New Study Casts Doubt On A Key Metric For Predicting Global Warming

[rangerrebew]

New Study Casts Doubt On A Key Metric For Predicting Global Warming
Photo of Michael Bastasch
Michael Bastasch
12:06 PM 12/14/2016
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Former Vice President Al Gore speaks during the Center for American Progress 10th Anniversary Conference in Washington, D.C., Oct. 24, 2013. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)   Former Vice President Al Gore speaks during the Center for American Progress 10th Anniversary Conference in Washington, D.C., Oct. 24, 2013. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

New research suggests scientists may be wrong about a key measurement for projecting man-made global warming.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts and amateur scientist Willis Eschenbach released new research suggesting “global climate sensitivity to increased carbon dioxide, and the potential feedback mechanism of increased water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere, is actually far less than postulated by the IPCC.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/14/new-study-casts-doubt-on-a-key-metric-for-predicting-global-warming/#ixzz4SuEUp0u5

[Free Vulcan]

Meteorologist Anthony Watts and amateur scientist Willis Eschenbach released new research suggesting “global climate sensitivity to increased carbon dioxide, and the potential feedback mechanism of increased water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere, is actually far less than postulated by the IPCC.”

This has been where I've always called BS on the ridiculous warmer nonsense. They make CO2 out to be magic pixie dust, something that is able to do near magical things far beyond it's minuscule presence in the atmosphere.

One of the big reasons being that they refuse to acknowledge that far more radiation is going out into space than they want to admit.

[LateForLunch]

This has been where I've always called BS on the ridiculous warmer nonsense. They make CO2 out to be magic pixie dust, something that is able to do near magical things far beyond it's minuscule presence in the atmosphere.

One of the big reasons being that they refuse to acknowledge that far more radiation is going out into space than they want to admit.

Free Vulcan nailed it. I am forever engaging in educating AGW proponents and bringing them to the reality that carbon dioxide is classified as an INERT atmospheric trace gas not heh magic pixie dust heh

Add to that the fact that most of the strong evidence is that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are an after-effect of warming not causative.

Anti-conservatives are forever confusing cause and effect (no doubt deliberately much of the time).

[the_doc]

Free Vulcan nailed it. I am forever engaging in educating AGW proponents and bringing them to the reality that carbon dioxide is classified as an INERT atmospheric trace gas not heh magic pixie dust heh

Add to that the fact that most of the strong evidence is that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are an after-effect of warming not causative.

Anti-conservatives are forever confusing cause and effect (no doubt deliberately much of the time).

Add to that the fact that we already know that the increased sunspot activity in the 20th Century tracks the earth's temperature perfectly.  Add to that the fact that atmospheric physicists have demonstrated in sophisticated cloud chamber experiments the actual mechanism by which sunspots warm the earth.

[geronl]

We also know there was much much more CO2 way, way back when the world was young and there was more life per square foot than anywhere on Earth outside of a rain forest.

[Fishrrman]

Late wrote:
"Free Vulcan nailed it. I am forever engaging in educating AGW proponents and bringing them to the reality that carbon dioxide is classified as an INERT atmospheric trace gas not heh magic pixie dust heh"

The greenies have nearly succeeded in transforming CO2 into the "McGuffin" of the environmental movement.

(that's a term that will be familiar to all Alfred Hitchcock fans...)

[LateForLunch]

Late wrote:
"Free Vulcan nailed it. I am forever engaging in educating AGW proponents and bringing them to the reality that carbon dioxide is classified as an INERT atmospheric trace gas not heh magic pixie dust heh"

The greenies have nearly succeeded in transforming CO2 into the "McGuffin" of the environmental movement.

(that's a term that will be familiar to all Alfred Hitchcock fans...)

MacGuffin - "An object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot."

In this case the goal of leftists is stampeding the Population of the World into trusting and giving more power to the State by producing "threats" and "dangers" from which, (the Statists claim) only an all-powerful, (tyrannical) government can protect them.

Dr. Michael Crichton expanded upon and elucidated how this technique (which derives directly from Trotskyite/Alinskyite Marxist doctrine) is being employed regarding AGW in his brilliant, ridiculously-entertaining, eminently-informative AGW debunking novel, State of Fear.

[Fishrrman]

Late wrote:
"Dr. Michael Crichton expanded upon and elucidated how this technique (which derives directly from Trotskyite/Alinskyite Marxist doctrine) is being employed regarding AGW in his brilliant, ridiculously-entertaining, eminently-informative AGW debunking novel, State of Fear."

Good book, I read it.

Although Dr. Crichton's books have been made into successful films before (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park), I doubt Hollywood will ever touch this one!  ;)

[IsailedawayfromFR]

This has been where I've always called BS on the ridiculous warmer nonsense.

I just want some proof that even if we get warmer temperatures, it will be bad for the earth.

It just might be that Greenland and Siberia, as well as most of Canada, becomes the agricultural breadbasket of the earth while the hellhole of the Middle East becomes unlivable, and the rise of the oceans will down out most of the blue vile we have in this country.

[Free Vulcan]

I just want some proof that even if we get warmer temperatures, it will be bad for the earth.

It just might be that Greenland and Siberia, as well as most of Canada, becomes the agricultural breadbasket of the earth while the hellhole of the Middle East becomes unlivable, and the rise of the oceans will down out most of the blue vile we have in this country.

Oh I agree, warming isn't bad. We proved that in the Viking times. It's just also not caused by more CO2.

[LateForLunch]

Late wrote:
"Dr. Michael Crichton expanded upon and elucidated how this technique (which derives directly from Trotskyite/Alinskyite Marxist doctrine) is being employed regarding AGW in his brilliant, ridiculously-entertaining, eminently-informative AGW debunking novel, State of Fear."

Good book, I read it.

Although Dr. Crichton's books have been made into successful films before (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park), I doubt Hollywood will ever touch this one!  ;)

Correct-O-Mundo!! H-Wood has decided to steal all of Crichton's remaining ideas and themes that they like and ignore or denigrate the rest. For instance much of the plot from the "final" installment of the Terminator series was lifted almost directly from Crichton's magnificent SF novel "Prey" without even a trace of attribution.

H-Wood is doing to Crichton what they did to Ursula K.LeGuine and to some extent Ben Bova and Isaac Azimov - mercilessly ripping off some of their best ideas and behaving as if they thought of them all by themselves. All the while being guided by clever H-Wood lawyers so that they never come afoul of so much as a city ordinance while they do and cannot be successfully sued. 

One of the best things we could do would be to atom-bomb Hollywood and let the motion-picture capital of the world become someplace in the Midwest.

"Hollywood is a shallow money trench...a long plastic hallway where good men die like dogs and pimps and thieves run free." - Hunter Thompson

[Suppressed]

We also know there was much much more CO2 way, way back when the world was young and there was more life per square foot than anywhere on Earth outside of a rain forest.

Yup.  And the temperatures were FAR higher.

Then the removal of that CO2 from the atmosphere, being trapped as coal or other fossil hydrocarbons, caused the temperatures to plummet down to where we are today.

If we want to go back to those conditions, all we have to do is burn the fossil fuels!

[Gefn]

Personally I think we might be entering a baby ice age.

Also, Michael  Crichton was the tallest man I've ever seen in person.

Not that these two facts are related. I did like "The Andromeda Stain"

R.I.P

[LateForLunch]

Yup.  And the temperatures were FAR higher.

Then the removal of that CO2 from the atmosphere, being trapped as coal or other fossil hydrocarbons, caused the temperatures to plummet down to where we are today.

If we want to go back to those conditions, all we have to do is burn the fossil fuels!

Absolute complete and utter nonsense. Global temperatures dropped independently of CO2 levels. Most of the strong evidence is that higher CO2 levels are the result of warming, not the cause. For instance, there was a measurable increase in C02 which occurred after an increase in temperature in an area where coral reefs died off about a century before the dawn of the Industrial Age. This demonstrates clearly that the increased CO2 in the seawater was a natural phenomenon which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with human activity.

The only time in geologic history when CO2 behaved as a significant "greenhouse gas" was in the era prior to the oxygen era (vulcanism era) when the CO2 concentrations were hundreds or thousands of times what they are today, not a few minuscule fractions of a percentage point.

You need to do some more home work  in physicial geographical science instead of rescripting leftist AGW shills with hard science degrees who post abstruse jargon-laden obfuscation with abundant technical terms which stand on their heads. There is no strong evidence that mythical "carbon forcing" is a significant contributory factor in elevating black-body radiation retention levels in geophysical systems or in the atmosphere. None. 

If you think you have some evidence then by all means post it and summarize it in easily-understood terms or don't bother. If you can't summarize it then it means that you don't understand it. Neither I nor anyone else on this thread is interested in plowing through endless reams of tangential, meaningless verbiage.

It is rude to post excessive technical stuff without having the courtesy to state in plain terms its significance so that those who are not up to speed on technical issues can follow the logic and check on the veracity of the claim. I am sick and tired of AGW fanatics posting meaningless, incomprehensible, disjointed numbers, equations, suppositions and claims and then using the fact that they are confusing and meaningless to normal people as "proof" that they are valid.

In most sane circles people who refuse to speak in plain, understandable terms are often shown the door and told that their services are no longer required. It has been my experience that AGW fanatics often refuse to substantiate their claims with understandable information and use this as "evidence" that others are less intelligent and "unable to follow" the argument. That is not it at all, it is that AGW fanatics have no theoretical leg to stand on and so must retreat into obfuscation and obscure technical nonsense in order to try to confuse people and intimidate them into silence or agreement. One of the oldest cons in the book. Such AGW scammers most often stand on elitist suppositions claiming that because they cannot be understood it is not an indication of their own evasiveness or lack of comprehensive understanding, but instead the inferiority of the other.

You have already rudely done something similar on this thread once, Suppressed. I suggest strongly that you do not try to do so again.

[Hondo69]

MacGuffin - "An object or device in a movie or a book that serves merely as a trigger for the plot."

In this case the goal of leftists is stampeding the Population of the World into trusting and giving more power to the State by producing "threats" and "dangers" from which, (the Statists claim) only an all-powerful, (tyrannical) government can protect them.

Dr. Michael Crichton expanded upon and elucidated how this technique (which derives directly from Trotskyite/Alinskyite Marxist doctrine) is being employed regarding AGW in his brilliant, ridiculously-entertaining, eminently-informative AGW debunking novel, State of Fear.

Hithcock preferred the Double MacGuffin which provides a nice little extra twist to the plot.  As it turns out, we have Multi-MacGuffin working here.

Fears ebb and flow over time and plot writers must work to keep things interesting for the viewer at home.  Global Cooling was big in the '70s and that all fizzled into something resembling "we just need to recycle more".  When Al Gore come along, a man who suddenly found himself short on cash and mistresses, he dramatically whipped the world into a frenzy for a few short years.  But he soon cashed out when the market was hot on Global Warming (pardon the pun).

When the "Warming" part of the equation became a little to easy to quantify the plot writers decided Climate Change was a better suited term.  Hell, the climate is always changing so the term was no easier to grasp than a puff a smoke.  It's warmer in the afternoon than in the morning so there's your proof right there.

By the time the three act play begins to work itself out those of us who remember Global Cooling in the '70's will be long gone.  Those left behind will be well conditioned at that point and easily accept the Final Solution.  Terms like Zyklon B and Soylent Green will seem perfectly acceptable ideas to the masses.

But I've got a little MacGuffin of my own called Agenda 21-1/2.

The story begins on a sunny day on the island of Bermuda.  An innocent looking woman approaches a man at an outdoor cafe who taps twice on his cigarette case, the woman responds with a subtle nod.  The unsuspecting tourists could never know the two are about to pull the pin on plot to take down the United Nations.  Suntan oil and lime juice create an odd mixture in the air . . .

[DB]

Yup.  And the temperatures were FAR higher.

Then the removal of that CO2 from the atmosphere, being trapped as coal or other fossil hydrocarbons, caused the temperatures to plummet down to where we are today.

If we want to go back to those conditions, all we have to do is burn the fossil fuels!

Is that what happened... Wow that was fast... Only 13,000 years or so much of North America was under a mile or two of ice... Strangely it has gotten considerably warmer since then - all without man. Never mind that we're currently in an interglacial period within the current ICE AGE. Funny how glaciers recede in interglacial periods and advance in glacial periods but somehow if they do that it isn't "normal" anymore. It has been a whole lot colder and a whole lot warmer for far greater periods of time than our current tiny slice of existence. When we exit this ice age, it will be getting a whole lot hotter.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

IMO Humans are affecting climate. There are 7 billion of us here. It'd be impossible to not affect climate.


I'm sure CO2 has an affect on the climate, what it is, I do not believe climatologists can be as certain as they say.


That being said, I don't really see much difference in the weather since when I was a kid in the 80's. I remember plenty of strange, snowless winters in the 80's.


They have done actuary analysis on weather events in the US: there simply is no increase in damage from storms going forward. Even Warren Buffett pointed this out.


Hurricanes hitting the US simply put are not more powerful, destructive, or numerous. Weather just will not cooperate with the alarmist's worst predictions.


Can anyone really say that ocean levels are rising? Doesn't seem so to me. I was shocked seeing video of my town's oceanfront area in the early eighties, surging over the top. I know this is an extreme circumstance but I don't see more flooding, personally.

[DB]

IMO Humans are affecting climate. There are 7 billion of us here. It'd be impossible to not affect climate.


I'm sure CO2 has an affect on the climate, what it is, I do not believe climatologists can be as certain as they say.


That being said, I don't really see much difference in the weather since when I was a kid in the 80's. I remember plenty of strange, snowless winters in the 80's.


They have done actuary analysis on weather events in the US: there simply is no increase in damage from storms going forward. Even Warren Buffett pointed this out.


Hurricanes hitting the US simply put are not more powerful, destructive, or numerous. Weather just will not cooperate with the alarmist's worst predictions.


Can anyone really say that ocean levels are rising? Doesn't seem so to me. I was shocked seeing video of my town's oceanfront area in the early eighties, surging over the top. I know this is an extreme circumstance but I don't see more flooding, personally.

If ice was really melting at a higher rate the sea levels would be rising at an increasing and substantial rate. Isn't happening. The sea levels have been on the rise for the last 13ish thousand years since we exited the last glacial period. According to satellite data the levels have risen about 3 inches over the last 20 years.

[LateForLunch]

IMO Humans are affecting climate. There are 7 billion of us here. It'd be impossible to not affect climate.

 Human beings occupy only about 5% of the livable surface of the planet(@ an average concentration of about 200 per square mile). That means 95% of the planet's surface is almost-totally devoid of human beings. This is a big, big, BIG planet. Look at the numbers and you will understand that your feelings may be based more on illusion than reality. There are 196.9 million square miles of solid surface. If every human being alive today were given one square meter to stand in alone, we could put the entire population of the planet in a area covering only 2780 square miles (IOW,  an area a little smaller than Brewster County, Texas)

I'm sure CO2 has an affect on the climate, what it is, I do not believe climatologists can be as certain as they say.


That being said, I don't really see much difference in the weather since when I was a kid in the 80's. I remember plenty of strange, snowless winters in the 80's.

Why? With all due respect such technical appraisals are matters of physical geographical science, not necessarily strong feelings or intuitions.

They have done actuary analysis on weather events in the US: there simply is no increase in damage from storms going forward. Even Warren Buffett pointed this out.


Hurricanes hitting the US simply put are not more powerful, destructive, or numerous. Weather just will not cooperate with the alarmist's worst predictions.

All true! Add to that the fact that a recent detailed technical study of the effects of any measurable warming on the planet (regardless of cause) have been beneficial. For instance, increases of CO2 (likely an after-effect of warming, not causative) has increased vegetation in rain forests and around the globe generally. Since most would agree that more foliage is at the very least not a harmful thing, this is a positive thing.

This study determined that even if the climate warms considerably over the next century, the positive effects would outweigh any negative ones.

Can anyone really say that ocean levels are rising? Doesn't seem so to me. I was shocked seeing video of my town's oceanfront area in the early eighties, surging over the top. I know this is an extreme circumstance but I don't see more flooding, personally.

There is no major elevation of the planet's oceans. That does not stop AGW fanatics from claiming that there is. Remember also that the planet is not a perfect globe. Terra is rather more like a huge pear-shape and the distribution of the ocean's water is not uniform. Sea-level in the Atlantic is not always equivalent to sea-levels in the Arctic, nor the Indian Ocean nor the Pacific. Also it may be important to note that there are contributory factors to average sea-levels which have to do with geologic factors (tectonics, tides, axial/rotational variations) and which have nothing to do with melts or aggregation of sea ice.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

Human beings occupy only about 5% of the livable surface of the planet. That means 95% of the planet's surface is devoid of human beings. This is a big, big planet. Look at the numbers and you will understand that your feelings may be based more on illusion than reality. There are 196.9 million square miles of solid surface.  Humans occupy about only about 10 million square miles of that total.

Just the heat output from humans running engines, electricity, etc. has to affect climate. It's thermodynamics.


Changing the CO2 in atmosphere, also has to affect climate in a certain way. Whether it's the "climate thermostat" like the alarmists like to say I do not know, but I don't doubt it affects climate in a small or unknown way.

[LateForLunch]

Just the heat output from humans running engines, electricity, etc. has to affect climate. It's thermodynamics.


Changing the CO2 in atmosphere, also has to affect climate in a certain way. Whether it's the "climate thermostat" like the alarmists like to say I do not know, but I don't doubt it affects climate in a small or unknown way.

Every DAY the sun radiates 30 nonillion watts of energy onto the face of Terra. That's roughly equivalent to the total amount of energy the human race would create at the current rate, in 10 million years.

CO2 is an inert trace gas which is never more than 0.04- 0.07% of the planet's total atmosphere. On average less than 15% of the total atmospheric CO2 is contributed by human activity. Natural CO2 accounts for 80%-95% of all CO2 in most years and sometime much, much more (such as when there is a massive volcanic eruption or a series of massive forest or plains fires started by lightening). The notion that the minute percentage of that inert trace gas that human activity contributes to the atmosphere has a greater effect than all of the other natural elements which contribute to transport, absorption, mediation and retention of atmospheric black-body radiation is to believe that a spit wad can derail a freight train.

Much of the "intuitive sense" that human beings MUST be influencing the climate's average temperature is born of an anthropocentric view of the relative significance of human beings. Make no mistake, human activity in the larger physical sense, is only really significant to human beings. The total amount of energy that the human race contributes to the larger physical geographical systems which mediate heat retention (water vapor is the single greatest "greenhouse gas") is so minuscule as to be almost laughable.

[the_doc]

Just the heat output from humans running engines, electricity, etc. has to affect climate. It's thermodynamics.


Changing the CO2 in atmosphere, also has to affect climate in a certain way. Whether it's the "climate thermostat" like the alarmists like to say I do not know, but I don't doubt it affects climate in a small or unknown way.

You are correct that human activity, apparently including even CO2 generation, would have an effect on climate.  But so would a guy spitting in the ocean--one guy only, one time only. 

No engineer I have ever known personally would be concerned at all about the idea that the effect of increased man-caused CO2 in the atmosphere would surely have a small but non-zero effect on climate.  The key phrase is "small but non-zero."  A good engineer would rework that phrase to be "non-zero but miniscule." 

The matter that you are overlooking is the fact that the anthropogenic effect would be so miniscule as to be irrelevant.  How do we know that?  It is because there are other climatological issues that are massively important;  these dwarf any CO2 effects.  Another way to look at the miniscule character of man-related CO2 effects is to realize that previous CO2 levels were much higher than in our day and without any deleterious effect, climate-wise.

Even if we worry about the "butterfly effect" (an idea that is important in chaos physics), we can ignore the CO2 effect for the reason I presented earlier:  there are geophysical matters that completely gobble up the significance of man-caused CO2.  Besides, chaos physicists ultimately instruct us that we cannot stop their kind of chaos anyway.

***
Anyway, the whole AGW mess is a political hoax mainly designed to hurt the U.S. economy--which is why the U.N. is behind it.  The fact that some credentialed scientists have bought into AGW like stupid cows in a herd based mainly on the phony claims that practically every smart guy embraces the AGW scare--over the strenuous objections of tens of thousands of really thoughtful scientists, I might add--merely underscores how dangerous Global Socialism is for a nation dominated by fools (including even a few moderately-high-IQ fools).

FYI, both the warming and the CO2 increases measured in the 20th century can be accounted for by the sunspot trend seen in the 20th century.  But our utterly filthy media never, never points this out.  They are part of a massive conspiracy to silence us naysayers for the ostensible good of the world.  The suppression of anti-AGW science has been almost unbelievably fierce.  You need to wrap your brain around that.

***

All of this mess makes me worry about the nomination of Tillery for Secretary of State--who overruled Exxon-Mobil's engineers concerning AGW when he became CEO.  I frankly doubt that Tillery is super-smart, but he is super-political, and I am afraid that he is smart enough to be politically perverse. 

Back to the domestic scene, I also suspect that the Socialists would like to make it a crime to spit in the ocean. 

[DB]

Just the heat output from humans running engines, electricity, etc. has to affect climate. It's thermodynamics.


Changing the CO2 in atmosphere, also has to affect climate in a certain way. Whether it's the "climate thermostat" like the alarmists like to say I do not know, but I don't doubt it affects climate in a small or unknown way.

The sun is radiating about 1000 watts of power for every square meter of earth exposed to it. EVERY SQUARE METER. Think about that. What we produce and use is TINY compared to that.

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

The sun is radiating about 1000 watts of power for every square meter of earth exposed to it. EVERY SQUARE METER. Think about that. What we produce and use is TINY compared to that.

The effect is small but measurable. even skeptics agree that stuff like "urban heat islands" are real and measurable and that by definition affects climate.

[Oceander]

The effect is small but measurable. even skeptics agree that stuff like "urban heat islands" are real and measurable and that by definition affects climate.

Yes, but there is a difference between affecting local climate and affecting global climate.