No the idea is more like that we were used to having a blanket 10 millimeters thick, which made us a nice and comfy temperature at night. We’ve now jacked that up to having a blanket 15 millimeters thick, which makes us sweaty and is uncomfortable.
If there is a point at which the whole system “breaks” in some way, we don’t believe that we’re too such a point yet nor in the foreseeable future.
Yes…but it is an assumption based on the observed facts:
CO2 levels have, for the last 750,000 years always been between 180 and 300 ppm (and remarkably stable around 280ppm during the current interglacial over the last ~12000 years).
The rise in CO2 levels is accounted for by our emissions from burning fossil fuels. In fact, the levels have only risen about half as much as they would have had all the CO2 remained in the atmosphere, thus showing that the oceans and biosphere have been able to act as sinks and take up some of the excess.
We also know that the large exchanges between the oceans and atmosphere, and biosphere and atmosphere are essentially just passing the same carbon back-and-forth whereas we are introducing a store of carbon that has long been locked away from the atmosphere. And, we can actually look and see the isotopic ratios of the CO2 in the atmosphere changing because of the different isotopic ratios present in fossil fuels as compared to the other carbon.
Also, I don’t know exactly what is what in your analogy. If your analogy represents all the carbon stored in the oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere together, then your numbers might not be bad. However, if it represents just the atmosphere, it is important to note that the CO2 level has already increased 40% above the pre-industrial baseline.
(In the above, I assumed you were asking about the CO2 increase. However, I see in preview that Sage Rat has interpreted you as asking more about the temperature increase / energy balance, which I guess is reasonable given that you do talk about “the sensitivity of forcing”.)
There does seem to be evidence, however, that as countries become wealthier and more developed, their rate of population growth slows dramatically (and some without large influxes of immigrants are even looking at declines in population). On the other hand, in terms of AGW, so far countries have increased their CO2 emissions as they have become wealthier and more developed.
Exactly so (see my link above to the article around the UN talks on MSN.com)
Our chances of getting the underdeveloped wealthy enough to stop procreating seem trivial to me, but of course if we do take that approach, it will be at the cost of vastly worsening CO2 output.
As I mentioned, the real problem is too many people. Way too frigging many people. The joint is overrun already, and the most optimistic predictions don’t have it leveling off until another 50% more peeps show up. That, in sum, is what’s making too much CO2–among a host of other issues. And the wealthy are making way more CO2 than they are credited for; China is making Stuff for us as fast it’s making Stuff for China. Since there are already so many damn people, it’s a safe assumption that as we get to a point where they are making Suff for themselves as well (perhaps in a side hope that this will help them level off their populations) the CO2 production will soar.
Even for those who buy into AGW, I’d like to see a primary passion for population control that does not have the knee-jerk solution of More Stuff So They Get Rich So They Stop Procreating. That is such a self-defeating “solution” it strains credulity. But it’s part of the Great Cause psychology, in my view, to not let an obvious paradox interfere with the joy which comes from being a believer for the Great Cause while relegating the real cause to the back hallway.
Perhaps my last post for a bit…off to a remote part of the world for a couple of weeks. Gotta get there before it overpopulates, too. 
(my bolding and underscoring)
That’s so 1970’s.
1000 poor Africans or Latin Americans possibly have the same carbon footprint as a midlle-class US, Canada or Western Europe guy.
I’m sure that the top billion people have the same footprint as the bottom 3 billion.
I have to go with jshore on this one. The record is too short to get statistically significant figures for the cooling. What we can say is that per HadCRUT3, there is no statistically significant warming since 1996.
The UAH Satellite record shows a bit longer period of no significant warming, in their case since 1993.
However, this does not mean cooling. All that we can say is that there is no significant warming since the early to mid 1990s.
So yes, in response to the OP’s question of
Yes, me. There has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years or so.
A couple of problems with this one. First, it is absolutely no surprise that the models can hindcast the temperature trend. They are tuned to do that (what A de G calls “fiddling endlessly” above). It would be surprising if they were unable to hindcast temperature. On the other hand, they do a very poor job with say hindcasting rainfall, because they’re not tuned to do that.
Second, there is absolutely no evidence that the longer term trend is “easier to compute than the shorter term fluctuations”. This claim has been made by the modelers many times, but it flies in the face of common sense. As near as anyone can tell, weather/climate are chaotic on all timescales. There is no reason to assume that long term fluctuations are any easier to predict than short term fluctuations.
Historically, droughts have been longer and more common during cold times rather than warm. Less heat = less evaporation = less rain. The models agree with each other, it’s true … but they don’t agree with historical data on rainfall. This is not surprising, they are known to be poor at hindcasting rainfall amounts and patterns.
… I had not started this thread.
I do believe we’re losing our planet, but unfortunately I can’t defend my position.
Thanks
Q
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/embarrassing-questions/
The graphic from the 10-year averages since 1970 shows how silly this affirmation of “no significant warming” is getting to be.
GIGOBuster, thanks for the reply, but I’m not sure what your point is here. I just said that per the satellite data there is no statistically significant warming in the last 16 years. I’m not sure how what you said relates to that. What am I missing?
Well, that’s an interesting quote. What happens when the deniers try to establish the trend with “fifteen years data,” or with more than “fifteen years data,” at that? It could happen pretty soon; will the goalposts move at that point, such that any denier looking at ‘much less than twenty years data’ will be called out for ignorance or flim-flamming?
And, in fact, according to the HADCRUT record the 11 warmest years on record have all occurred since then, with 7 of the 8 warmest having occurred since 2001. (1998 is still the warmest year in HADCRUT.) So, there is no reason to believe that the warming has stopped. However, it does generally take several years for the statistics to become good enough that we can say that there has been a statistically-significant warming trend.
It is true that the models have some parametrizations of physics that happen on too small scales to be resolved (such as those involving clouds). However, I have never seen any evidence that these parameters are of the type that can be tuned to fit the global temperature record. They are generally tuned to get some aspect of the current climatology correct, such as the cloud coverage fraction. [The only way in which one can to a certain degree implicitly tune things is that there is uncertainty regarding the aerosol forcing so models that have a larger (in magnitude) negative aerosol forcing and a higher climate sensitivity will tend to produce results similar to that of a model with a smaller negative aerosol forcing and lower climate sensitivity. This is just another way of saying that the instrumental temperature record does not strongly constrain the climate sensitivity, which is better constrained by looking at a combination of things such as the temperature difference from the last glacial maximum and the cooling due to the Mt Pinatubo eruption.]
If getting the models to hindcast was merely the result of tuning the models, then it would be easy enough for someone skeptical of the greenhouse gas attribution of climate change to tune the models so that they reproduce the temperature record without including the anthropogenic forcings. To my knowledge, this has never been done. And, even if you believe that all the designers of all of the climate models are so biased that they haven’t tried (which I find pretty dubious anyway), at least some of the models like the NASA GISS model and I believe the NCAR Community model are publicly available so that anyone could get hold of them and try this.
As for the difficulties of hindcasting rainfall, the issue is not whether or not they have been tuned to it but the fact that rainfall is more difficult for the models to handle well.
The point is that the shorter term trends are dominated by fluctuations and the longer term trends are dominated by forcings. There are a couple ways to see this:
(1) The models themselves show chaos…i.e., if you perturb the initial conditions, you get a different result. However, the result is only different for the fluctuations so when they are run long enough with an increasing greenhouse forcing, the different runs show about the same long-term response to the forcing even though the up-and-down jiggles are different for each run.
(2) There is a good analogy with the seasonal cycle. Here in Rochester, it is not uncommon to have periods of a week or so in the fall where the temperature trend would show warming even though the seasonal cycle says it should be cooling. However, the prediction that January’s climate will be considerably colder than July’s is a robust prediction.
Admittedly, the models tend to predict a pretty linear response to the forcing and it is possible that some aspect that is not being modeled very well could create some sort of “tipping point” and lead to a highly nonlinear response. However, such surprises seem much more likely to be unpleasant than pleasant.
There is a good discussion on how various aspects of uncertainty in the modeling vary with time and the possibility of improving short-term (e.g., decadal) predictions here.
There are still holocaust deniers,moonlanding conspiracy theorists,people who think that conditions in the Third World are getting better,people who think that the world is six thousand years old and that Sandy Claws exists…
So yes you can bet your bottom dollar that there are G.W. deniers and probably always will be.
It’s true; I expect more crackpots will deny global warming every decade the globe doesn’t warm.
I would be a whole lot more ready to accept the proof of global warming, if proponents didn’t appear so reluctant to have their ideas challenged. As in he moniker “Climate Denier” – tasting too much of “Holocaust denier”. Or as in the upcoming climate debate in Copenhagen, where Bjorn Lomborg has been given a (very small) amount of money. To the great distress of Green politicians and organisations who argue it sends the wrong signal. I should imagine giving money to critiques sends the message that we are so confident in the soundness of the scientific basis of our findings that we see anyone trying to challenge it as an opportunity to work on the details. They see it different. But whenever I see someone giving more energy to critique of critiques that to the arguments of critiques I invariable get the impression that perhaps their arguments are less impressive than they want them to appear.
And what of this:
The man who broke the bank. I have no idea who is right. But if you want me to accept your theories for anything but bullshit, you better be more than forthcoming in releasing all your data to anyone wanting to examine them.
Nope, based on the history it is your side that needs to stop being reluctant and come back with points that were not debunked many times before.
I even noticed before that even like creationists many contrarians and deniers (yes, it is still valid, the term after all came from the 15th century and not from WWII) also do not check what their “champions” are really saying:
http://www.lomborg.com/faq/?PHPSESSID=557838857dc77d6929df6b7f21a65c0f
Lomborg does not deny global warming, period.
As for McIntyre:
I know Lomborg is not now and never has been a global warming disbeliever. Period. Way to miss the point. In fact his role in the conference is even limited to suggest solutions within the framework that it is a fact that global warming is the most dangerous problem mankind faces. However that has not removed the criticism of his participation, from those who believe his past discussion of weather global warming is the most pressing problem facing humanity has disqualified him. I think that if people were sufficiently confident in their scientific results they should not fear being challenged by Lomborg or anybody else.
Besides I don’t have a side. In fact I heartedly support the global warming agenda. Not so much because I care about future climate changes, but because I want to rid the West of its dependence on oil & gas imports from the Middle East and the two agendas seem to share means if not goals.
Why do you insist on missing the point? I don’t care for McIntyre. I want to know if or why the data was not made immediately available to anyone wanting to double-check it. Including to McIntyre and my neighbor’s dog. And especially those who may disagree with its conclusions.
If that were the case, it wouldn’t/shouldn’t even be news.
Instead, we have political front runners spouting off about things yet undetermined. Sensationalism by the Liberals!!
Oh noes
there is kudzu in Canada in that hangy down part.
Your own words were:
“I would be a whole lot more ready to accept the proof of global warming, if proponents didn’t appear so reluctant to have their ideas challenged.”
There would be no complaint from me if you had not started with a copy cat misleading note.
Lomborg is not challenging the science behind global warming, he is challenging what to do and how to deal with the changes that are coming. That IMHO have a good basis for current discussions.
The same goes to Kearsen.
As for McIntyre, only by ignoring history you can say I’m missing the point. Others like McIntyre did the same stunt with guys like Mann, and even that was not enough, after having access to the original data deniers only came up with innuendo and results that are not confirmed or peer reviewed.
Mann and others came recently with even more evidence that the current warming is not natural and showed that the hockey stick was not an imaginary thing.
McIntyre is just showing us a Red Herring so far, and looking a his past history I would doubt his explanations until they are peer reviewed.
You might want to check out this book on the subject.
The author says,