Climate Change

Same crap, different year, different number. Arthur Robinson and co. strike again. At first, it was the 19,000 signatories for the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), and now they’ve jacked the number up to over 31,000 “scientists” who signed a petition against the AGW consensus. The phone book is cute, but personally I’d prefer one person with real science and data, as opposed to 31,000 people supporting scientific hogwash. The science in their “peer-reviewed” publication is easy enough to invalidate, and carries its share of looking at regional temperature (as opposed to global), throwing up strawman attacks (no one expects global temperatures to follow hydrocarbon emissions), and refuting themselves in the process (like their solar radiative forcing graph, which would be converted into a temperature anomaly that is negligible). But, surely Chris doesn’t know more than all of these 31,000 scientists, right? Well I did a quick survery of these “scientists” and report as follows:

Of 60 samples (including 54 phD’s), there were a grand total of zero publications behind the sampled signatories that were relevant to climate or climate change. None has specific background in meteorology, climatology, oceanography, etc and just two with a geology background (including one who is now deceased).

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So it appears that Florida has now decided to actually teach science in their science classrooms. After a February 19th vote, the United States science curriculum made the improvement from worse to bad, now allowing the young padawans to learn evolution in class. The infamous motto of “Teach the controversy” (like gravity and cell theory) won 4-3, but of course with the scientific caveat that “it’s just a theory.”; my guess is that lecture begins right after discussing “hypothesis,” “theory,” “law” definitions in chapter 1. Now, reading this new Nature article, it looks like the Institute for Creation Research wants to grant online master’s degrees in science education in Texas. But I loved the next line, which reads, “The ICR accepts the Bible as literal truth on all topics. According to its website, the palaeoclimatology class covers “climates before and after the Genesis Flood”". Maybe someone like Paul Reiter can moan about the IPCC not covering creation paleoclimates in the report…too bias I suppose.

Chris Colose even finds a book here. There you go, now we don’t need to hear about “CO2 lagging temperature” anymore. From our interpretation of the “young ice cores” the CO2 levels and temperatures fluctuated significantly over just a few thousand years…we’ve even gone through several ice ages since the global flood. Aside from the obvious climate pitfalls of a young ice sheet hypothesis, the other argument reads like “there were WW2 planes found deep in the ice sheet” so it must be a young ice sheet, but this discounts the fundamental fact that glaciers flow and so ice at the bottom is much more compacted than ice at the top. This means one meter of ice core at the bottom represents a much longer amount of time than one meter of core near the top.

So what about that global flood?

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Much noise has been made over the internets about “sea ice recovery” this year, along with a list of other noisy distractions, like “Global Warming stopped in January 2008″ (after it stopped in 1998).  But does that mean it has recovered? Most definitely not.  The ice covering the Arctic Ocean is much younger and thinner than normal, and 2008 might in fact be a new record low.  The previous record low was 2007 which beat out 2005 (lucky #2) by the size of California and Texas combined. 

The colors are ice age, with green and purple being older ice, 5 and 6 years old. The older ice is rapidly being lost.

Meanwhile, Colorado researchers say there is a 3 in 5 chance that 2008 will have a new record low. Mr. Atmoz also has a post on this.

It is my non-quantified opinion that we’ve hit one of the first “tipping points” as far as global warming is concerned, or at least we will over the next few years– a commitment to seasonal loss of arctic sea ice regardless of what we do to CO2 emissions. We’ll be able to see by autumn if summer ice hit a new low, so stay tuned.

This was an interesting article.

Whether or not the oceans are net sources or sinks of CO2 is very important, since right now, atmospheric CO₂ increases at only about one half the rate of human-induced CO₂ emissions, because quite a bit is taken up by the oceans. The study back in 2007 by Le Quere et al on the decline of the Southern Ocean as a sink still looks like it is holding.

The March 2008 temperature data is available now.  While some sources like Anthony Watts blog made a big deal out of anomalous January 2008 cooling (largely due to La Nina), and a DailyTech article went as far as to say that January 2008 cooling “cancelled out” a century of global warming. March 2008 recovered, but also jumped much higher than expected.

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Aside from the total solar irradiance changes, changes in cosmic rays might be the next skeptic alternative to increases in greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic activities as the cause of modern global warming. It is an idea being investiaged a lot, though some like Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv are very confident that they have overturned the CO2 paradigm and found a link between cosmic rays and low level cloud cover.

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So Chris Colose says a few week ago that University of Albany’s professor and senior researcher Dr. Chris Walcek is to give a talk on global warming entitled “More Inconvenient and Convenient Aspects of Global Warming.” All went well, no one threw anything at Chris Walcek, although one irate chap did stand up in the Q&A and yell about the disservice he gave to the audience. That guy was a little strange, but what about Chris Walcek’s presentation??

I want to give justice to his points, so I can open up discussion to everyone. I also want to just bring up a lot of science so that even people who did not attend can discuss freely. According to Dr. Walcek, the “AGW consensus” vs. “skeptic” summary can be said as follows:

On Warming

Consensus– Yes it is

Skeptics– Yes, but trends very small compared to natural fluctuations

Causation

Consensus– Mostly anthropogenic (human-induced) factors in recent times

Skeptics– Possibly some anthropogenic, more solar variation, very low confidence for attribution

Is it bad ?

Consensus– Is bad

Skeptics– Maybe some bad, maybe some good

Can we slow it down?

Consensus– Can slow

Skeptics– Can’t stop global warming in any significant way

Additional points raised by Chris Walcek include– Sea level variability is not significant, cooling and ice accumulation in Antarctica interior, CO2 lagged (not led) temperature over the glacial-interglacial cycles, solar correlation to temperature is high over the 20th century, globe is warming but not outside the range of natural variation and within our understanding of the climate system, models not yet sufficient.

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How much warmer is the Arctic becoming compared to the globe?? What exactly is the story in Antarctica?? Why does the Northern Hemisphere warm faster than the Southern Hemisphere?? Does global warming imply warming at all sites?? What happens when you add, or remove CO2??

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Hi, this is Chris. This blog is made for the purpose of discussing the issues of climate change; this includes the science, impacts, and mitigation of climate change. Scientists are clear on a few issues- the globe is warming, and we’re responsible. Climate Sensitivty is enough to be worried. It will take effort, and money, to solve the problem but the benefits outweigh the risks.

In the process, we’ll discuss many skeptical arguments against Anthropogenic Global Warming (to see how they stack up), as well as the up-to-date literature on what is going on today. More to come!