What Do We Think About Climate Change

Distraction ?
Josh I really didn't mean to throw a kink into the works or anything, but while we are on the subject I suppose I might mention that the studies to date of cosmic ray influence on climate are typically so shotty that they didn't earn much consideration by the IPCC WG1, would that be more succinct and to the point. Cause I wouldn't want you to think I was trying to point out that the premise of the question is flawed or anything.

Maybe you could mention a few articles that you think they might have considered and possibly why you believe they didnt and then I could just ask them if you were close. These guys are surprisingly more available than you might suspect.

just sayin
B

PS
the whole argument does kinda have that mountains out of mole hills look to it again

I suppose my question would be that if nipping at heals like this is the best denialist argument that can be presented then maybe the whole Rapid Global Climate Shift Theory isn't so bad after all. I keep asking if you have any kind of working hypothesis or counter theory and I'm just kinda curious about an answer, cause this bit about there being no papers worthy of consideration within a particular field typically overpopulated by deniers anyways sorta seems like a distraction to me

 

Who is this Garnaut character? Is he the same who presides over that gold mine in Papua New Guinea that is responsible for environmental disaster, and political corruption galore?
Nice credentials!
He is also in a dozen board of directors of companies who will become trillionairs with a carbon trading scheme.
How impartial!

Let's face it, carbon trading is modern day piracy and its promoters modern day Mafia bosses and if the aim is the ( completely useless) CO2 reduction they will not achieve it that way, it will only achieve wealth shift into fewer pockets whilst the enviro-cheerleader squad lose their voices from so much cheering. I have never seen such massive amount of ******** in my entire life including the times when the rubbish was transported by cart pulled by 2 Percheron horses dropping manure on the street.

 

Correction we don't have cobras, and the funny beast is a platypus, plural platypuses. As for capitalism haters, yes, ginger lady Guillard, hates capitalism as a true blue union boss, as lefty as they come. Worst of all no one here voted her, yet the Westminster system allows for the party to change the leader. We vote for the party or so we should, but the populus votes the person and so Julia is a nice to look at person take away the nose and so will get more votes than lemon Kevin

The Commy Pommy wants to tax the mining companies "Super" profits, (anything above what the bank pays is "super") the funny amount of 40% on top of their normal taxes and royalties. Complete and utter lunacy that will send us all broke and make us the laughing stock of the thinking world. THe reason...wait for it and picture Mussolini or rather Evita Peron on a high podium with a ginger wig ..." The minerals belong to the people and they have the right to a bigger share of the profit"... End of speech
A bit like the "Emission Trading Scheme" that makes as much sense as taxing farts.

 

Meantime we are having our coldest winter in 60 years and my firewood pile is deminishing at an alarming rate. Can you please let go a lot of them CH4 at the same time so that we get a bit of that elusive GLOGLOBAL WAWAWARMING PLEPLEPLEEEESE!!!!

 

Testing the CO2 & Greenhouse Gas Theory

It is totally useless to try to maintain a clever and enrichening discussion with you about climate matters, Boston, so I will not commit that mistake again, sorry.

Now, let me show here something interesting about CO2 and the Greenhouse Gas Theory.

Such theory is based on the supposition that greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere will result in “back radiation” reflecting heat radiated by the Earth back towards the Earth, resulting in warming. Humid areas have relatively warmer nights than desert areas. The effect of increased GHG on radiation is logarithmic. Thus areas that have high water vapor will exhibit less effect with the addition of anthropogenic CO2 than those with low water vapor. True? Let's see:

Tombstone is in the desert of southern Arizona, southeast of Tucson.
The first figure shows the annual average temperature from the NOAA GHCN database at theTombstone temperature station. It shows there has been no significant warming at this desert location.

NOAA provides station information at https://mi3.ncdc.noaa.gov/mi3qry

The tombstone station was moved to the current location in 1969. In 2002 the equipment was changed from max-min thermometers to MMTS electronic sensors at the same location.

The effect of increasing CO2 as a greenhouse gas in the desert should be most noticeable at night when the Earth is radiating heat.

The second figure shows the annual average minimum temperature for Tombstone (which ends in 2004 in the GHCN database). This graph starts at 1970 since the Tombstone station was moved in 1969, so the period consiered coincides with the period the IPCC climate models require the addition of anthropogenic CO2 after 1970 (prior to that they say warming is well explained with natural forcings only).

What do we learn from this? It's quite easy: There has been no warming in the Tombstone minimum temperature during the “anthropogenic CO2 era”.

Interesting, isn't it?

 

Global warming:

 

Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt

More interesting things:

"For the past several decades, oceanographers have embraced the dominant paradigm that the ocean’s meridional overturning circulation operates like a conveyor belt, transporting cold waters equatorward at depth and warm waters poleward at the surface. Within this paradigm, the conveyor, driven by changes in deepwater production at high latitudes, moves deep waters and their attendant properties continuously along western boundary currents and returns surface waters unimpeded to deepwater formation sites. A number of studies conducted over the past few years have challenged this paradigm by revealing the vital role of the ocean’s eddy and wind fields in establishing the structure and variability of the ocean’s overturning. Here, we review those studies and discuss how they have collectively changed our view of the simple conveyor-belt model."

M. Susan Lozier
Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA. E-mail: mslozier@duke.edu
Science 18 June 2010:
Vol. 328. no. 5985, pp. 1507 - 1511
DOI: 10.1126/science.1189250

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5985/1507

Since its proposal, oceanographers have understood that the conveyor model is an oversimplification of the way ocean overturning actually takes place. But it was believed to be a useful simplification, capable of providing an overall model of the ocean's transportation of heat energy, if not the exact details. But now it seems that some major features of the conveyor belt have been called into question. Here is a list of recent discoveries that have shaken the foundation of the conveyor belt theory.

* Most of the subpolar-to-subtropical exchange in the North Atlantic occurs along interior pathways.
* The deep deep western boundary current (DWBC) breaks up into eddies at 11°S.
* There is little meridional coherence in the overturning transport from one gyre to the next .
* Wind forcing, rather than buoyancy forcing, can play a dominant role in changing the transport of the overturning.
* The southward transport of deep waters at 8°S, off the Brazilian coast, was shown to be carried entirely by migrating coherent eddies.
* Floats launched within the DWBC at 53°N do not follow a continuous boundary current, but instead take multiple paths to the subtropics, including interior pathways far removed from the DWBC.
* Two recent studies have found unexpected pathways in the upper ocean.
* A recent study shows that MOC transport in the subtropical North Atlantic is susceptible to variability in the "leakage" of warm and salty water into the South Atlantic.
* Studies showing little to no coherence across gyre boundaries have prompted interest in monitoring the overturning circulation in the South Atlantic and the subpolar North Atlantic.
* The connectivity of the overturning and, more importantly, of the meridional heat transport from one basin to the next can no longer be assumed on interannual time scales.

When all of these observations are combined, they indicate that the conventional conceptual model of ocean overturning needs revamping. As Dr. Lozier put it: “In sum, the impact of eddies on our concept of a continuous lower limb for the ocean’s overturning has evolved from an understanding that eddies can detrain and entrain fluid along the DWBC to the recognition that the DWBC can, at certain locales and perhaps certain times, be a series of migrating eddies, to the realization that eddy-driven flow provides an alternate pathway for deep waters to spread globally.”

In other words, it doesn't work as simply as we thought. Lozier is in a good position to make such a judgment, since it is partly due to her work that scientists are revisiting the conveyor belt model.

So, if the conveyor belt model is wrong then climate models—which are highly dependent on the coupling between ocean and atmosphere and, hence, the ocean circulation models they contain—cannot be anymore considered accurate reconstructions of Earth's climate system: thus none of the IPCC's model results can be taken seriously.

 

Is this typical of the reads at desert stations all over the world, or is it just an interesting anomaly?

 

Edited.

 

"that makes as much sense as taxing farts."

...you can avoid paying tax if you keep them in bed.....so far the bedroom has not been taved...but I am sure they are working on a way to do so.

 

Al Gore's gray matter?

 

Polar Sunlight Drives Climate Change

Science still cannot explain why, over the past 700,000 years, cycles of about 100,000 years became dominant. Moreover, though Herbert et al. suggest that CO2 played an important role in producing tropical SST variations, those arguments “are undermined by the striking differences between the eastern and western equatorial Pacific, between the regions north and south of the equator along 95°W, and between the equatorial Pacific and Atlantic.”

So while many questions remain, here is what science thinks it knows: more than 3 million years ago, the slowly drifting continents triggered changes in ocean circulation, making the oceans much more sensitive to small changes in insolation in higher latitudes. The ever changing cycles that affect Earth's orbit came to dominate climatic changes, even though the change in insolation engendered by the orbital cycles is relatively small.

Changes in high latitude insolation force changes in sea surface temperatures at lower latitudes, made possible by the shallowness of the ocean thermocline, bringing about global change. Greenhouse gases have a supporting role to play, both increased atmospheric levels of H2O and CO2. But consider this: as the orbital cycles progress, a equally small change in insolation—this time a reduction—will trigger the next glacial period, despite the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

A small reduction in high latitude insolation can negate the effect of all the carbon dioxide the interglacial warming released from the ocean and frozen land. Advocates of CO2 driven anthropogenic global warming have refused to accept the role the Sun and changes in insolation play in climate change, preferring instead to exaggerate the potency of CO2. The changes in insolation are too small and affect the wrong regions, they claim. We now know better: it's the small changes in insolation that matter, not the CO2 levels.


Atmospheric Science: Tilting at Connections, from Pole to Equator
S. George Philander
Science 18 June 2010:
Vol. 328. no. 5985, pp. 1488 - 1489
DOI: 10.1126/science.1189748
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/328/5985/1488

Abstract:
After the demise of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago, Earth experienced irregular global cooling because of processes associated with the drifting of continents (1). About 3 million years ago, glaciers formed in high northern latitudes, surface waters cooled in parts of the equatorial Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (2), and climate sensitivity to variations in obliquity (the tilt of Earth's axis) increased substantially. Since that time, changes in sunlight associated with obliquity variations at a period of 41,000 years induced variations in global ice volume and equatorial sea surface temperatures (SST). In general, variations at the equator occurred a few thousand years before those in high latitudes and thus could not have been a direct consequence of the waxing and waning of glaciers. How did the changes in sunlight, which were large mainly near the poles, affect the tropics? Two papers in this issue, on pages 1550 and 1530 (3, 4) shed light on the matter.


Subpolar Link to the Emergence of the Modern Equatorial Pacific Cold Tongue
Alfredo Martínez-Garcia, Antoni Rosell-Melé, Erin L. McClymont, Rainer Gersonde, Gerald H. Haug
Science 18 June 2010:
Vol. 328. no. 5985, pp. 1550 - 1553
DOI: 10.1126/science.1184480
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5985/1550

Abstract:
The cold upwelling "tongue" of the eastern equatorial Pacific is a central energetic feature of the ocean, dominating both the mean state and temporal variability of climate in the tropics and beyond. Recent evidence for the development of the modern cold tongue during the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition has been explained as the result of extratropical cooling that drove a shoaling of the thermocline. We have found that the sub-Antarctic and sub-Arctic regions underwent substantial cooling nearly synchronous to the cold tongue development, thereby providing support for this hypothesis. In addition, we show that sub-Antarctic climate changed in its response to Earth’s orbital variations, from a subtropical to a subpolar pattern, as expected if cooling shrank the warm-water sphere of the ocean and thus contracted the subtropical gyres.


Tropical Ocean Temperatures Over the Past 3.5 Million Years
Timothy D. Herbert, Laura Cleaveland Peterson, Kira T. Lawrence, Zhonghui Liu
Science 18 June 2010:
Vol. 328. no. 5985, pp. 1530 - 1534
DOI: 10.1126/science.1185435
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5985/1530

Abstract:
Determining the timing and amplitude of tropical sea surface temperature (SST) change is an important part of solving the puzzle of the Plio-Pleistocene ice ages. Alkenone-based tropical SST records from the major ocean basins show coherent glacial-interglacial temperature changes of 1° to 3°C that align with (but slightly lead) global changes in ice volume and deep ocean temperature over the past 3.5 million years. Tropical temperatures became tightly coupled with benthic {delta}18O and orbital forcing after 2.7 million years. We interpret the similarity of tropical SST changes, in dynamically dissimilar regions, to reflect "top-down" forcing through the atmosphere. The inception of a strong carbon dioxide–greenhouse gas feedback and amplification of orbital forcing at ~2.7 million years ago connected the fate of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets with global ocean temperatures since that time.


Be safe, enjoy the interglacial and stay skeptical.

 

.............................................Code Orange!

Al Gore? ...You mean AlGore, the Crazed Sex Poodle? Did he get his second chakra released yet?



Looks like!

A "science of Chakras", or energy centers, primer (book to follow if there is enuf interest); They are the openings for life energy to flow into and out of our aura. Their function is to vitalize the physical body and to bring about the development of our self-consciousness. They are associated with our physical, mental and emotional interactions. Chakras have been depicted as a funnel of sorts with smaller funnels within the funnel (picture AlGore with a funnel just reaching his swollen prostrate - this is the sacral chakra). They are also often referred to as looking like lotus flowers, tho Big Al's is likely a little worse for the wear than the typical "botanical garden" variety lotus. Individual intakes of chakras have been "intuitively" viewed as appearing similar to the blades of a fan or windmill (There's the connection!) in circular motion. Al wud like were this physical but bear in mind that chakras are in the science of "not quite conventional", if you will - somewhat like AGW, if you can picture that.
You see, like AGW, the energy centers are revered by some and poopooed by "deniers", so to add heft to the subject, those searching for life's meanings in this place (see Ramtha, soul travel, Hollywood diversions in general, socialism as a viable form of governance, etc.), infuse the dialect with "big", sometimes archaic, sometimes, "scientific sounding" words having nothing to do with the topic to the uninitiated, e.g., "quantum", "swadhisthana", "balancing chakras", to obfuscate the utter rediculous nature of the science. Please compare to any comment by Wood and the "scientific" nature of AGW arguments, in general.



Thru this sickening spectical (Gore's sexual, not climatological, antics), we are left to ponder (until it makes it to court) "Is Goral sex really sex?". Stay tuned, as the legal team of Obama, Clinton and Clinton give us the definitive answer... ... "it depends on what your definition of "is" is..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILkw46FwgMs&feature=related

"Not a speck of cereal!"

 

Oh common its been a barrel of laughs on both sides of the coin G, just cause I take a different tact on the direction you were hoping the conversation would go does not mean that its not an enriching conversation for all parties concerned

you were hoping to discuss the fact that only one cosmologists work was included in the IPCC considerations and I merely pointed out that its likely cause that field has been used by, lets just say, people of dubious intent, to further there agenda. Unfortunately having only one persons work in consideration is hardly the scientific method but when the rare few other works in the field dont seem to stack up from a scientific ethics point of view then its kinda difficult to engage in a straight up discussion concerning these issues

sorry if I didnt ignore that, but it was obvious from this end of the discussion
actually I've learned a lot in our little exchanges and I'd like to think that goes for all of us

in short
there are two sides to the coin and from the other side it was obvious why you were not going to end up with a Stetson for dinner

OK dont go getting angry at me Im just going to look at this from a slightly different point of view. The first thing that must be understood is that solar radiation is of a variety of wave lengths, some equate to light some heat some ultraviolet's and so on and on. Infrared radiation is the one we are primarily concerned with. Its what we sense as heat.

Greenhouse gasses can be defined as gasses or molecules of a certain size that are prone to, by virtue of there size, to reflect wavelengths of a corresponding size. Specifically Radiant heat which is ( if I can remember this right ) longer wave and lower amplitude than solar radiation within the infrared range. So what happens is that these greenhouse gas molecules are not of the correct size to reflect efficiently the form of radiation that comes directly from the sun that we feel as heat but they are of just the right size to reflect the radiant heat that bounces back off the planet.

so if we consider that the radiant heat now has a direction and that the direction is away from the planet then it stands to reason that any "reflectivity" by these gasses will likely result in the energy being directed at least some percentage of the time back towards its source, thus adding this percentage back to the system were it would not be before.

the greenhouse gas is such by virtue of its size and nothing else really. Its effect is purely a mater of physics. Not much discussion to have on that one, and its net effect is determined by the percentage of energy directed in any given direction, again a simple mater of physics.

Granted the variables are mind bending but the basics are
well
basic

any given response in weather rather than climate is bound to be due to the edge effect that makes weather prediction so difficult where as climate is relatively easy to predict

now I realize I did not engage in your scenario concerning a local weather event but my best answer was to discuss the averages of climate and mention that the physics is pretty basic and not really a "supposition" as you suggested

cheers and happy thoughts G

B

 

I still don't quite understand the significance of the reads from Tombstone. Is Guillermo claiming they prove or disprove a worldwide trend? Or are they interesting simply because they buck that trend?