Climate & Climate Change

I was fascinated by some of the issues raised and explanations given by Arnost, posted here as a comment late last night in response to a comment from Paul Biggs:

“Hi Paul,

Kudos to you for asking great questions and especially questions that risk undermining your position: I may not be a “solarphile” but by the same token I also believe that there is “something” that we as yet don’t understand which has a significant role to play in the case against CO2.

Food for thought…

Fact: CO2 tends to mix quickly into the atmosphere.

Fact: Anthropogenic CO2 emissions have historically increased at a (relatively) steady rate (in line with population growth).

So when we look at the direct measurements of CO2 at Mauna Loa or at the South Pole we should not expect to see any major spikes and troughs. And in fact we don’t.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/mlo145e_thrudc04.pdf

But we should expect step increases if there are additional, non anthropogenic emissions. When there are serious volcanic events such as those listed in the following link – we would expect a step increase in CO2 levels ON TOP of the anthropogenic emissions.

http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/largeeruptions.cfm

We would expect that there be steps corresponding to other natural events like the fires in Indonesia or even the bushfires we had in Victoria early this summer where 100’s of thousands of square km of vegetation was converted into CO2. The list goes on…

We would logically also expect step increases corresponding to Man’s folly such as the burning of the oilfields in the first Gulf War.

Yet, these don’t appear in the record.

So, the inevitable conclusion must be that there HAS to be a signal that overrides this.

Fact: Atmospheric temperatures have increased and the correlated assumption: ocean temperatures have therefore increased proportionally.

Fact: As water heats up, it has less capacity to carry CO2.

Fact: The key CO2 sampling stations are at Mauna Loa (in the middle of the Pacific), and at the South Pole (in a biologically sterile environment that is surrounded by ocean).

Inductive conclusion: The reason that the CO2 measurements don’t exhibit expected “steps” is that what actually is measured is the release of CO2 from the ocean AND that this release of CO2 from the ocean is a stronger signal that masks the other, anthropogenic/natural fluctuations.

Note: Cape Grim is at the northwest point of Tasmania and with the prevailing weather being from the west, really only measures the CO2 from the Southern Ocean atmosphere.

A bit about statistics:

The principal use of statistics is to identify trends and correlations from a “sample” of one or more (incomplete) data sets. It is perfectly acceptable, or even obligatory to exclude outliers from a sample so that any derived trends are not (potentially) distorted.

On this basis, it is perfectly acceptable to discard the data as per Beck as contaminated and unrepresentative.
Unfortunately, science is not statistics.

In fact science is the antithesis of statistics. It is perfectly acceptable in statistics to exclude the observed relativistic perturbations of Mercury’s orbit (using SJT’s favourite example) from an estimation of (not theory of) the force of gravity.

In science this is not the case. It is in the method of science to either show that the observation is flawed or to account for the observation as “data” – and you can never arbitrarily “discard” inconvenient “data”.

So we come to Beck.

I would suggest that nobody disputes the CO2 measurements reported as per Beck’s analysis. What is in dispute is whether these are “representative”.

What Beck does is to bring to light the fact that a “uniform” increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions does not exit. And if you think about this – this is a rational proposition. Given that the Mauna Loa/South Pole observational data shows “uniformity” this means that there HAS to be some other and stronger signal that masks the non-uniform anthropogenic (and natural) increase in CO2 emissions.

Now to Glassman as per the other thread.

In view of the above, his [Glassman’s] argument has merit. In a cooler environment, CO2 saturated surface water is naturally sub-ducted into deeper and even colder layers which can cope with more CO2 (via the oceans “conveyor belt”), and then brought back to a surface environment (where the water is warmer than that originally sub-ducted). Since in a warmer environment, and this surface is already saturated with CO2 (and therefore can’t hold any more CO2), this will result in a degassing i.e. release of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Given the above, it is plausible that as the water warms and as it gets CO2 rich, water from below the ensuing CO2 degassing is potentially in excess of any anthropogenic/natural emission. This therefore masks the anthropogenic/natural emission signal as measured at Mauna Loa/South Pole.

Given the length of time that the oceanic conveyor belt can take to do the circle, this is also a great explanation for carbon dioxide lagging temperature in the ice core data.

There is a big question that needs to be resolved however: Is the ocean already saturated with CO2 throughout the entire water column and in equilibrium?

If it is, then the CO2 in the surface water can not “sink” with it.

As I said, this is food for thought, I am not going to make any further conclusions/guesses at this point.

It’s too late… readers can extrapolate on this and make their own.

Cheers, Arnost

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** There has been minor editing of the orginal text/comment to make it hopefully easier to read.

Meteorologists know a lot about climate, or at least they should. But are they the best group to be promoting policy responses to say ‘climate change’? Once upon a time scientists mostly just provided quality information, and then those with, for example, expertise in economics, looked for best potential policy solutions?

Anyway, I have just received** this information from the American Meteorological Society explaining that they more-or-less have the science of climate change sorted, and now want to mediate a very open and very public discussion on potential policy responses:

“The American Meteorological Society, the nation’s leading professional society for those in the atmospheric and related sciences, recently launched a new weblog (blog) to address the challenging policy issues related to climate change. The goal is to help decision makers at all levels make sound policy based on the
best available information.”

“From a policy standpoint, the important scientific questions about human caused climate change are largely settled. Society faces serious risks and complex choices about how to handle them. We need to confront the most contentious policy issues as openly and straightforwardly as possible. That way we may be able to overcome
the stumbling blocks that keep preventing us from dealing with climate change. AMS wants to help by making sure that it is knowledge and understanding that drive our policy choices.

“ClimatePolicy.org will encourage exchanges among experts, policy-makers, journalists, and the broader society. The blog will build on the knowledge of some of the world’s leading climate experts who come from the United States’ most renowned institutions. The core contributors include Joe Aldy (Resources for the Future), Scott Barrett (Johns Hopkins University), Dan Kammen (University of California, Berkeley), Mike MacCracken (Climate Institute), Mike Mastrandrea (Stanford University), and Michael Oppenheimer (Princeton University). With this broad range of expertise, ClimatePolicy.org will explore and analyze society’s options for reducing climate risks while also increasing economic opportunities and incorporating ethical values. These expert contributors, along with reader input from around the world, will help encourage a full assessment of potential responses to the threats posed by climate change.” [End of quote]

As I see it there are two options: mitigation and/or adaptation.

In order to mitigate, countries like Australia are looking at reducing emissions through the introduction of carbon trading or alternatively a carbon tax. There is always the option to do nothing, what a friend described to me the other day as “the third way”.

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** Information received via David, thanks.

Hi Jen,

I don’t know if you have seen this new paper in the journal ‘Energy and Environment’ by Ernest-Georg Beck, entitled ‘180 Years of Atmospheric C02 Analysis by Chemical Methods’, now available online here with supporting data.

The absract follows:

“More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air since 1812 are summarised. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.

Between 1857 and 1958, the Pettenkofer process was the standard analytical method for determining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and usually achieved an accuracy better than 3%. These determinations were made by several scientists of Nobel Prize level distinction. Following Callendar (1938), modern climatologists have generally ignored the historic determinations of CO2, despite the techniques being standard text book procedures in several different disciplines. Chemical methods were discredited as unreliable choosing only few which fit the assumption of a climate CO2 connection. [end of quote]

Regards,
Paul Biggs

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A note to potential Commentators, I suggest you read the paper before posting a comment below, try and limit comments to 2-3 posts per 24 hour period, and try and stay polite and on-topic. Cheers, Jennifer.

It seems everyone is watching the new BBC ITV channel 4 documentary ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’.

It is being describes as out and out propaganda by many establishment climate scientists. I was sent a link to this blog post which includes a short critique by a well known contributor to the IPCC, William Connolley:

“There has been a vast amount of back and forth about the recent propaganda film ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’. Two things have distressed me: that Channel 4 clearly have no interest in whether they broadcast truth or not; and the number of people prepared to fall for this tripe.

It’s possible to go through and analyse why just about everything they said was wrong or misleading, and I’ll try that in a moment. But if you find that going right over your head, then it may be more convincing to point out that:

1. They have faked some of their graphs,
2. One of the most respected scientists interviewed, Carl Wunsch, has since denounced the programme as “an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community.” [end of quote]

Connelley then goes on to justify the approach Al Gore took in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’:

“Comparisons to Al Gores ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ may be instructive. A defence of TGGWS that I’ve seen is “it may be propaganda, but so was AIT”. While I have some quibbles with AIT, the science is fundamentally correct (though I wasn’t impressed with the images of Manhattan flooding, or the bits about spread of disease). Gore, as far as I can tell, hasn’t faked any of his graphs or mislead any of his interviewees. He ignored the tempertaure /CO2 lag stuff, which is probably fair enough as it does little except confuse people. [end of quote]

So it seems Al Gore got a fair bit wrong: the likely extent of flooding, the spread of malaria not to mention misrepresenting the relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide in the ice-core data.

Connelley’s approach to the two movie’s seems a bit partisan to me.

Read the complete blog post here including accusations of faking graphs: http://elleeseymour.com/2007/03/14/who-swindled-who/

One of my main problems with anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theories, as expounded by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others, is that the increase in carbon dioxide in the ice-core record lags temperature by at least 800 years.

In other words, the long term record over 600,000 or so years, and numerous ice ages and interglacial warm periods, indicates that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have, until now, always increased after temperature.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png

This point is disputed by neither AGW believer nor skeptics.

Given that historically, carbon dioxide does not appear to have been a driver of climate change, why would we expect it to be a driver now?

So, I was interested in the explanation in ‘The acquittal of carbon dioxide’ which is a rather long blog post by Jeffrey A. Glassman, PhD, that even includes an abstract:

“Throughout the past 420 millennia, comprising four interglacial periods, the Vostok record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is imprinted with, and fully characterized by, the physics of the solubility of CO2 in water, along with the lag in the deep ocean circulation. Notwithstanding that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, atmospheric carbon dioxide has neither caused nor amplified global temperature increases.

Increased carbon dioxide has been an effect of global warming, not a cause.

Technically, carbon dioxide is a lagging proxy for ocean temperatures. When global temperature, and along with it, ocean temperature rises, the physics of solubility causes atmospheric CO2 to increase. If increases in carbon dioxide, or any other greenhouse gas, could have in turn raised global temperatures, the positive feedback would have been catastrophic. While the conditions for such a catastrophe were present in the Vostok record from natural causes, the runaway event did not occur. Carbon dioxide does not accumulate in the atmosphere. [end of quote]

And what about this little illustration:

Jeffery Glassman describes it as:

“Several processes are simultaneously underway in the Carbon Dioxide Stream … Superimposed on a latitude–temperature graph is the solubility curve (shown without its ordinate axis). Solubility gets a shaded thickness to suggest the temperature dependent potential to absorb or release CO2 everywhere.

The atmosphere is a cloud to portray the global mixing of atmospheric gases by the winds.

The CO2 exchange should occur to some extent distributed over the surface of the ocean. It should also occur focused by the ocean’s meridional overturning circulation, also known as the thermohaline circulation, and popularly called a conveyor belt. The circulation descends at the poles and rises to touch the surface dominantly in the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Pacific. When the belt rises to the surface, the current is saturated with CO2 because of the rising temperature and falling pressure. It is ripe to release the gas. [end of quote]

Read the complete blog post here: http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html

Earlier this year I spent a week at the beach, more specifically at Bluey’s Beach, on the NSW mid-north coast. My daughter and partner are both keen surfers. So, always in search of that best wave break, we also visited Boomerang, Elizabeth, Seal Rocks and a few other beaches.

I’m used to southeast Queensland with the summer water temperature a very pleasant 26C or so, and expected the same in NSW.

But the first day we went surfing it was a very cold 14C!

So much for the global warming of sea temperatures I thought as I shivered on the beach that day.

The locals explained that it was unusual, but they didn’t seem to have a good explanation. Interestingly, the water wasn’t so cold every day or at every beach.

According to a recent article in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph a “massive, mysterious whirlpool of cold water” formed off Sydney in January and is still active “forcing the sea surface to fall almost 1m and ocean currents to change course”.

So sea levels are falling off Sydney?

According to the CSIRO, oceanographers have identified a huge, dense mass of cold water off Sydney but know very little about what causes it.

“What we do know is that this is a very powerful natural feature which tends to push everything else aside – even the mighty East Australian Current,” says CSIRO’s Dr David Griffin.

Dr Griffin, from the Wealth from Oceans Flagship Research program, said cold-water eddies regularly appear off Sydney.

“Until 20 years ago we would not have known they even existed without accidentally steaming through them on a research vessel,” he said.

“However, now that we can routinely identify them from space via satellite, marine scientists can evaluate their role as a source of life in the marine ecosystem.”

Reaching to a depth of more than 1000m, the 200km diameter ocean eddy has a rotational period of about seven days. Its centre is about 100km directly offshore from Sydney.” [end of quote]

Now I’m waiting for a best AGW explanation for this dramatic, even if localized and ephemeral, drop in sea level and sea temperature.