What Do We Think About Climate Change

You can kiss my sweet heinie, because you aren't paying a dime of my union wages. Neither is any other taxpayer in the country. How many times do I have to tell you that I work for a publicly traded corporation, not a government agency, before it gets through your thick skull?

And I'm not ashamed of the fact that I'm willing to stand up for Americans who work for a living, instead of sliming them like you do.

 

So you think it would be an improvement to let kids run loose on the streets 24/7, and grow up without learning to read and write? Sure....that's just what the country needs.

And despite your simpleminded stereotyping, you can find kids dressed like that in rich suburbs, too. Everyone who wears his pants at half-mast isn't a ghetto gangbanger, any more than everyone who wore his hair long forty years ago was a drug addict.

 

fortunately the real world is able to recognize the science and ignore the disinformation campaign

you can bet the oil and gas giants are working as hard as they can to preserve there profit margins
at the expense of our future

 

it's a crime when people want a living wage for their labor

what about the chamber of commerce and other business organisations, should they also be vilified for looking out for their members welfare?

Is this not a democracy and don't people have the right to come together and organize for their best interest.

whatever happened to the free market or is it only free for the few to grab it all?

you as a consumer have the right not to buy anything made by union workers or not to stay at a hotel with a union, or not to shop at a union store

you have that right just as others have the right to organize as they see fit

do you want to deny rights to others that you want for yourself

and who will protect your rights if someone were to try and take them away


can you say martin niemoller?

 

Happy 35th birthday, global warming!
Filed under: Aerosols Climate Science Greenhouse gases Instrumental Record — stefan @ 28 July 2010 - () () ()
Global warming is turning 35! Not only has the current spate of global warming been going on for about 35 years now, but also the term “global warming” will have its 35th anniversary next week. On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science. That appears to be the first use of the term “global warming” in the scientific literature (at least it’s the first of over 10,000 papers for this search term according to the ISI database of journal articles).

In this paper, Broecker correctly predicted “that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide”, and that “by early in the next century [carbon dioxide] will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years”. He predicted an overall 20th Century global warming of 0.8ºC due to CO2*and worried about the consequences for agriculture and sea level.




Global temperature up to June 2010 according to the NASA GISS data. Grey line is the 12-month running average, red dots are annual-mean values. The thick red line is a non-linear trend line. Broecker of course did not have these data available, not even up to 1975, since this global compilation was only put together in the late 1970s (Hansen et al. 1981). He had to rely on more limited meteorological data.
To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable, the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later (when Jim Hansen in 1988 famously stated that “global warming is here”).

Broecker is one of the great climatologists of the 20th Century: few would match his record of 400 scientific papers, a full sixty of which have over 100 citations each! Interestingly, his “global warming” paper is not amongst those highly-cited ones, with “only” 79 citations to date. Broecker is most famous for his extensive work on paleoclimate and ocean geochemistry.

It is very instructive to see how Broecker arrived at his predictions back in 1975 – not least because even today, many lay people incorrectly assume that we attribute global warming to CO2*basically because temperature and CO2*levels have both gone up and thus correlate. Broecker came to his prediction at a time when CO2*had been going up but temperatures had been going down for decades – but Broecker (like most other climate scientists at the time, and today) understood the basic physics of the issue.

Basically his prediction involved just three simple steps that in essence are still used today.

Step 1: Predict future emissions

Broecker simply assumed a growth in fossil fuel CO2*emissions of 3% per year from 1975 onwards. With that, he arrived at cumulative fossil CO2*emissions of 1.67 trillion tons by the year 2010 (see his Table 1). Not bad: the actual emissions turned out to be about 1.3 trillion tons (Canadell et al, PNAS 2007 – estimate extended to 2010 by me).

A shortcoming, from the modern point of view, is that Broecker did not include other anthropogenic greenhouse gases or aerosol particles in his calculations. He does however discuss aerosols, which he calls “dust”. In fact, the first sentence of the abstract (quoted above) in full starts with an if-statement:

If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climate change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide.

That is a nod to the discussion about aerosol-induced cooling in the early 1970s. Broecker rightly writes:

It is difficult to determine the significance of the next most important climatic effect induced by man, “dust”, because of uncertainties with regard to the amount, the optical properties and the distribution of man-made particles,

citing a number of papers by Steve Schneider and others. Because he cannot quantify it, he leaves out this effect. Here luck was on Broecker’s side: the warming by other greenhouse gases and the cooling by aerosols largely cancel today, so considering only CO2*leads to almost the same radiative forcing as considering all anthropogenic effects on climate (see IPCC AR4, Fig. SPM.2).


Table 1 of Broecker (1975)
Step 2: Predict future concentrations

To go from the amount of CO2*emitted to the actual increase in the atmosphere, one needs to know what fraction of the emissions remains in the air: the “airborne fraction”. Broecker simply assumed, based on past data of emissions and CO2*concentrations (Keeling’s Mauna Loa curve), that the airborne fraction is a constant 50%. I.e., about half of our fossil fuel emissions accumulates in the atmosphere. That is still a good assumption today, if you look at the observed CO2*increase as fraction of fossil fuel emissions. Broecker calculated that about 35% of the emissions is taken up by the ocean and the other 15% by the biosphere (again not far from modern values, see Canadell et al.). On this basis he argued that if the ocean is the main sink, the airborne fraction would remain almost constant for the decades to come (his calculations extend to the year 2010).

Thus, with a 3% increase in emissions per year and 50% of that remaining airborne, it is easy to compute the increase in CO2*concentrations. He obtains an increase from 295 to 403 ppm from 1900 to 2010. The actual value in 2010 is 390 ppm, a little lower than Broecker estimated because his forecast cumulative emissions were a little too high.

Step 3: Compute the global temperature response

Now we come to the temperature response to increased CO2 concentration. Broecker writes:

The response of the global temperature to the atmospheric CO2*content is not linear. As the CO2 content of the atmosphere rises, the absorption of infrared radiation will “saturate” over an ever greater portion of the band. Rasool and Schneider point out that the temperature increases as the logarithm of the atmospheric CO2*concentration.

Based on this logarithmic relationship (still valid today) Broecker assumes a climate sensitivity of 0.3ºC warming for each 10% increase in CO2*concentration, which amounts to 2.2ºC warming for CO2*doubling. This is based on early calculations by Manabe and Wetherald. Broecker writes:

Although surprises may yet be in store for us when larger computers and better knowledge of cloud physics allow the next stage of modeling to be accomplished, the magnitude of the CO2 effect has probably been pinned down to within a factor of 2 to 4.

The AR4 gives the uncertainty range of climate sensitivity as 2-4.5ºC warming for CO2*doubling, so there still is about a factor of 2 uncertainty and Broecker used a value near the very low end of this uncertainty range. Modern estimates are not only based on model calculations but also on paleoclimatic and modern data; the AR4 lists 13 studies that constrain climate sensitivity in its table 9.3.

In Broecker’s paper the warming calculated with the help of climate sensitivity happens instantaneously. Today we know that the climate system responds with a time lag due to ocean thermal inertia. By neglecting this, Broecker overestimated the warming at any given time; accounting for thermal inertia would have reduced his warming estimate by about a third (see AR4 Fig. SPM.5). But again he was lucky: picking ~2ºC rather than the more likely ~3ºC climate sensitivity compensates roughly for this, so his 20th-Century warming of 0.8ºC is almost spot on (the actual estimate being closer to 0.7ºC, see Fig. above). (A modern version of this back-of-envelope warming calculation is found e.g. in our book Our Threatened Oceans, p.82.)

Natural Variability

Broecker was not the first to predict CO2-induced warming. In 1965, an expert report to US President Lyndon B. Johnson had warned: “By the year 2000, the increase in carbon dioxide will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate.” And in 1972, a more specific prediction similar to Broecker’s was published by the eminent atmospheric scientist J.S. Sawyer in Nature (for a history in a nutshell, see my newspaper column here).

The innovation of Broecker’s article – apart from introducing the term “global warming” – was in combining estimates of CO2*warming with natural variability. His main thesis was that a natural climatic cooling

has, over the last three decades, more than compensated for the warming effect produced by the CO2*[....] The present natural cooling will, however, bottom out during the next decade or so. Once this happens, the CO2*effect will tend to become a significant factor and by the first decade of the next century we may experience global temperatures warmer than any in the last 1000 years.

The latter turned out to be correct. The idea that the small cooling from the 1940s to 1970s is due to natural variability still cannot be ruled out, although more likely this is a smaller part of the explanation and the cooling is primarily due to the “dust” neglected by Broecker, i.e. due to the rise of anthropogenic aerosol pollution (Taylor and Penner, 1994). However, the way Broecker estimated and even predicted natural variability has not stood the test of time. He used data from the Camp Century ice core in Greenland, arguing that these “may give a picture of the natural fluctuations in global temperature over the last 1000 years”. Ironically, Broecker’s own later work on Atlantic ocean circulation changes showed that Greenland is likely even less representative of global temperature changes than most other places on Earth, it being strongly affected by variability in ocean heat transport (see our recent post on the Younger Dryas, or Broecker’s latest book The Great Ocean Conveyor). However, Broecker was right to conclude that the buildup of CO2*would sooner or later overwhelm such natural climate variations.

Overall, Broecker’s paper (together with that of Sawyer) shows that valid predictions of global warming were published in the 1970s in the top journals Science and Nature, and warming has been proceeding almost exactly as predicted for at least 35 years now. Some important aspects were not understood back then, like the role of greenhouse gases other than CO2, of aerosol particles and of ocean heat storage. That the predictions were almost spot-on involved an element of luck, since the neglected processes do not all affect the result in the same direction but partly cancel. Nevertheless, the basic fact that rising CO2 would cause a “pronounced global warming”, as Broecker put it, was well understood in the 1970s. In a 1979 TV interview, Steve Schneider rightly described this as a consensus amongst experts, with controversy remaining about the exact magnitude and effects.

Reference
BROECKER WS, 1975: CLIMATIC CHANGE – ARE WE ON BRINK OF A PRONOUNCED GLOBAL WARMING?
SCIENCE Volume 189, Pages 460-463.

*

 

Some precisions about the paper from de Vernal et al. (American Geophysical Union, 2008), cited a few posts ago:

From the Abstract:
"...during the early Holocene, about 8000 years ago, data from dinocyst assemblages suggest reduced sea ice cover as compared to present in some subarctic basins (Labrador Sea, Baffin Bay, and Hudson Bay), whereas enhanced sea ice cover is reconstructed along the eastern Greenland margin and in the western Arctic, showing a pattern not unlike the dipole anomaly that was observed during the 20th century."

See attached figures for a better comprehension on what de Vernal et al. did to estimate the amount of the Arctic sea ice during the last 10,000 years.

On the other hand, sea ice around Iceland (for 1200 years, the peoples of Iceland have recorded observations of drift ice) is a good "proxy" to the amount of sea ice in the Arctic, as it drifts out of it pushed by the wind patterns (Beaufort Gyre) through Fram Strait. The fluctuation in the quantity of sea ice flowing through the Fram Strait is correlated with a fluctuation with period 6–7 years in which the Icelandic Low Pressure system extends eastward into the Barents Sea.

The site at the Chukchy sea (western Arctic) is particularly relevant as ice formed there can be carried all the way down to Iceland by the Transpolar Drift and the East Greenland Current, this being one of the reasons why its location was chosen by the authors, as several other authors before.

We have already seen the McKay paper about dinocyst-based reconstructions from this relevant location a few days ago, where authors (de Vernal among them) state:

"Superimposed on these long-term trends are millennial-scale fluctuations characterized by periods of low sea-ice and high sea-surface temperature and salinity that appear quasi-cyclic with a frequency of about one every 2500–3000 years. The results of this study clearly show that sea-ice cover in the western Arctic Ocean has varied throughout the Holocene. More importantly, there have been times when sea-ice cover was less extensive than at the end of the 20th century."


May I say now again, in a low voice , Boston is a useless, illiterate, coward and lying IDIOT?

 

Probably these were the credentials Boston was talking about....

http://www.maxtanks.com (not working)
http://www.denverwoodandmill.com (not working either)

Not working...mmmm...perhaps the reason why he deleted them?

Am I right, my scatterbrained and lying Weasel?

 

Directly from Real Climate, the only fountain of climate truth our scatterbrained Boston believes in....

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/happy-35th-birthday-global-warming/


(Not that I have something against Broecker. Just highlighting Boston's "Fountains of Truth")

P.S.
It's interesting to learn Wally Broecker was heavily critizised by Dr. Edward R. Cook of the Tree-Ring Laboratory before Michael Mann and Thomas J. Crowley, as we can see at the "Climategate" mails.
See here: http://junkscience.com/FOIA/mail/0988831541.txt
Search text for "broecker"

 

Talking about fooling people:

 

Hi Jim!
I was so entertained "slaughtering" Boston, I was so unpolite not to compliment you.

Be very welcome back to this psychiatric thread!

 

All consumers(or taxpayers in the case of gov't workers) pay union wages because the costs are passed on to the consumer by management in a lame effort to keep the union bosses from bankrupting the companies. The taxpayers are the country however and they get bankrupted so the Dems can buy votes.

 

Tell me: do you think non-union wages don't get passed on to the consumer? How about executives' pay and sales managers' pay, and the pay of all their secretaries and receptionists? You think that doesn't get passed on to consumers?

The CEO of my company made almost eight and a half million dollars last year. But you aren't a damn bit worried about that getting passed on to consumers, are you? Why? Because you're too busy obsessing about the possibility some friggen union worker somewhere might be getting paid a dollar an hour more than he's worth, that's why.

Here's a reality check for you: the wages I make are 'competitive.' That means they're in about the middle of what other workers doing the same job all over the country make - including all the non-union workers.

I'm getting more than a little tired of !@#holes like you and Mark carrying on like I somehow screw the world out of my wages, instead of earning them.

 

"The CEO of my company made almost eight and a half million dollars last year" - This brings up exactly how a progressive thinks. NOT, "what can I do to do more for my family (and thereby do more for EVERYONE)" but "That dirty SOB is making a lot of money so we need to do something about it". I got a PM from somebody here a few months ago that said it is a "generational" thing (the way you people think) but Troy, you're as old as I am so I have to amend that to a "generational/entitlement minded" thing. Brings to mind last week's LA times report on your welfare debit cards being used at the luxury resorts of Lanaii, Las Vegas and Florida. There is no free lunch (Milton Freidman) Duuude, and your chickens are coming home to roost when even the uberliberal LA Times acts conservative and exposes corruption by the "downtrodden".

 

You and Hoyt were obsessing about the dollars I make getting passed on to the consumer, so I pointed out you don't give a damn about the millions of dollars my CEO makes being passed on to the consumer.

Trying to twist that around into a claim that I want to take down my CEO is breathtakingly dishonest and chicken!@#$ of you. Have you no shame or honor whatsoever? Stupid question; of course you haven't.

How are they 'my' welfare debit cards? I've never collected or spent a dime of welfare in my life, and I've never passed out any welfare cards.

Entitlement mentality? I've worked since I was 14 years old. I could have been drawing a veteran's disability pension for 37 years instead, but I never applied for it because I learned to walk again. And I'm working right now, when I could be sitting at home on sick leave for my DVT and pulmonary embolism.

How does that prove I have an 'entitlement' mentality? Come on; I want to hear this.

 

You believe some deserve to have others pay for their healthcare. Simple.