Monthly Archives: March 2009

Lindzen on Climate Feedback

Update- Some changes over the last few hours
Update2- Anthony Watts has contacted Lindzen for clarification
Update 3 on bottom

Science is an evolving process. Data, models, and methods all evolve in time, correcting errors along the way, and building more questions or robust conclusions in the process. It is necessary for people with expertise in a particular area to keep up with the data and any changes that may be made to it, as well as the underlying problems that may exist within the data. In some unfortunate cases, people lose objectivity and will use only a particular dataset (or version of that dataset) that re-inforced some point they are trying to make. In presenting information, not telling people outside of their field what the possible caveats are in a dataset, or explaining revisions that were made to data they show is not generally taken well in academic setting. So it is with a recent example. Continue reading

Advertisement

A new hypothesis for deglacial CO2 rise?

It is well recognized that warming from a cold glacial period to a warmer interglacial is accompanied by increases in Carbon Dioxide concentrations, which at least amplified Milankovitch-induced forcing over millennial timescales. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations were around 100 ppmv lower than pre-industrial values during deep glacial climates. A key question in paleoclimate studies that is still not sufficiently addressed is how changes in solar insulation could have forced the feedbacks in atmospheric chemistry observed in proxy records.

Continue reading

What if relative humidity was not constant?

I don’t like to comment about the information stemming from “Watts up with That” because no one in their right mind gets information from such a source, and by doing so I’m only allowing nonsense to set the tone in the climate debate, but Anthony Watts has a recent post about the water vapor feedback which I felt compelled to elaborate on.

Continue reading

Abrupt Cooling at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary

The Earth has gone through significant climate change over the last 100 million years going from the mid-Cretaceous “greenhouse” to the late Cenozoic icehouse. Roughly 33.7 million years ago, at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary (EOB), the world would begin to develop permanent ice sheets, particularly the East Antarctic. This accompanied the so-called Oi-superglacial driven by a reduction in atmosphere CO2 concentrations.

Continue reading