Climate Change & Global Warming

[Carlos]

Found this one

 

"On our web site we present tree ring chronologies from 26 northern hemisphere sites and 7 southern hemisphere. the sites were chosen to cover the period 1600 to the late 20th century. They show that the "divergence problem" is widespread in the northern hemisphere but not in the southern hemisphere. Interestingly both hemispheres show the early 20th century warming and the mid 20th century cooling. See: http://www.climatedata.info/Proxy/Proxy/treerings_introduction.html"

 

Also a 1998 paper to the Royal Society addressing the divergence problem.

http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Briffa_et_al_PTRS_98.pdf

[ArabiaTerra]

thats at best poor science. if the tree rings are good enough for the past couple of thousand years then claiming they suddenly change in the 60s id false. they may not show the effects that the experts wanted but they still show good and bad growing periods. adapting eidence to fit there needs is poor at the least.

No it isn't bad science, paulb. The scientists have the instrumental record, which is the standard. They have proxies from several different sources which don't use tree rings which agree with the instrumental record. And the tree rings themselves agree with the instrumental record for 100 years. Also, as Carlos points out, the divergence problem is more widespread in the northern Hemisphere.

 

That is enough to tell them that it is something else, something new in the Northern Hemisphere which is causing the divergence problem by overriding the temperature signal.

 

So, what was new in the sixties? Commercial air travel using high altitude jets. The sixties were the decade of the "jet-set". The effect of commercial air travel on climate was shown starkly after 9/11 when for a week or so after the attacks all air travel over the continental USA was suspended. Climatologists looking at the data a few months later discovered that the surface temperature of the continental USA had risen by over 1 degree centigrade within a couple of days of the ban being implemented. This was simply because more sunlight was reaching the surface due to the lack of jet contrails in the sky. An effect known as Global Dimming.

 

Sunlight is one of the factors which govern tree growth along with temperature and availability of water. Less sunlight means less growth. It's that simple.

 

This does not change the fact that the tree ring data from before 1960 show a high degree of correlation for a full century with the instrumental temperature record (0.89 according to the 1998 paper Carlos posted the link to, where 1.0 would represent a perfect match).

 

It also does not change the fact that the non tree ring proxies from, for instance, lake sediments, stalactites and ice cores, which would not be expected to show this effect, indeed do not show it.

 

There was no cover up, there is no conspiracy.

[Symbister]

Personally I believe global warming is a massive threat to our race......

 

.....but I don't think that saving energy is the answer to global warming. It definitely helps, but I don't think it's the answer.

 

I think that we HAVE to start finding other methods of producing power. Clean ways. Yes, I am talking about renewable energy but I also believe that if we must resort to nuclear power as a temporary measure until we are fully renewable, then we should.

 

In an idle moment, I came across a Swedish study that perhaps needs more attention. Essentially, it said that only around a quarter of observed global warming is caused by the greenhouse gas effect of CO2. Three quarters is caused directly by the heat we create by burning any sort of non-renewable energy. The effect is most obvious in large city centres in winter, which are typically several degrees celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside.

 

Nuclear apparently doesn't help very much, because although it doesn't contribute very much to the CO2 part of the equation, its use to generate heat will just as surely contribute to raising global temperatures. The other message from all this is that we need massively to improve insulation and heat retention and (though it's not a problem in Shetland) we'll need to get used to warmer shopping centres, offices and so on in the summer.

 

Wish I could now find the study!

[ArabiaTerra]

Symbister, if you go back over the last four or five pages of this debate, you will find that Njugle brought up this point. It is not correct. The heating caused by CO2 massively outweighs the effect of waste heat.

 

This explains it better:

 

http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/11/solar-energy-trumps-coal-caldeira-study/

 

Hope that helps.

 

Edit: Oh, and renewables do not add any heat to the system, they just move it around allowing us to do something useful with it.

[paulb]

any studies on peat deposits.

[crofter]

any studies on peat deposits.

 

 

Being serious, there are plenty. You might find this site interesting:

 

http://www.imcg.net/

[north]

This story just about sums up the hypocracy of the entire Copenhagen Summit and Global Warming Industry. I expect Al Gore will be there in his Gulfstream and rented Limo, just like the rest of them.

 

All you followers are the biggest load of suckers ever.

 

 

 

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

 

Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

 

By Andrew Gilligan

Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

 

 

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

 

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

 

Climate Express sets off for Copenhagen

 

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

 

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

 

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

 

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

 

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen's clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city's famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week "Climate Bottom Meeting," complete with a "storytelling yurt" and a "funeral of the day" for various corrupt, "heatist" concepts such as "economic growth".

 

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a "parallel conference" in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

 

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

 

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants' travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of "carbon dioxide equivalent", equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

 

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from "saving the world," the world's leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

 

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

 

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

 

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week's unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change "saboteurs" reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

 

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. "If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence," said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. "Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys."

 

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners' apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

 

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. "If Martin Luther King had come along and said 'I have a nightmare,' people would not have followed him," he said.

 

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

 

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

 

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama's decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a "victory" for the talks.

 

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure.

[DamnSaxon]

Yep, here we go, all aboard for two weeks of nonsense on stilits. And I, cynical old sod that I am, await the show with interest. Predicted net effect of outcome on thermal properties of planet Earth, approx. 0.000000% max. Sorry it's another longish post, I've not been able to get on for a few weeks so I've been bottling it all up.

 

We are, of course, all dooomed - we always have been, nothing we humans like better than stuff to scare ourselves silly - and, by God, for the next fortnight we're all going to be told in very loud voices about how we're racing towards climatic catastrophe and why we're all individually to blame, miserable sinners that we are. The mathematical models can't lie, after all, can they? Errrrrrrr ... you mean they might just be "botch after botch after botch"? ...

 

And, of course, after all the blather, our noble, statesmanlike leaders will agree on "decisive measures" to "address the problem", undoubtedly by imposing whole new tiers of parasitic economic superstructure, which will (this is, after all, politics) hurt everyone except the real offenders against the world's ecology ... the giant agribusinesses who are tirelessly working to replace the human food supply with their paid-for, patented monocultures, the slash-and-burners who feel that replacing millions of acres of rainforest with millions of acres of farting cows is a cool idea, all of them. No, they'll be wheeling and dealing their "carbon credits" and laughing even louder all the way to the bank. And the bank will certainly be laughing. We used to think it was a joke when we said "they'd tax the air you breathe, if they could" ... and now they are.

 

The real loser in the long run from the fiascoid state this has degenerated into is science. In a time when universities have been closing science departments because potential students think science is too hard, we're exposed to acres of coverage of how "world leading" scientists have been tweaking and diddling with figures, fiddling with peer review, repelling FOI requests, how original data have "been destroyed" ... yes, kiddies, these scientists are just like anyone else, they make it up as they go along, no reason to think that what they say is "really" any truer than anybody else. Oh. except those silly, "out-of-date" deniers, of course, who've "been left behind by the debate", the "consensus" is that they're pants.

 

No. As AT has observed above, science is about facts. You define and study your problem. You think about it, make a mark 1 theory to explain what happens, and test against reality. If stuff happens (or doesn't happen) in the real world which is incompatible with your theory, then your theory is wrong. So you modify the theory to mark 2 and try again, and again, until you end up with a theory which hasn't broken down yet. Most importantly, you publish everything - the actual measurements, how they were taken, the formulae you used, the assumptions you made, everything you think might have had an influence. That way anyone and everyone can question every aspect of your work, until the eventual theory has some authority and disproofs become - temporarily - beyond our knowledge.

 

The CRU haven't helped their own case in all this by apparently using data which they "couldn't" release because it was "someone else's intellectual property" - if people can't see what you're doing and check your workings, why should they believe a word of your conclusions? I'm an interested, scientifically literate onlooker, and I see a lot more output from mathematical models than deliberation about actual data, which is much, much harder to find.

 

Well, the Met Office has now said that it will release the original data itself. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the political miasma of the last couple of weeks results in these figures being doubted; after all, the Met Office are well-known supporters of the AGW hypothesis, so "of course" these figures will show it. Even if the released figures are simon pure, they are now infused with that residual doubt, and in science that shouldn't happen. Not that it will make any difference to anything, of course, because international action is being decided now, long before anyone can do anything with the data.

 

Yes, science is the loser. In a world where uni science departments are closing, and where so many people seem to think that the truth is something determined by consensus on Wikipedia, I find that far more terrifying than anything climatic change can offer. If we throw away our rationality, we are certainly doomed.

 

Still, on with the show! Humanity, not to mention the "face" of leading politicians worldwide, must be saved!

[Carlos]

This story just about sums up the hypocracy of the entire Copenhagen Summit and Global Warming Industry. I expect Al Gore will be there in his Gulfstream and rented Limo, just like the rest of them.

 

All you followers are the biggest load of suckers ever.

 

 

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right.

 

Read that one.

 

Yes, I think they missed a major PR trick by not having the planes greeted by a load of rented bikes for the delegates' transportation.

Although we are of course dealing with politicians for the main part.....

 

Interesting though that, after stirring up some more worries about leaked emails, without actually going into the details of what those show or do not show, that the writter felt they had to state that they agreed with the main points of the science......

[judgeknott]

he Met Office has now said that it will release the original data itself

 

of course the Met Office are part of the MOD who may be interested in raising green taxes for some project or another......

[DamnSaxon]

Well, not halfway through yet and they're not disappointing. Plenty of apocalyptic quotes, as expected, and ooops! How unexpected! that the Grauniad, hardly sceptical on this issue, leaks the "Danish text" and reveals that ... the conclusions have already been written by the main beneficiaries thereof!

 

1% science, 99% politics.

[ArabiaTerra]

Well, not halfway through yet and they're not disappointing. Plenty of apocalyptic quotes, as expected, and ooops! How unexpected! that the Grauniad, hardly sceptical on this issue, leaks the "Danish text" and reveals that ... the conclusions have already been written by the main beneficiaries thereof!

 

1% science, 99% politics.

Have you actually read the text the Groan leaked? The wording was there, sure, but no numbers. The numbers are what they are there to argue about.

 

And of course it's politics. It's a political meeting to make a political agreement. What on Earth did you expect? They are not there to argue about the science, it's not a scientific meeting. The scientists present their findings and their recommendations about what must be done and the politicians argue about how best to do it. That is what the meeting is about.

[DamnSaxon]

^^

Well, yes, actually - went straight over to Wikileaks when I saw the mention on the Graun site, then found they had their own link to a scribd copy when I went back.

 

But my "1% science, 99% politics" comment was about the whole process, not just this junket. Along with tens of thousands of scientists (and let us not forget them), I don't accept the "science" being presented there, which I believe to be drawing unjustifiably extreme conclusions from dubious arguments based on a science which is still in its infancy (not to mention software which (a) faithfully produces a "hockey stick" graph from a file of random numbers and ( is in any case a linear mathematical model trying to predict a chaotic system).

 

AT, when your side of this (definitely *not* settled!) argument can explain how human GG generation on Earth can also cause the warming on other planets in the Solar System which has been noticed over a period of some 10 or more years, I may be persuaded, though the argument will have to be pretty good. 'Til then, I'll stick with broadly agreeing with Piers Corbyn, a man who is more accurate about next week's weather than the Met Office is about tomorrow's - it's the Sun and Moon which control Earth's climate.

 

I wish I had your certainty, but frankly I believe that if we stopped producing CO2 today and hoovered all "human" CO2 out of the atmosphere, it wouldn't make any noticeable difference to GW. It's the Sun doing odd things to all the planets, being in what seems to be an "interesting" state at the mo with an unusually protracted period of sunspot minimum - today's figures from Space Weather are:

 

2009 total: 259 days (76%)

Since 2004: 770 days

Typical Solar Min: 485 days

 

That's your (well, my) main suspect - almost 60% over the normal quiet period and we're still waiting for a convincing upswing in spot count. We don't know what it's doing, and we don't even have proper data on exactly what energy, in what forms, it throws at us, still less enough to predict manmade apocalypse by disregarding it.

 

(And I absolutely refuse to be drawn on whether it's all teeing up for the End of Life as We Know It in 2012, fascinating and wonderful as those internet predictions are ... )

[Pleepsie]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6951029.ece

Top scientists rally to the defence of the Met Office

The Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furore over stolen e-mails.

 

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the “professional integrity†of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fuelling scepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.

 

One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

 

 

One scientist told The Times he felt under pressure to sign. “The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming,†he said.

 

So a couple of scientists sign a petition because they fear they will lose work....how many have fudged figures for the same reason?

[ArabiaTerra]

- it's the Sun and Moon which control Earth's climate.

 

I wish I had your certainty, but frankly I believe that if we stopped producing CO2 today and hoovered all "human" CO2 out of the atmosphere, it wouldn't make any noticeable difference to GW. It's the Sun doing odd things to all the planets, being in what seems to be an "interesting" state at the mo with an unusually protracted period of sunspot minimum - today's figures from Space Weather are:

 

2009 total: 259 days (76%)

Since 2004: 770 days

Typical Solar Min: 485 days

 

That's your (well, my) main suspect - almost 60% over the normal quiet period and we're still waiting for a convincing upswing in spot count. We don't know what it's doing, and we don't even have proper data on exactly what energy, in what forms, it throws at us, still less enough to predict manmade apocalypse by disregarding it.

A couple of points:

 

1. We are in a Solar Minimum, this means the Sun is in the cool phase of it's cycle, so we should be cooling. We're not. See here for details.

 

2. Could you please explain how we can increase the amount of a proven greenhouse gas in the atmosphere by more than 30% (280ppm-384ppm) and not affect the climate?

 

Oh, and we have very precise data on the amount of Solar energy reaching the Earth. Every single Satellite with solar panels is keeping a record for us, so to say we don't know what the sun is doing is rubbish.