And won’t that mean that countries under the Kyoto treaty will just move their factories to China and India?
That cite shows a correlation between the two, not that temperature rise follows a CO[sub]2[/sub] increase. The plotted charts are too large scale to show which trend lags the other. The cite itself states "Do rising atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub] concentrations cause increasing global temperatures, or could it be the other way around? This is one of the questions being debated today."
This cite on the other hand states definatively that the CO[sub]2[/sub] rise lags the temperature rise by around 1000 years, as determined by anarctic ice core measurements.
http://www.70south.com/news/1099971626/index_html
Not that I don’t think we may be in climatic trouble, but the picture simply is not as clear cut as it is being presented.
And yet whenever the CO2 concentration rose, the temperature did too. There is no instance (save, perhaps, for when plants hadn’t yet evolved nearly a billion years ago) when a rise in CO2 was not accompanied by a rise in temperature.
Granted, some of those CO2 rises might have been caused by a rise in temperature, and some of those temperature rises might have been caused by CO2 increases, or some complex interaction between the two. But if there is never one without the other, why should vastly increasing the CO2 concentration in a tiny, tiny timescale be any different?
Did you read my cite?
Close scrutiny of ice core data shows that the temperature increasesprecede the CO[sub]2[/sub] increases by around 1000 years. This could be simply due to the decreased CO[sub]2[/sub] solubility in seawater caused by a temperature rise.
From this, we can surmise:
i) in the historic fluctuations in global temperature indicated by ice cores, the warming periods were NOT initiated by a CO[sub]2[/sub] greenhouse mechanism.
ii) there exists some natural, non-CO[sub]2[/sub] related mechanism has historically caused global warming.
We cannot conclude:
iii) the present artificial elevation of global CO[sub]2[/sub] from fossil fuel combustion is harmless, or
iv) the present rise in global temperatures is due to the same natural non-CO[sub]2[/sub] mechanism as postulated in (ii)
but they are possibilities.
I’m in the “too much rhetoric, insufficient data” camp myself. I’m also with Arthur C. Clarke on fossil hydrocarbons- warming or no warming, they are too valuable as chemicals to simply burn as fuel, and with Lovelock on energy policy - the world should go nuclear. In this way I manage to antagonise just about everybody.
Well, shit. Now that this thread is so polite (I blame Kimstu 
), I’ll give this a bit of an answer.
Yes, probably some, but not most. If I were a global petrochemicals company I wouldn’t be looking to open a big plastic plant in a Kyoto-obligated country. But. But first, most carbon-producing plants, including even new carbon-producing plants, don’t make shippable industrial chemicals, they make electricity. If Germany needs electrical power, building a plant in India isn’t going to help. But second, some carbon products ship poorly. Indeed, some specialty chemicals only profitably ship a few hundred miles. But third, developing countries offer important advantages in terms of property rights, stability, etc. that will in some cases overcome any environmental restrictions. But fourth, the meat of Kyoto is to induce countries to reduce carbon pollution from existing sources, which actually frees up carbon allowances for new (and cleaner) sites.
All that, and I think Kyoto is a bad idea!
Well, what I got from that citation is merely that those naturally occurring past temperature rises might be different in character from a situation in which CO2 was vastly increased over a tiny timescale, which I have already accepted:
The proposed bio-feedback saviour is considered by the IPCC data: it really would have to be one hell of a strongly non-linear effect to offset such an enormous push off equilibrium.
Whether CO2 rises happened before or after temperature rises in the past, there has never been one without the other, and the current temperature rise is a reality, especially the otherwise inexplicable rise since around 1980. Would you agree that data showing further temperature rises since those IPCC graphs were created in 2000 would very clearly show that we were on another upward cycle?
Okay. But I remind you that you claimed your cite showed that temperature rise was preceded by CO2 rise, when in fact your cite explicitly stated in its text that this was undecided. My own cite indicates that this has now been decided from the data, and that your claim was incorrect.
I have no information about the models and algorithms the IPCC used to generate their curves. I hope they were better than those used to generate the Hockey Stick, which has recently come under severe criticism.
http://www.greeningearthsociety.org/wca/2004/wca_24c.html
Whether the artificial increase in CO2 caused by us is “an enormous push off equilibrium” rather depends on the sensitivity of the CO2 greenhouse effect to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. I’ve never seen any data on that relationship.
Which doesn’t tell us anything about whether one causes the other! A thermometer always climbs when it gets hot, but pushing more mercury into a thermometer won’t make it any hotter. I’m surprised; you would be top of my list of posters least likely to make a logical fallacy.
Well, this week’s New Scientist claims that 1998 was the hottest year on record, 2003 was cooler and 2004 was cooler still. It also claims that this is due to short-term variation and doesn’t indicate a cooling trend. Five years of data doesn’t really tell you anything either way.
Yes…It is generally agreed that the beginning of the warming preceded the rise in CO2. And, it is also understood that this warming was triggered by orbital oscillations (caused by the earth’s interactions with other planets like Jupiter). For example, at the moment, the earth is actually nearest to the sun during the northern hemisphere winter but that varies over time and since the distribution of land and ocean is different for the two hemispheres, this has an important climatic effect. Another effect is small changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis.
This initial warming then triggered the release of CO2 (partly from land sources but apparently mainly from the oceans) by processes that are not completely understood. And, the evidence is that this CO2 then amplified the warming. (The rough estimate is that about 1/2 the warming is due to greenhouse gases and about half to the direct orbital effects. Note that this estimate is somewhat more robust than one might guess because, while the climate system is complicated, it is less complicated to make comparative estimates of the “bare forcing” that the CO2 and the orbital oscillations each produce before the “feedbacks” in the climate system come into play.)
Well, much of the criticism has been undeserved and refuted. Some may be valid. However, most of the peer-reviewed scientific studies agree that by the late 20th century, temperatures were warmer than they had been in over 1000 years (at least in the northern hemisphere where data is more complete), although a few do show more variation in the pre-1900 years than Mann et al. so that the warming in the 20th century doesn’t look quite as anomalous as it does in the Mann et al. graph.
At any rate, the “hockey stick” graph is one of several independent lines of evidence for anthropogenic global warming, and one of the most indirect ones at that.
It is apparently pretty straightforward to calculate the direct “forcing” due to increases in CO2…It works out to just under 4 W / square meter for a doubling of CO2. And, one can even make a simplistic estimate of how much of a temperature increase this would produce in the absence of “feedbacks”. The question then becomes how the climate system responds to such a forcing once all of the various complicated “feedbacks” in the climate system are taken into account. There are essentially two approaches to getting at these feedbacks: One is to build and run climate models, using recent historical data (from the past 100 years or so) as validation. The second is to look at the Ice Age - interglacial cycles and figure out what the forcings were at that time and what the climate response was. Both methods seem to arrive at an estimate for climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 which is about 3 C ± 1.5 C. [Actually, a recent study suggested that much higher sensitivities, up to 11 C, could be produced by the models for what are considered to be plausible values of the parameters but these can probably be excluded on the basis of the paleoclimate data.]
It certainly doesn’t indicate a cooling trend. In fact, while 1998, a year that featured a monstrous el-Nino event is the hottest on record, I believe the rest of the top 5 hottest years have occurred since then…or something close to that; I don’t remember exactly. There are expected to be year-to-year fluctuations…It won’t be a monotonic increase from one year to the next but the trend line is clear. (And, scientists are already speculating that 2005, although it is featuring only a much weaker el Nino that is trending toward neutral, will still quite possibly turn out warm enough to dethrone 1998 as the hottest year on record.)
By the way, if you want to learn more about climate science from scientists in the field, there is now an excellent website that started up last November: www.realclimate.org
Oh, I’m convinced by the data that there’s a warming trend. Haven’t been to any ice fairs on the frozen Thames recently, after all.
Quite!
Yes, it should be a simple experiment to determine this, I just wasn’t aware of the numbers. That is in fact relatively insensitive, a few % increase when compared with normal insolation. But not insensitive enough.
I was aware of the recent study; the press are only too happy to report bad news. Your point about the paleoclimate data is news to me and IT SHOULDN’T BE, the journalists reporting on the story should have included it and found someone creditable to explain it.
I was being facetious to wind up poor SentientMeat, who is passionate on this subject. Naughty of me.
Thank’s, I’ll give it a look.
There was, as a few years ago, some discrepancy between what the satellite data (which is from 1979 on) showed and what the surface data showed. It is not true that the warming seen by the satellites was negligible once some corrections were made to the original data [to account for things like the decay in orbit of the satellites which were never designed to study long-term temperature trends]. Although there was still less warming seen in the troposphere as a whole than at the surface. However, when the National Academy of Sciences convened a panel to study this a few years ago (see here), they concluded that while the discrepancy remained a bit of a puzzle, the surface warming was definitely real. (The data are corrected for heat island effects,plus even air temperatures at sea show the warming.)
In the past couple of years, a few papers have been published that actually re-analyze the satellite record and find as strong or stronger warming in the mean troposphere temperatures as are seen at the surface. This remains the subject of some debate but it is safe to say that, at the very least, the question has changed from “Why is there a discrepancy between what the satellite and surface data show?” to “Is there really any discrepancy between what they show?”
Having poked about a bit on the realclimate site, I concede I was mostly wrong about the “hockey stick” being discredited.
Being wrong bugs me like a hangnail, but I’m getting used to it…
The counterpoint to realclimate.org is junkscience.com, who disagree with everything on realclimate, apparently on principle. I don’t particularly care for their tone, but they are there and they argue from data.
One of the claims of the greenhouse sceptics is that it’s not just satellite data that fails to detect a warming trend, but radiosonde balloons as well, for example as stated on:
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/medley.htm
I’ve never seen this claim addressed, and couldn’t find anything on realclimate.org. Could you shed any light?
I know this is debating in the Pit, and also that you jshore have run through some of this before at least once in GD, but it is important.
It’s already happening. I have many proposals I’ve seen (and been hired to consult on a few) dealing with India ramping up coal-fired power very quickly to use the electricity for such things as aluminium production. I also have been hired to consult on proposals to ship oil to India to future refineries of Biblical proportions, where the products would be used to fuel the marine fuel market of SE Asia (VERY tight right now), as well as selling to China. Numerous proposals for steel mills are running around, and expect coke production (both for local steel and export to China et al) to take off in India as well - and possibly even pulp and paper production, since that’s also fairly high-energy. The people I work for have said in about as many words that they fully intend to “take advantage of Kyoto” and leverage it to make their company rule.
Can’t speak on China; no direct experience there on this specific subject.
I’ve argued not against Kyoto but in favour of treating all nations equally, including the developing ones. I argued with some on here a bit about not giving a break on CO2 for developing countries, since pollution knows no borders, as they say - but the people on the pro-Kyoto side often really seem to dig in their heels on this point. It ends up smacking of wealth redistribution more than total attention to emissions, and I reckon if that aspect of the treaty was taken care of in a scientific manner, as opposed to what appears to be a geopolitical “punish the evil US” manner, it would have had much, much more support. I doubt, in fairness, that a Republican Senate would pass it even with that provision, but it would be close. And maybe with enough support, it could be negotiated and compromised to some middle ground.
Which would be better than squat-all nothing, IMO.
If junkscience is the counterpoint to realcimate, then it isn’t a very impressive counterpoint, since Steven Malloy is not a climatologist by any stretch of the imagination. As is evident from reading realclimate.org, it is a particularly complicated field, requiring a fair amount of expertise.
I am much less familiar with the whole radiosonde debate, but my general impression is that the sparsity of radiosonde data and perhaps other issues make it considerably less reliable for discerning long-term trends than either the surface data or the satellite data (despite the complications with it too).
Well, the question becomes one of what equality means. The developed nations are responsible for the lion’s share of the emissions up to this point so by one measure of equality, they have to do more of the work, at least initially. They are the countries that also have a much higher use of energy per capita. They also have stronger economies with better developed technology and this technology will need to be harnessed to get the job done. (The biggest purpose of Kyoto, in my view, is to provide the market incentives for technology to reduce emissions to come online.)
And my response is that CO2 knows no borders, and, as I have already seen in my limited experience, the polluters are taking the path of least resistance and taking advantage of every single loophole they can. If any country is exempted from the standards, or subject to reduced standards, then the polluting industries will flow to that country, and we’ll all be worse off. Something seen as a response to the CAA and its amendments in this country too, as you yourself correctly noted in past discussions - this is just that on a global scale.
The point is to reduce CO2, not use Kyoto as what IMO appears to be a back-door way to redistribute wealth. And when Kyoto stops being something other than what it’s supposed to be, it might be more acceptable to those on the fence (I won’t speak for the die-hards or blind partisans, they’ll never change their views).
Granted, and its a fair point. But if these guys are wrong, I want to hear WHY they are wrong. Not, “they’re wrong because they’re not climatologists”. I want to know what’s wrong with their data and/or their arguments.
Realclimate has a “dummies guide” to the Hockey stick controversy:
In section 8 of that guide they link to a Wikipedia article showing a whole bunch of studies gauging temperature trends over the past 1000 years. The trends are determined from proxy data - tree rings, isotope balance in ice cores and the like. You can see it here:
Note that this link was offered in support of Mann et als original “hockey stick”, in fact the link is described as the “hockey team”! However, take a close look. Mann’s various studies are shown in blue, yellow and light orange, and all show relatively small temperature fluctuations and then take off in the 20th century.
The other trendlines, published by non-Mann groups, show much larger temperature fluctuations than Mann’s studies. The one in red in particular seems to support the existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. What are these different groups doing with their proxy data to disagree like this?
The trendlines from proxy data only really become “hockey sticks” when you tack the 20th century direct measurement data onto the ends of them. And here we have a problem, because the proxy lines don’t agree with the direct measurement in the later half of the 20th century, and many of them show a cooling dip around 1950-1970. Is it valid to tack direct measurements onto proxy data in this way? I don’t know.
The direct measurement line in black shows current temperatures exceeding those of 1000 AD by a significant margin, the proxy data does not. If tree rings say it’s as hot now as it was 1000 years ago, direct measurement says its hotter now than tree rings say it was 1000 years ago, then maybe tree ring measurements can’t be relied on to determine these trends. Maybe the whole set of proxy data lines need to be kicked up 0.4 deg C to bring the current proxy data in line with the direct measurement.
I don’t actually believe this, since it would destroy the good proxy data-direct measure agreement in the first half of the 20th century. A claim by the sceptics is that the direct measurement increases are due to “heat islands”, urbanisation around recording stations leading to a measured warming trend where none exists. That has recently been attacked by a study comparing measurements taken on calm and on windy nights in urban and rural weather stations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4021197.stm
I guess overall you can just colour me confused. But I don’t accept that the sceptics should be summarily dismissed - that’s not the way science is supposed to work.
matt: Regardless of the specific issues around the “hockey stick” graph, the point is that Steven Milloy is someone who has awesomely impressive conservative credentials and pretty paltry scientific credentials. The fact that he has been elevated to some sort of reasonable status in the climate change and other scientific debates is very strange.
I agree there are legitimate questions about the whole “hockey stick” graph and such questions are indeed being debated in the scientific literature. While all the major studies in that Wickipedia graph show that the late 20th century warmth has exceeded the warmth over the past 1000 years or so, it is true that some of them don’t show the 20th century warming as looking quite as anomalous as it appears in the reconstruction of Mann et al.
Such reconstructions from proxy data are difficult and prone to various errors. I am also not sure about the answer to your question regarding the use of instrumental data over proxy data in the latter half of the 20th century. (By the way, in regard to the instrumental data: in addition to that recent study in regards to urbanization, there were also previous studies and there are also measurement at sea which surely should not be affected by this heat island effect.)
At any rate, one thing you should recognize is that the theory of anthropogenic warming is based on multiple lines of evidence at this point of which this particular piece of evidence is some of the most indirect (since it doesn’t directly address cause-and-effect). Those skeptics currently attacking the “hockey stick” graph are trying to have people believe that this is somehow the linchpin upon which the theory of anthropogenic global warming rests. (Interestingly enough, the linchpin used to be proclaimed to be the lack of warming in the satellite data, but now that the weight of the scientific evidence on that seems to be changing, the linchpin has changed too.) Here is a page on realclimate.org addresses the issue of “What if the hockey stick were wrong?”
[url=]Here is a PDF file of a “white paper” drafted in November 2002 in support of the U.S. government’s Strategic Plan for Climate Change Science Program that talks some about the radiosonde data. It sounds as if there is really a lot of uncertainty about that data…with some interpretations of it showing little or no warming over the last few decades but some showing quite strong warming:
(For comparison, I think the surface record shows a warming of something like 0.15-0.2 C per decade over the past two decades.)
Here from NASA is a nice graph of the yearly global temperature year-by-year. It indeed confirms my vague memory that, while 1998 was the hottest year on record, the 2nd-5th places all belong to years after 1998…In fact, they belong to the last 4 years. (6th-11th place go to 1997, 1995, 1990, 2001, 1991, and 2000 respectively.)