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.
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.
How “The Trick” was pulled off Posted on November 30th, 2009
For the benefit of new readers, we discussed some aspects of the “trick” at Climate Audit in the past. Obviously, the Climategate Letters clarify many things that were murky in the past. On the left is a blowup of IPCC 2001 Fig 2.21 showing where the Briffa reconstruction (green) ends. More on this below.
Figure 1 below is the original graphic showing the MBH98-99, Jones et al 1998 and Briffa 2000 temperature reconstructions. I think that it’s fair to say that this graphic gives a strong rhetorical impression of the proxy reconstructions all going up throughout the 20th century, lending credibility to the idea that the “proxy” reconstructions would also be responsive to past warm periods – and obviously not giving any “fodder to the skeptics” by revealing the divergence between the Briffa reconstruction and temperatures.
Figure 1. IPCC 2001 Comparison of warm-season (Jones et al., 1998) and annual mean (Mann et al., 1998, 1999) multi-proxy-based and warm season tree-ring-based (Briffa, 2000) millennial Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. The recent instrumental annual mean Northern Hemisphere temperature record to 1999 is shown for comparison.
While the digital version of the Briffa reconstruction has only become available in the past few days, Briffa 2000 (cited in the caption to IPCC Fig 2.21) did show the decline as shown in Briffa 2000 Figure 5 shown below (with its original caption). This series obviously goes down at the end (as does a related series in Briffa et al 1998, referred to by Gavin Schmidt.) What Gavin didn’t discuss is how you get from the version below to the IPCC version.
Figure 2. Briffa 2000 Figure 5 An indication of growing season temperature changes across the whole of the northern boreal forest. The histogram indicates yearly averages of maximum ring density at nearly 400 sites around the globe, with the upper curve highlighting multidecadal temperature changes… The LFD curve indicates low-frequency density changes produced by processing the original data in a manner designed to preserve long-timescale temperature signals (Briffa et al., 1998c). Note the recent disparity in density and measured temperatures discussed in Briffa et al., 1998a, 1999b). Note that the right hand axis scale refers only to the high-frequency density data.
Gavin Schmidt stated that everything was “in plain sight”. Regular CA readers are used to watching the pea under the thimble. There is no mention in the IPCC report of the deletion of Briffa reconstruction data after 1960. Nor is there any mention of the deletion in the IPCC reference (Briffa 2000) nor, for that matter, in the article cited by Gavin Schmidt (Briffa et al 1998). These articles report the divergence, but do not delete it. (Briffa et al 2001 does delete the post-1960 values.)
Not only was the deletion of post-1960 values not reported by IPCC, as Gavin Schmidt implies, it is not all that easy to notice that the Briffa reconstruction ends around 1960. As the figure is drawn, the 1960 endpoint of the Briffa reconstruction is located underneath other series; even an attentive reader easily missed the fact that no values are shown after 1960. The decline is not “hidden in plain view”; it is “hidden” plain and simple.
Read the rest at Watts Up With That by clicking here.
Review – The Skeptics Handbook Posted on November 17th, 2009
A few days ago I talked about how I’d talked with Joanne Nova via email a little and how nice she was. I promised at that time to read and review for you both of her booklets: The Skeptics Handbook and Climate Money. I’m reviewing TSH first and will review CM in another post.
This booklet is free to download in PDF format, is about 16 pages long, and is nicely illustrated and put together. Despite it’s somewhat heavy subject matter, it is easy to read and is written in plain English.
The book’s main point is this single question:
“What science is there that more CO2 forces temperatures up further?”
Most global warming (anthropomorphic global warming or AGW) theory is based upon computer modeling of the atmosphere. These computer models have thus far been proven to be highly inaccurate in their predictions. They failed to predict the general cooling trend we’ve seen globally since 1998, when temperatures peaked the last time.
In fact, all of the phenomenon they claimed would happen has so far failed to materialize. Basically, the greenhouse signature is missing. There is nothing to prove that CO2 or any greenhouse gas that we know of is raising global temperatures or causing harm. In fact, ice core data is directly contradicting the AGW theory.
Further, during the ice age of 105-115 million years ago, CO2 was at nearly 280 parts per million in the atmosphere (roughly equivalent to today) and temperatures were around -6° Centigrade.
And now the IPCC, the world’s “consensus body of scientists,” has been caught using bad data and graphs gleaned from Wikipedia, placing ground thermometers in parking lots, near air conditioners, and in generally urban environments where radiant heat is bound to give higher readings. Further, they routinely discount or ignore satellite data, which is what consistently shows an overall lowering of temperature for the past ten years.
Nova then identifies how CO2 reacts in the atmosphere and shows that a “tipping point” is an illusion and that the assumptions made by the AGW modelers about carbon’s logarithmic absorption curve are wrong.
Finally, she lists a select group of well-known climate scientists of various disciplines that have changed their tune in regards to global warming and become skeptics.
Last, but not least, Nova addresses the real cause of global warming: alarmism, “consensus” taking by the IPCC (in self-interest), and a general attitude of argument by authority. This, in my view, is the biggest damnation of global warming proponents. When you quote non-scientific bodies, organized by government, funded by government, and pooled from the get-go with people who had foregone conclusions before they were appointed, you will not get science. You will get political propaganda in the name of science.
The core point, once again, is that the recent warming of the planet is caused by a so-far unknown factor. There is no evidence to show that it is being caused by any of the greenhouse gases that we know of.
“Anything that heats the planet will melt ice, shift lemurs, and cause droughts. None of these things tell us WHY the planet got warmer.”
In the last chapter of the booklet, Nova shows a graph titled Cutting through the Fog in which she addresses the most common responses given by AGW proponents. This, to me, was the best part of the book. It gives the usual answers or arguments for man-made global warming and/or CO2 and quick, bullet-riddling returns that shoot down the argument (which is usually false to start with).
For instance: when someone says “What would you know? You’re not a climate scientist.” The answer: “Neither is Al Gore. I know what evidence is and I can read a graph. How about you?” If they persist and call you a “denier” or “oil company shill” the response is “Name-calling is all you’ve got? Where’s your evidence? Neither of our opinions will change ice core records and satellite data.”
In the end, I would highly recommend you read Nova’s book. It’s free, short, concise, and entertainingly useful. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, you will find this book useful. If you read this book and cannot find reasons to discount her (based on science), but still believe that global warming is made by CO2, you are a member of a religion and are going forth based on your own faith, not on science.
Oh, and Joanne is also Australian, just like Bob from the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation, whose book The Day the Lights Went Out I reviewed not too long ago. She didn’t mention anything about putting shrimps on the barbie or use the word “crikey” anywhere in her book either. I’m beginning to believe that Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin have lead me astray as to what Australian culture is really like. Come to think of it, I can’t recall a single AC/DC song with those words in them either.
IPCC Crushes Scientific Objectivity Posted on October 23rd, 2009
Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.
The most glaring example of this bias has been the lack of interest on the IPCC’s part in figuring out to what extent climate change is simply the result of natural, internal cycles in the climate system. In Chapter 9 of the latest (4th) IPCC report, entitled “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”, you would think the issue of external versus internal forcing would be thoroughly addressed. But you would be wrong.
The IPCC is totally obsessed with external forcing, that is, energy imbalances imposed upon the climate system that are NOT the result of the natural, internal workings of the system. For instance, a search through Chapter 9 for the phrase “external forcing” yields a total of 91 uses of that term. A search for the phrase “internal forcing” yields…(wait for it)…zero uses. Can we really believe that the IPCC has ruled out natural sources of global warming when such a glaring blind spot exists?
Admittedly, we really do not understand internal sources of climate change. Weather AND climate involves chaotic processes, most of which we may never understand, let alone predict. While chaos in weather is exhibited on time scales of days to weeks, chaotic changes in the ocean circulation could have time scales as long as hundreds of years, and we know that cloud formation – providing the Earth’s natural sun shade – is strongly influenced by the ocean.
Thus, small changes in ocean circulation can lead to small changes in the Earth’s albedo (how much sunlight is reflected back to space), which in turn can lead to global warming or cooling. The IPCC’s view (which is never explicitly stated) that such changes in the climate system do not occur is little more than faith on their part.
The IPCC’s pundits like to claim that the published evidence for humanity causing warming greatly outweighs any published evidence against it. This appeal to majority opinion on their part is pretty selective, though. They had no trouble discarding hundreds of research papers supporting evidence for the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age when they so uncritically embraced the infamous “Hockey Stick” reconstructions of past temperature change.
Despite a wide variety of previous temperature proxies gathered from around the world (see figure below) that so clearly showed that centuries with global warming and cooling are the rule, not the exception, the Hockey Stick was mostly based upon some cherry-picked tree rings combined with the assumption that significant warming is a uniquely modern phenomenon.
As such, they rejected the prevailing “scientific consensus” in favor of a minority view that supported their desired outcome. I suspect that they do not even recognize their own hypocrisy.
As I have discussed before, the IPCC’s neglect of natural variability in the climate system ends up leading to circular reasoning on their part. They ignore the effect of natural cloud variations when trying to diagnose feedback, which then leads to overestimates of climate sensitivity. This, in turn, causes them to conclude that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations alone are sufficient to explain global warming, and so no natural forcings of climate change need be found.
But all they have done is reasoned themselves in a circle. By ignoring natural variability, they can end up claiming that natural variability does not exist. Admittedly, their position is internally consistent. But then, so is all circular reasoning.
Our re-submitted paper to the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled “On the Diagnosis of Radiative Feedback in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing” will hopefully lead to a little more diversity being permitted in the global warming debate.
I don’t think the IPCC scientists are as opposed to this as are their self-appointed spokespersons, like Al Gore and numerous environmental writers in the media who get to over-simplify the climate issue without ever being corrected by the IPCC. Natural climate change continues to be the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and I suspect that some within the IPCC are slowly becoming aware of its existence.
