Category Archives: CO2 positive feedback

Is Carbon Your Enemy?


I am on a Pointman kick right now, but I can assure you that keeping up with what Pointman has to say is worth your time and his posting ”Sleeping with the Enemy”  is both informative and funny.  He notes that environmentalist believe “carbon” is their enemy even though they really have little understanding who or what that enemy really is.  Pointman gets things going by saying this:
“So, let’s put that other hat on and learn about their elemental enemy. The thing is, I’ve found the alarmists actually don’t do science but like all good scenario explorations, we’ll lose that little detail as part of simplifying the exercise. Let’s get down and boogie up real close to her sexy satanic majesty, Ms. Kickass Carbon. She has a certain ballsy attitude I kinda like.”
By the way, he pays tribute to the Aussies in his audience by naming one of the elements “Vegemitium”.
 Read this enjoyable posting by clicking here.
cbdakota

Collapsing Consensus–Next Targets Are The Professional Societies


In my previous posting I wondered when the “consensus” scientists would begin to openly call into question the theory that CO2 is the primary forcing agent driving global warming. The longer the “pause” in global warming continues, (the IPCC head, Dr. Pachuri said the pause is now at 17 years), the harder it must be to steadfastly hold to the CO2 theory. Skeptics largely agree that CO2 is a forcing agent but have maintained that natural forces were probably the dominate force. In my opinion, the Sun is most likely the major forcing agent even though the exact mechanism has yet to be proven.

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Dr Evans: “Climate Change in 12 Minutes-The Skeptic’s Case”


Dr David Evans has made a youtube video titled “Climate Change in 12 Minutes-The Skeptic’s Case”.  The focus of this video is the “positive feedback” claimed by the greens which they claim amplifies the effect of CO2.   This positive feedback is used in all the green’s computer models.  These computer outputs are incompatible with the actual data. Air and ocean temperatures as well has the tropical hotspots do not agree with computer output. In fact, a negative feedback appears to exist that reduces, rather than amplify, the effect of CO2.
See Evan’s video by clicking here.
cbdakota

What Does The Leaked IPCC AR5 Reveal?


The second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was leaked to the internet on 13 December. It is generating a lot of discussion.  So far the main talking point seems be that the leaked report says that the Sun is as great a forcing agent as is CO2.  I scanned the “Summary For Policy Makers” (SPM) from the leaked draft.  I don’t see that view being reflected there. One of the 13 lead author of Chapter 7  “Clouds and Aerosols” was interviewed by Australia’s ABC TV network and he said Chapter 7 does not say the Sun is a major factor.  Chapter 8 “Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcings”  also discusses this issue.  While I think that the Sun is a major forcing agent, much more powerful than CO2, I have little doubt that the final report will not say that.  Especially the SPM.  The full report is large and quite technical.  Most people do not read it and you can bet that no politician or journalist anywhere in the world will read the full report. So the SPM, in the past, ignored any scientific conclusion that did not fit the narrative of catastrophic man-made global warm. It will again.

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10 Myths of Man-made Global Warming


Friends of Science list 10 reasons disproving the myths of man-made global warming.  I can not improve on their list so here it is in its entirety:
 
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
 
MYTH 1:  Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT:  The HadCRUT3 surface temperature index shows warming to 1878, cooling to 1911, warming to 1941, cooling to 1964, warming to 1998 and cooling through 2011. The warming rate from 1964 to 1998 was the same as the previous warming from 1911 to 1941. Satellites, weather balloons and ground stations all show cooling since 2001. The mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8 C over the 20th century is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (“heat islands”), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (“land use effects”). Two science teams have shown that correcting the surface temperature record for the effects of urban development would reduce the warming trend over land from 1980 by half.
There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.


MYTH 2:  The “hockey stick” graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
FACT:  Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the “average global temperature” has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare.
The “hockey stick”, a poster boy of both the UN’s IPCC and Canada’s Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

Climate Model Forecasts Proven Wrong


Where would the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW, aka: man-made global warming) be if it weren’t for the climate models that forecast devastatingly high temperatures, sea level change that will make hundreds of millions of people homeless, mass extinctions of all manner of creatures, etc? What if those forecasts consistently were in error?  You would have to conclude, that the warmers don’t have a viable theory and they would quickly fade away.  Well, the forecasts are consistently in error and warmers still have not faded away.  So what is going on?

Because it is Father’s Day, let’s look at James Hansen’s (father of the current man-made global warming cult) forecast presented to the US Congress in 1988:

Chart from: James Hansen et al. Global Climate Changes as Forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three-Dimensional Model journal of Geophysical Research.

The chart forecasts a global temperature increase that will be caused by different levels of CO2 emissions.  Scenarios “A” (blue) which postulated an increase in CO2 emissions by 1.5% per year
 and “B” (green): constant increase in CO2 emissions after 2000
 and “C” (red): no increase in CO2 emissions after 2000The black line is the actual global temperature.

Since 2000, the CO2 emissions have increased about 2.5% per year.  So one would expect the observed temperature to have exceeded the blue line “A”. Yet we see the actual temperature increase matching or perhaps coming in lower than that forecast by the red line “C” that was based upon a forecast of O% per year increase in CO2 after 2000. How many ways can you say FAIL!!!

Hansen’s influential presentation was widely broadcast and had a profound effect on Congress.  If you had been in the Capitol that day, you might have become concerned.   But with time, the Hansen forecast has been demonstrated to be very wrong.   The Chart above came from Wattsupwiththat (WUWT) blog and the comments by readers to the WUWT posting are quite interesting.  The warmers that commented essentially said—well, sure, it was wrong but some things happened; volcanoes, less fluorocarbons in the atmosphere, less methane in the atmosphere and the positive feedback he used is now imagined to be less than it was imagined to be at the time of the Hansen forecast.

Wow, that is a lot of things going wrong considering we are still being told that only CO2 really matters.  Isn’t it amazing that when the forecasts play out for a lot of years (in Hansen’s case, 24 years), only then can you find out if they are really any good.  Forecasting today what the world will look like in 2100 is an interesting exercise but only fools would believe that it was likely to be accurate.

We know that money and control drives the warmers and the politicians to continue this charade.  But the media has bought into this lock, stock and barrel.  What drives them?  I know that bad news (fear of global warming caused catastrophe) sells more papers than good news.  And the falling readership that the mainstream media is experiencing, makes them desperate to continue echoing everything the green alarmists say.  Why are there no latter-day Woodwards and Bernsteins that want to expose the lies after some 20 years of flat global temperatures and failed predictions?   Skeptics are gaining the upper hand with regard to public opinion, but if the media owned up to the facts and began questioning the AGW theory, this round of Lysenkoism could be ended.

cbdakota

  

Dr Evans Explains Why Climate Models Overstate Potential Global Warming


Last September, I posted:  Dr Evans:”Climate Models Are Violently At Odds With Reality”.   This posting is a Dr Evans up-date of the September information.  This time he adds a simple explanation of the central issue regarding CO2 caused global warming—will feedbacks from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 be positive or negative?  The Warmers claim that a 1C increase due to doubling of atmospheric CO2 will really become a 3.3C  increase because of positive feedback.  We skeptics believe that the feedback will be negative and the warming will probably be in the range of 0.6C.

For those of you more inquisitive types, Dr Evans in his footnotes, gives more information and references to help you do some research of your own.

Click here to read Dr Evans full posting

cbdakota

If They Could REALLY Model Global Climate Only One Model Would Be Needed


The chart below is from Dr Roy Spencer’s blog “Global Warming”.  It shows the output from 14 different climate models versus the CERES Global satellite measurement of heat loss into space.  This chart was assembled in response to criticism by Warmers that he had cherry picked the climate models he used to contrast their performance versus his work in a recently published paper in Remote Sensing. Following the post publication criticism, Dr Spencer has done a little tweaking but nothing that changes his conclusions.   See here  and here for discussion of this issue.

But this posting is not to review the bidding on Dr Spencer’s paper.   It is to talk about the Warmer’ Global Climate Models.  Whenever I see this assembly of Warmer Global Climate Models output, I wonder why anyone believes the predictions they make.  If they could REALLY model our global climate they would only need one model.   Instead, all 14 give different results!!!   Does that really instill you with a lot of confidence in their ability to do skillful prediction?    What the 14 models do is allow them to make predictions based upon the most extreme model output.  It also allows them to match just about any condition at any time with at least one of the models.  Think—-A stopped watch tells the right time two times a day.

cbdakota

Dr Evans:”Climate Models Are Violently At Odds With Reality”


Dr. David Evans has posted “Four Fatal Pieces of Evidence” demonstrating that using computer climate models as the basis for man-made global warming (AGW)  theory is,  in Dr. Evans’ view,  “violently at odds with reality”. He maintains there is “no empirical evidence that global warming is mainly man-made.  If there was, we would have heard about it.  Tens of billions of dollars have been spent looking for it.”Dr Evans uses four pieces of evidence to illustrate his position.

First: Evans examines the Climate Model predictions made by James Hansen (the so-called godfather of AGW) during his testimony to the US Congress in 1988.(click on chart to enlarge)

Evans says:”… the actual temperature rises are about a third of what he predicted. Remember, they have been saying the “science is settled” since the early 80’s, and the models now are essentially the same as they were then.

Furthermore, Hansen’s models predicted the temperature rise if human carbon dioxide emissions were cut back drastically starting in 1988, such that by year 2000 the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was not rising at all. But in reality, the temperature did not even rise that much. Which proves that the climate models don’t have a clue about the effect of carbon dioxide on world temperature.”

Second: Evans looks at ocean warming.  This is a better gauge of global warming than is measuring atmospheric temperature fluctuations.  The Argo Buoys were put into service in 2003.  The measurements of ocean temperatures prior to the Argo program are suspect in my view.  Nothing before 2003 remotely resembles the scope of Argo measurements.(click on chart to enlarge)

Evans says: the climate models predict the oceans should be warming. We’ve only been measuring ocean temperature properly since 2003, using the ARGO system. In ARGO, a buoy duck dives down to 2000m, slowly ascends and reads the temperatures on the way, then radios the result back by satellite to HQ. Three thousand ARGO buoys patrol the oceans constantly. They say that the ocean temperature since 2003 has been basically flat. Again, reality is very different to the climate models.

Thirdly: Evans looks at the “hotspot” which was  a climate computer prediction  which is the  Warmers’ proof of the positive feedback.  Feedback that is able to take a weak CO2 forcing signal and double or triple it.   Unfortunately for the advocates of this hypothesis, the hotspot does not exist.(click on chart to enlarge)

Evans says: “the climate models predict a particular pattern of atmospheric warming during periods of global warming. In particular, the most prominent change they predict is a warming in the tropics about 10 km up, the so-called “hotspot”. But we have been measuring atmospheric temperatures by weather balloons since the 1960s, and millions of weather balloons say there was no such hotspot during the last warming from 1975 to 2001. The hotspot is integral to their theory, because it would be evidence of the extra evaporation and thickening of the water vapor blanket that produces two thirds of the warming in the climate models…”

Fourthly:  Evans hits on one of the most discussed topic in recent times—that of outgoing radiation into space.    Note in the chart below that the top row left is the actual measurements of outgoing radiation by the stat elite ERBE program (Earth Radiation Budget Experiment-click here for more information.)   The other boxes are climate model predictions. (Chart source=Lindzen and Choi 2009)

Evans says: “satellites have measured the outgoing radiation from the earth and found that the earth gives off more heat when the surface is warmer, and less heat in months when the earth’s surface is cooler. Who could have guessed? But the climate models say the opposite, that the Earth gives off less heat when the surface is warmer, because they trap heat too aggressively (positive feedback). Again, the climate models are violently at odds with reality.”

Evans sums up saying:” Those are four independent pieces of evidence that the climate models are fundamentally flawed. Anyone one of them, by itself, disproves the theory of man-made global warming. There are also other, more complex, pieces of evidence. Remember, there is no direct evidence that man causes global warming, so if the climate models are wrong then so is the theory.”

Read all of Evan’s posting here.

cbdakota