Leaked IPCC report: 90% confidence in AGW is now 95% -- and sea level will rise!

[GIGObuster]

@Sam_Stone

It is NOT an argument from ignorance. As I said, the first-order interaction of water vapor could certainly provide a positive feedback - it’s just that we don’t know what else it might do, and how the climate will respond after it mutates and changes in response to that change.

There are a lot of scientists resistant to the implications of complexity theory in their own domain, because it says that there are some things we can’t know through reductionism and experiment. That doesn’t make it any less true.

I suggest you read a bit about complexity theory. And not through the lens of ‘climate science’.

Sorry, but it remains an argument from ignorance, there is plenty of evidence to show how the feedback is and works, you need evidence for the negative par of it and that it can overcome the positive.

[Sam_Stone]

@GIGObuster

Once again, not what the scientists report, it is complex, but the overall behavior can be understood. Enough to report that there is not much there on evidence for a negative feedback from clouds or other items to stop the warming observed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a69_owv4jEE

There’s also a lot we know about ants. In fact, we know far more about them than we do about the climate system. We understand their brains well enough to be able to build computer simulations of them. We understand how they use pheromones for organization. We know the temperatures inside their colonies and how those affect reproduction. We have made intricate studies of their colonies, and can even simulate ant colonies to a high degree of realism.

That doesn’t get us one iota closer to being able to predict the detailed structure of a new ant colony, or to be able to predict what it will do in response to inputs. That’s because colony behavior is complex, and highly susceptible to minute changes in initial conditions.

[GIGObuster]

@Sam_Stone

There’s also a lot we know about ants. In fact, we know far more about them than we do about the climate system. We understand their brains well enough to be able to build computer simulations of them. We understand how they use pheromones for organization. We know the temperatures inside their colonies and how those affect reproduction. We have made intricate studies of their colonies, and can even simulate ant colonies to a high degree of realism.

That doesn’t get us one iota closer to being able to predict the detailed structure of a new ant colony, or to be able to predict what it will do in response to inputs. That’s because colony behavior is complex, and highly susceptible to minute changes in initial conditions.

We can still tell what the overall shape the ant colony will get to, once again you only relying on FUD to tell a farmer, for example, that he should not worry about that new ant colony (that we know is the kind that it will make a huge one) undermining a side of the barn because someone is claiming that we should not do anything until we figure out an unknown input that has not made much of a difference in the past for the purposes of looking if the side of the barn will be undermined.

[BrainGlutton]

@Sam_Stone

The Earth IS warming. Even without human input, the Earth would probably be warming right now simply because of where it is in the interglacial cycle. That’s not particularly controversial.

But that kind of warming is a lot slower than what we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution began; in fact, the latter appears to be unprecedented in Earth’s history.

[doorhinge]

@GIGObuster

And we hit once again the #1 Myth.

What does past climate change tell us about global warming?
What does past climate change tell us about global warming?

LOL. Climate change occurs every season. Global warming occurs between ice ages. The IPCC man-made inputs magically excluded the little ice age temps from their computer modeling when it proved inconvient.

“Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.”

According to the MMCO2GW zealots. And you ignore the possibility of a massive volcanic eruption, which would, relatively-speaking, quickly lower global temps. Either the global tempurature is increasing, decreasing, or relatively stable. Even the IPCC should be able to produce evidence of what the global temp is and has been.

The IPCC is currently trying to blame/prove the oceans are acting as heat sinks to explain the failure of the globe to act as the IPCC predicted. Maybe, just maybe, the new-and-unproven IPCC report will finally produce a report that will explain the IPCC’s repeated failures to produce accurate results. Maybe. And the new report WILL HAVE TO BE VETTED by any 3rd party and the IPCC will have to share it’s data and magical software with any 3rd party. If the IPCC wants to convince people that MMCO2GW isn’t a fraud, or sloppy science, or zealotry for the sake of zealotry.

I guess a lot is riding on the new-and-improved IPCC report.

[doorhinge]

@BrainGlutton

But that kind of warming is a lot slower than what we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution began; in fact, the latter appears to be unprecedented in Earth’s history.

Has man-made CO2 reached 3% of the total amount of CO2 produced yet?

[GIGObuster]

@doorhinge

Has man-made CO2 reached 3% of the total amount of CO2 produced yet?

Wrong question that gets a misleading answer,

How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions?

What the science says…

The CO2 that nature emits (from the ocean and vegetation) is balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation). Therefore human emissions upset the natural balance, rising CO2 to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years. In fact, human emit 26 gigatonnes of CO2 per year while CO2 in the atmosphere is rising by only 15 gigatonnes per year - much of human CO2 emissions is being absorbed by natural sinks.

Manmade CO2 emissions are much smaller than natural emissions. Consumption of vegetation by animals & microbes accounts for about 220 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. Respiration by vegetation emits around 220 gigatonnes. The ocean releases about 332 gigatonnes. In contrast, when you combine the effect of fossil fuel burning and changes in land use, human CO2 emissions are only around 29 gigatonnes per year. However, natural CO2 emissions (from the ocean and vegetation) are balanced by natural absorptions (again by the ocean and vegetation). Land plants absorb about 450 gigatonnes of CO2 per year and the ocean absorbs about 338 gigatonnes. This keeps atmospheric CO2 levels in rough balance. Human CO2 emissions upsets the natural balance.

[Lobohan]

@doorhinge

Has man-made CO2 reached 3% of the total amount of CO2 produced yet?

Quick question: Do you think that the vast majority of working climate scientists would be blindsided by that question?

Do you actually think that you’ve come up with a neener-neener that will overturn the consensus?

Honestly?

[GIGObuster]

@doorhinge

LOL. Climate change occurs every season. Global warming occurs between ice ages. The IPCC man-made inputs magically excluded the little ice age temps from their computer modeling when it proved inconvient.

No, that is ignoring history, there is no evidence for what you are claiming here.

@doorhinge

“Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time; humans are now the dominant forcing.”

According to the MMCO2GW zealots. And you ignore the possibility of a massive volcanic eruption, which would, relatively-speaking, quickly lower global temps. Either the global tempurature is increasing, decreasing, or relatively stable. Even the IPCC should be able to produce evidence of what the global temp is and has been.

Once again, no evidence for what you claim, Eruptions and other factors are used to quantify even the Water Vapor Feedback.

@doorhinge

The IPCC is currently trying to blame/prove the oceans are acting as heat sinks to explain the failure of the globe to act as the IPCC predicted. Maybe, just maybe, the new-and-unproven IPCC report will finally produce a report that will explain the IPCC’s repeated failures to produce accurate results. Maybe. And the new report WILL HAVE TO BE VETTED by any 3rd party and the IPCC will have to share it’s data and magical software with any 3rd party. If the IPCC wants to convince people that MMCO2GW isn’t a fraud, or sloppy science, or zealotry for the sake of zealotry.

I guess a lot is riding on the new-and-improved IPCC report.

And there you go again, repeating the already debunked ignorance is not helpful, Scientists like Kevin Trenberth are contributors to the IPCC, they are not trying, they reported that possibility a long time ago and now they and other oceanographers are finding the evidence for that idea. And this now has to be repeated as it was ignored just recently.

The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle | Dana...

Importantly, as authors Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography explain, accounting for the changes in the Pacific Ocean allows the model to reproduce the slowed global surface warming over the past 15 years. It also accurately reproduces the regional and seasonal changes in surface temperatures, which adds confidence that their results are meaningful.

“Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to La-Niña-like decadal cooling … For the recent decade, the decrease in tropical Pacific sea surface temperature has lowered the global temperature by about 0.15 degrees Celsius compared to the 1990s”.

Despite only covering 8.2 percent of the Earth’s surface, these results suggest that the tropical Pacific Ocean plays a major role in short-term changes in the average global surface temperature. And over the past 15 years, it’s offset most of the global surface warming from the increased greenhouse effect.

These results are broadly consistent with several other important recent papers investigating the role of the oceans in global warming. For example, the model used in this study finds that the overall heating of the planet has not slowed when the warming of the oceans are taken into account, as studies led by John Abraham, myself, and several others have also concluded.

Research led by Gerald Meehl has similarly focused on the importance of the Pacific Ocean in short-term global surface temperature changes. His climate model predicts that there will be decades when surface temperature changes are relatively flat because more heat is transferred to the deep oceans, precisely as we have observed over the past decade. Meehl discussed the Kosaka & Xie study with Carbon Brief,

“This paper basically confirms, with a novel methodology, what we originally documented in our Nature Climate Change paper in 2011 and followed up with in our Journal of Climate paper … We went beyond [the new paper] to show that when the tropical Pacific was cool for a decade … more heat is mixed into the deeper ocean, something the new paper doesn’t address.”

Kevin Trenberth, who co-authored several of these important ocean studies, has likewise pointed to the important role of the Pacific Ocean in transferring more heat to the deep oceans.

"The cause of the shift is a particular change in winds, especially in the Pacific Ocean where the subtropical trade winds have become noticeably stronger, changing ocean currents and providing a mechanism for heat to be carried down into the ocean. This is associated with weather patterns in the Pacific, which are in turn related to the La Niña phase of the El Niño phenomenon."

Research by Masahiro Watanabe of the Japanese Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute has also suggested that the transfer of heat to the deep oceans and corresponding slowed global surface warming is related to changes in the Pacific.

Thus the scientific picture is becoming increasingly clear that the Pacific Ocean has played a large role in the slowed surface warming in recent years, but the warming of the oceans and planet as a whole have continued unabated. Thus the slowed surface warming is very likely to be a temporary effect, similar to the flat global surface temperatures between 1940 and 1970 when the Pacific Ocean was in another cool cycle.

[doorhinge]

@GIGObuster

Wrong question that gets a misleading answer,

How do human CO2 emissions compare to natural CO2 emissions?

Thanks for the self-identified “misleading answer”.

[FXMastermind]

Everybody seems to have an opinion about what things* mean*, which is a probable problem with the science of climate. The likelihood that opinions and preconceived ideas will determine what people think is high.

What leaked IPCC report really says on climate change

Rawls highlights a paragraph on page 43 of chapter 7, which he claims undermines the report’s main conclusion – that human activity is the main driver of climate change.

The key sentence examines evidence of the link between the sun’s activity and climate. It concludes that the link is slightly stronger than previously thought. This suggests positive feedbacks within the climate must make the sun’s influence a little larger to fully explain how it affects Earth’s climate. Rawls interprets this as an admission that the sun is actually a significant driver of climate change.

While the die hard doom and gloomer insists the sun has almost no influence on our climate.

Climate scientists are lining up to debunk this claim. “They’re misunderstanding, either deliberately or otherwise, what that sentence is meant to say,” says Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London, who studies the effect of solar activity on the Earth.

The sun has little effect on global temperatures over human timescales, she says, although – perhaps confusingly – it does have a relatively strong effect on some regions, particularly Europe (New Scientist, 25 September 2010, p 10).

Well, that clears that up.

Rawls’s would-be revelations actually draw attention away from some much more interesting and surprising conclusions in the draft report.

For one thing, the IPCC has changed its 2007 prediction on droughts. Then, it concluded that a world beset by more intense droughts was “likely”. But the authors of the new report have taken heed of recent criticisms that the statistical measure of drought favoured by climatologists is unreliable.

So once again, consensus is wrong. No surprise at this point.

The draft quotes studies that show recent “decreasing trends in the duration, intensity and severity of drought globally”.

Another common expectation of a warmer world also bites the dust: more frequent tropical cyclones. In 2007, the IPCC said there had been a “likely” increase in tropical cyclones since 1970, which was “more likely than not” due to global warming raising sea temperatures.

Amd , once again, the skeptics seem to be correct.

We now have a better picture of the extent to which smogs and other human-made aerosols in the atmosphere shade us from the worst of global warming. The draft says their cooling effect is 40 per cent less than thought in 2007, suggesting this side effect of air pollution has been overstated. That is good news. Less cooling from aerosols means there is less masked warming waiting in the wings for when the skies are eventually cleaned by pollution regulation. It also means the climate is less sensitive to rising levels of greenhouse gases than some have feared.

Once again, science has the final word, and the consensus was wrong. But how can this be? The article has to have a negative slant. it has to.

Other conclusions are more sobering. The report is pessimistic about Arctic sea ice, which hit a record low in September. The IPCC says the Arctic may see ice-free summers by 2100. Even that is too rosy a picture for many climatologists, who expect ice-free summers before 2050.

The IPCC also predicts greater sea-level rise than it did in 2007, as it now includes models of ice-sheet movements.

And there we go.

The draft report says it is “very likely” that the past three decades have all been warmer than any time in the past 800 years; that we could see almost 9 °C of warming by 2300; and that “a large fraction of climate change is largely irreversible on human timescales”.

Now we are back to the negative, which has to be the case.

The details of the picture may have changed, but it is still largely bleak.

Oh yeah, because it has to be. There is no possible scenario where mankind actually can have a positive effect on the world.

[doorhinge]

@Lobohan

Quick question: Do you think that the vast majority of working climate scientists would be blindsided by that question?

Do you actually think that you’ve come up with a neener-neener that will overturn the consensus?

Honestly?

Did you answer my question honestly?

I have no idea what the vast majority of working climate scientists would be blindsided by? Maybe they would respond to a threat of reduced or zero funding for disagreeing with the IPCC or the other MMCO2GW zealots?

There seems to be a consensus of MMCO2GW zealots who believe that the soon-to-be-released IPCC report has already been peer reviewed and certified flawless.

[GIGObuster]

@FXMastermind

Everybody seems to have an opinion about what things* mean*, which is a probable problem with the science of climate. The likelihood that opinions and preconceived ideas will determine what people think is high.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23014-what-leaked-ipcc-report-really-says-on-climate-change.html#.Ujel3NKsiSo

While the die hard doom and gloomer insists the sun has almost no influence on our climate.

Yeah, like if the FUD was not reported from where it came from, it was not the scientists.

A draft version was leaked online by Alec Rawls, a US blogger who signed up to be an expert reviewer of the next report – something anyone can do.

Climate sceptics immediately claimed it contains an admission that much of global warming is a result of the sun’s variability, not greenhouse gas emissions.** In fact, the report says nothing of the sort**. It does, however, show that our understanding of the climate is shifting. And while some future threats now seem less likely, others loom larger.

Rawls is indeed misrepresenting the report with his preconceived ideas, just as it was reported by the MET office on other naked efforts of the deniers to seed FUD.

[GIGObuster]

@doorhinge

Did you answer my question honestly?

I have no idea what the vast majority of working climate scientists would be blindsided by? Maybe they would respond to a threat of reduced or zero funding for disagreeing with the IPCC or the other MMCO2GW zealots?

There you go again, cite for the scientists getting funding from the IPCC? Or the scientists not voluntary contributing to the report? Because anyone with logic would see that indeed it is silly to claim that there would be any serious disagreements when the scientists are the ones contributing to the report.

@doorhinge

There seems to be a consensus of MMCO2GW zealots who believe that the soon-to-be-released IPCC report has already been peer reviewed and certified flawless.

:rolleyes:

RealClimate: IPCC errors: facts and spin

Let’s start with a few basic facts about the IPCC. The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in four technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports.

[doorhinge]

@GIGObuster

No, that is ignoring history, there is no evidence for what you are claiming here.
Once again, no evidence for what you claim, Eruptions and other factors are used to quantify even the Water Vapor Feedback.
And there you go again, repeating the already debunked ignorance is not helpful, Scientists like Kevin Trenberth are contributors to the IPCC, they are not trying, they reported that possibility a long time ago and now they and other oceanographers are finding the evidence for that idea. And this now has to be repeated as it was ignored just recently.

The Pacific Ocean fills in another piece of the global warming puzzle | Climate crisis | The Guardian

The IPCC produced two seperate “hockey stick” charts. The first showed a global temp decrease during the Little Ice Age which magically disappeared in the 2nd version of the chart.

Massive volcanic eruptions spew millions of tons of sulfur dioxide, ash, and rock into the upper atmosphere which can reflect sunlight and cool down the planet for months or years. Mankind can hardly match that much power without resorting to a nuclear war.

I’m sure Kevin Trenberth will make wonderful and awe inspiring contributions to the soon-to-be-released-but-not-yet-vetted IPCC report. I look forward to his helping rebuild the IPCC’s reputation.

[doorhinge]

@GIGObuster

There you go again, cite for the scientists getting funding from the IPCC? Or the scientists not voluntary contributing to the report? Because anyone with logic would see that indeed it is silly to claim that there would be any serious disagreements when the scientists are the ones contributing to the report.
:rolleyes:

:rolleyes: You’ve made it very clear that you believe that any cite, evidence, or opinion that I have is based on the ignorance of anyone who questions MMCO2GW. Since it’s obvious that won’t accept any cite questioning MMCO2GW, why would you waste time by requesting one?

In the meantime, I’ll wait for the official release (and independent vetting) of the new-and-improved IPCC report, which I’m sure will clear up any and all questions about AGW and potential sea level rise.

[GIGObuster]

@doorhinge

The IPCC produced two seperate “hockey stick” charts. The first showed a global temp decrease during the Little Ice Age which magically disappeared in the 2nd version of the chart.

And thank you for the trip to memory lane, that was the issue that showed me how illogical the denier sources are and got me interested on this issue, for the creationists I encountered before, it was like finding yet again the “why there are still monkeys” bit.

As I pointed early and, the contrarians never got it, scientists used the only records available then from dendrochronology, both the medieval warm period and the little ice age were stronger in the region of England where the the original chart was mostly based on.

To confirm it, then people like Michael Mann expanded the data set and areas of the earth, with better information the medieval warm period and little ice ages were shown to be more pronounced in Europe than everywhere else.

Nowadays there is a Hockey team of graphs showing that Mann and others are more accurate than the original graph, so once again here is only yet another example of the march of time and science being completely missed.

@doorhinge

Massive volcanic eruptions spew millions of tons of sulfur dioxide, ash, and rock into the upper atmosphere which can reflect sunlight and cool down the planet for months or years. Mankind can hardly match that much power without resorting to a nuclear war.

That is nice, cite for those effects being permanent? Of course admitting that it only can last for a few months or years does not help really.

@doorhinge

I’m sure Kevin Trenberth will make wonderful and awe inspiring contributions to the soon-to-be-released-but-not-yet-vetted IPCC report. I look forward to his helping rebuild the IPCC’s reputation.

I do not think that repeating points that are reheated baloney from denier sources helps rebuild their sorry reputations.

[Trinopus]

@doorhinge

. . . Massive volcanic eruptions spew millions of tons of sulfur dioxide, ash, and rock into the upper atmosphere which can reflect sunlight and cool down the planet for months or years. Mankind can hardly match that much power without resorting to a nuclear war. . . .

Sure we can, when you have a “gift that keeps on giving” in the form of greenhouse gases. (Or, worse, catalytic effects, like CFCs on the Ozone Layer…) Hundreds of millions of cars and trucks, and hundreds of thousands of coal-burning electrical generating plants, all add up to a good “volcano’s worth” of gases. Human industry is on a titanic scale.

Anyway, there aren’t any massive volcanic eruptions right now, so they can hardly be invoked to explain anything. The effects of that unpronounceable Icelandic chap were easily measured. I hope everyone gives the climatologists credit for factoring that into their assessments!

[GIGObuster]

@doorhinge

:rolleyes: You’ve made it very clear that you believe that any cite, evidence, or opinion that I have is based on the ignorance of anyone who questions MMCO2GW. Since it’s obvious that won’t accept any cite questioning MMCO2GW, why would you waste time by requesting one?

Wow, not even wrong.

The cites are not supposed to come from science but from the “intrepid” reporters that have uncovered the truth[sup]TM[/sup], lets see them.

[Aji_de_Gallina]

Wow!
Still no quotes from the actual leak.
I’ll provdie some more.

• The uncertainty in the effect of aerosols is large, but slightly reduced since AR4. (Not quite settled)
• While the WMGHG are well mixed in the atmosphere and therefore show a fairly homogeneous
  25 forcing, other agents such as aerosols, ozone and land use changes are highly heterogeneous spatially.
• Climate models of today are, in principle, better than their predecessors. However, every bit of added complexity also introduces new sources of error (e.g., via uncertain parameters) and new interactions between model components that may, if only temporarily, degrade a model’s simulation of other aspects of the climate system. An important consideration is that model performance