The Logarithmic Effect of Carbon Dioxide Posted on March 10th, 2010
by David Archivald, Watts Up With That?
The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions.
But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration:
And this graphic of his shows carbon dioxide’s contribution to the whole greenhouse effect:
I recast Willis’ first graph as a bar chart to make the concept easier to understand to the layman:
Lo and behold, the first 20 ppm accounts for over half of the heating effect to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm, by which time carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. One thing to bear in mind is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 got down to 180 ppm during the glacial periods of the ice age the Earth is currently in (the Holocene is an interglacial in the ice age that started three million years ago).
Plant growth shuts down at 150 ppm, so the Earth was within 30 ppm of disaster. Terrestrial life came close to being wiped out by a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. If plants were doing climate science instead of us humans, they would have a different opinion about what is a dangerous carbon dioxide level.
Some of the IPCC climate models predict that temperature will rise up to 6° C as a consequence of the doubling of the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. So let’s add that to the graph above and see what it looks like:
The IPCC models water vapour-driven positive feedback as starting from the pre-industrial level. Somehow the carbon dioxide below the pre-industrial level does not cause this water vapour-driven positive feedback. If their water vapour feedback is a linear relationship with carbon dioxide, then we should have seen over 2° C of warming by now.
Climategate: This Time It’s NASA Posted on March 6th, 2010
by Iain Murray and Roger Abbott, American Spectator
The “Climategate” scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics’ hands, subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its recommendations.
Now a new “Climategate” scandal is emerging, this time based on documents released by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The newly released emails further demonstrate the politicized nature of climate science, revealing a number of questionable practices that cast doubt on the credibility of scientific data provided by NASA.
The emails reveal that GISS, like CRU, has done a poor job of preserving and managing its data. Although there is no evidence that GISS has destroyed its data, as CRU did in the late 1980s, Dr. Reto Ruedy of GISS admits in an email that “[The United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date.” In another email, he reveals that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis. “[NASA's] assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data… may not have been correct,” he says. “Indeed, in 490 of the 1057 stations the USHCN data were up to 1C colder than the corresponding GHCN data, in 77 stations the data were the same, and in the remaining 490 stations the USHCN data were warmer than the GHCN data.”
Hat Tip: MilitantLibertarian
Climate alarmists feeling more heat Posted on February 22nd, 2010
by Lorne Gunter, Edmonton Journal
The empire has begun to strike back.
It was only a matter of time before the climate alarmists got their feet back under them. There is too much at stake politically, too many careers and reputations on the line, too much grant money for researchers and donations for 
environmental groups, too much green-tax revenue for governments, too much prestige in academic circles at risk for those who have asserted for more than a decade that man is causing damaging climate change to slink away in defeat.
So it is of little surprise that in the past couple of weeks many alarmists have begun asserting that despite all the revelations of the past three months about how key climate scientists and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have corrupted the scientific process in an obsessive drive to prove that climate change is real, nothing has undermined the “fact” that the Earth is warming dangerously.
Since late November, the True Believers have watched in stunned silence as the foundation of the climate-change theory has suffered one body blow after another.
First it was the revelation that scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in England — perhaps the most influential of the three sources the United Nations relies on for most of its climate data — were fudging their data to show more warming in recent decades than had actually occurred.
At the same time, these scientists were doing their best to upend the peer-review process at major scientific journals so scientists who disagreed with them would be unable to get published. And they were withholding their raw data and computer codes from other scientists and government investigators so no one else could validate or debunk their research by attempting to replicate it.
The alarmists have recently begun to rally around Phil Jones, the discredited head of the CRU. Nearly two week ago, Jones gave an interview to the BBC in which he admitted there had been no “statistically significant” global warming in the past 15 years.
Some news sources and global-warming skeptics overplayed Jones’s exact words. Last Sunday’s Daily Mail in Britain, for instance, claimed Jones had performed a “U-turn” in his claims for warming.
Jones, in fact, continues to insist the Earth is warming. But what he now admits is that it is not warming that rapidly (just 0.12 C per decade) and not “at the 95-per-cent significance level,” the level needed to assert statistical certainty.
He also now allows that there may have been other periods in the past 1,000 years that were as warm as or warmer than today.
While this is not a complete about-face, it is hardly business-as-usual, as the alarmist would have us believe. Even if Jones is still insisting that global warming is happening, there is now a measure of doubt in his claims that never existed before. What makes Jones’s words significant is not that they reveal some 180-degree change in his thinking, but that for the first time he admits significant uncertainty in the so-called settled science of climate change.
If leading climate scientists had spent the past 15 years saying the warming they were seeing wasn’t all that significant or that there remained many uncertainties about predictions of future climate or that some pre-industrial periods had been warmer, would there have been a Kyoto accord or a Copenhagen Earth summit? Would Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth have made $100 million? Would environmentalists have been asked to write government policy? Would there be any support at all for green taxes and carbon capture and other measures aimed at curbing carbon dioxide emissions?
Likely not.
Even though alarmists are correct that Jones has not recanted his earlier belief in the warming theory, he has undergone a significant change.
Or take the assertion, recently very common among alarmists, that NASA’s climate scientists are still finding global warming occurring, so it must still be happening.
Frankly, NASA’s climate scientists have hardly more credibility than the CRUs or IPCCs.
NASA is another of the three repositories of climate data relied upon by the UN, but three years ago a significant error was found in its records. In the 1990s, NASA had begun keeping temperature records differently, but it had failed to adjust all its pre-1990s records (about 120 years’ worth) to match the new method. When it reconciled its old records to its new method, recent warm years ceased to be as remarkable. For instance, 1934 replaced 1998 as the warmest year. And 1921 became the third-warmest.
In 2008, NASA substituted September’s global temperatures for October’s (they claimed accidentally), thereby distorting upward the worldwide averages for the fall of that year — an otherwise rather cool year.
And most recently, NASA has been shown to be cherry-picking the Earth stations it uses to calculate global average. It has been eliminating stations in colder locations (polar, rural, mountainous) and over-relying on warmer ones (mid-latitudes, urban).
Alarmists may want to believe this changes nothing, but that simply makes them the new deniers.
Hat Tip: ClimateChangeFraud
Amplification of Global Warming by Carbon-Cycle Feedback Significantly Less Than Thought, Study Suggests Posted on January 29th, 2010
A new estimate of the feedback between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration has been derived from a comprehensive comparison of temperature and CO2 records spanning the past millennium.
The result, which is based on more than 200,000 individual comparisons, implies that the amplification of current global warming by carbon-cycle feedback will be significantly less than recent work has suggested.
Climate warming causes many changes in the global carbon cycle, with the net effect generally considered to be an increase in atmospheric CO2 with increasing temperature — in other words, a positive feedback between temperature and CO2. Uncertainty in the magnitude of this feedback has led to a wide range in projections of current global warming: about 40% of the uncertainty in these projections comes from this source.
Recent attempts to quantify the feedback by examining the co-variation of pre-industrial climate and CO2 records yielded estimates of about 40 parts per million by volume (p.p.m.v.) CO2 per degree Celsius, which would imply significant amplification of current warming trends.
In this week’s Nature, David Frank and colleagues extend this empirical approach by comparing nine global-scale temperature reconstructions with CO2 data from three Antarctic ice cores over the period ad 1050-1800. The authors derive a likely range for the feedback strength of 1.7-21.4 p.p.m.v. CO2 per degree Celsius, with a median value of 7.7.
The researchers conclude that the recent estimates of 40 p.p.m.v. CO2 per degree Celsius can be excluded with 95% confidence, suggesting significantly less amplification of current warming.
The Four ‘Gates’ of the IPCC Posted on January 27th, 2010
First there was Climate Gate, showing that the peer review process has descended into a criminal farce of scientific malpractice where adjusting and hiding data was de-rigueur. Hello Fraud. ClimateGate also spread to the US, where 75% of worldwide data is systematically ignored or “adjusted” until it tells the right story.
Then there was PachauriGate, showing that the man in charge of the IPCC was chairman of boards of companies that profit handsomely as the scare-factor is ramped up.
Along comes GlacierGate: about the IPCC “accidentally” using a WWF report instead of peer reviewed science papers. After calling a 60 page Indian Govt report on glaciers “voodoo science” they were forced to apologize for that “one paragraph that was wrong”. Then Donna LeFramboise in just one day of hunting, found 16 other references in the IPCC 4th report to the “scientific journal” called “WWF”. Proving that really, the big safety-mechanism of the IPCC reputation was not in its exhaustive reviews but was in the way it made its documents so big, so dull and so unreadable, that hardly anyone actually … reads them. Call it the thousand-page-cloak-of-invisibility.
Camouflage for poor science, poor standards, bad logic, and too many vested interests to name.
Now there is AmazonGate. The IPCC fabricates disastrous claims about the Amazon forest, and references a document written by activists that doesn’t even support the claim.
Will 40% of the Amazonian forests react drastically to even a slight change in rainfall? Is there a tipping point for the Amazon? The reference turns out to be an Australian forest specialist, who works for not just the WWF, but also for the World Conservation Union, and who according to his CV mostly works in Australia and Asia, and not the Amazon. His co-author is a journalist who’s worked on Greenpeace campaigns and for the WWF. Then, to top it off, the assertions that the IPCC attributes to them can’t even be found in the report that they wrote.
All Gates lead to humiliation and embarrassment for the followers of the great cult of the carbonistas.
And we haven’t yet got even close to the scandal of the faulty assumptions that led to the faulty models and alarmist predictions in the first place, or the even bigger scandal of how the observational evidence that proves the assumptions false is and was ignored by the IPCC.
