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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 29, 2014 - 09:30pm PT
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I don't think you were aware that the orbital variations on the total energy incident at the top of the atmosphere were much larger than any variation you are talking about in spectral components, cosmic rays, etc...
and not only that, we have to come to not only some agreement on how to average those things out (take an annual average?) but also what the scale of the variations would be (quite small)
on that "sine" curve plot (which is the proper trendline) are some subtle variations... in particular, the amplitude is probably time dependent...
you're problem, rick is to explain some mechanism that is insensitive to all the large variations and only sensitive to the small variations...
the atmosphere is opaque to light below 0.3 micron wavelength, which means the light is absorbed in the upper atmosphere, what fraction of the irradiance is that?
you don't want to be reasonable, even on the very simplest aspects of what is known...
the Sun is considered a 6000 K black body radiator, the total fraction of its irradiance below 0.3 microns is 6%
that would be 86 W/m^2 (average)...
the solar corona, which is at a temperature of about 1 million K has 99% of it's radiated energy below 0.3 microns...
however, the total energy required to heat the corona is something like 1 part in 40000 of the radiated energy of the Sun...
so if all that energy ended up in the light from the sun, you're talking no more than 0.04 W/m^2
the energy radiated by the Sun as a blackbody is something line 2500 times that of emitted by the corona.
There are large fluctuations in the coronal emissions, but they are a small fraction of the total emitted energy at those wavelengths.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2014 - 08:42am PT
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The scale of those variations are orders of magnitude larger than the percentage of CO2 you guys claim over powers all negative feedbacks, heat sink capacities, biota adjustments, etc, to place us in a runaway greenhouse extinction event. Simply ridiculous.
As far as the atmosphere being opaque to the majority of the suns radiation-thanks again for stating the obvious. I mean why would we have layers called names like the thermosphere and 342wm2 reaching the surface when we have 1360wm2 incoming at top of atmosphere?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 30, 2014 - 09:08am PT
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As far as the atmosphere being opaque to the majority of the suns radiation-thanks again for stating the obvious.
well perhaps it is "obvious" but you have to ask, where does the energy go? isn't that a part of the energy balance Sketch is so keen to get a handle on...
what we have established so far in this discussion is that, certainly on a decadal time scale, the Sun's irradiance is extremely well measured (for this past decade) and very constant (although we haven't established that yet, rick doesn't want to get into the details, every time we do he gets upset that his pet dogma seems to suffer).
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2014 - 09:32am PT
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The Solar Grand Maximum we experienced in the latter half of the 20th century was a millennial scale event. The fact that our direct satellite measurement capabilities is only some 35 years and in the midst of this event skews interpretations of solar output. Reconstructions of the last three hundred years show an intensity change at one astronomical unit of 2 plus watts per meter, independent of what makes it to the surface. What changing portions of the total spectrum that reaches the surface is an interesting question, also the effects in the upper atmospheric layers of the portions that don't reach the surface need to be questioned. What is clear is that the effects of 2wm2 over a period of decades is a much more powerful driver of climate change than the measly trace gas CO2 increase. We live in interesting times. If, as the predictions of Livingston and Penn are bearing out, we now go into a millenial scale Grand Solar Minimum, the textbooks will have to be rewritten and the CAGW scroundels keel hauled and fed to the sharks.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2014 - 10:52am PT
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I'll considet the advice Bruce, if I'm writing anything to anyone whose Iideas couldn't be mistaken for dog scat.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 30, 2014 - 11:03am PT
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how again do we get to say that the temperature difference of the sun causes a negligible impact?
I'm not saying that, what I am saying is that the Sun has a very constant energy output... that the distance between the Earth and the Sun represents a large change in the amount of energy that the Earth is receiving.
This sets a scale for other energy variations. If you want to say that sub-percent changes in the solar irradiance causes changes to the energy balance on the Earth, then you have to describe a mechanism that selects the small variations over the larger variations.
This is actually not too hard to do, since we know that climate is an averaging process.
As for the "constant" trend line, please note that a "trend line" is not a linear function of time, it is a "trend" where you select an appropriate representation of that trend. A constant is a totally appropriate trend line, where the trend is independent of time. If you can't understand that you're totally lost.
For the TSI plot above, obviously the trend would be some sort of sinusoidal function (I can provide it if you're interested), to predict the TSI in time we need to know how the Earth-Sun distance varies in time. You could provide a linear "trend" but if you compared that trend with the actual measurement on a particular day you won't get agreement...
the "trend" represents the features of the variable you are interested in projecting, that projecting can be into the future, or into the past. In the example you were confused by, a "constant" projected with better agreement into the past than the linear function that was meant to describe the future, but also should have described the past. A better trend line was given by the climate models, which is a very complicated "trend" line but one with much better predictive power than the simple linear extrapolation.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2014 - 11:17am PT
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How in the hell do you select the correct trend independent of time when you don't even know (based on only 35 years of direct observation during a prolonged period of solar maximum) the true range of output from the variable star we orbit. The astronomical literature notes many stars once thought to have constant output that have since gone variable (or variable to less so) some to a large extent.
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Banks
Trad climber
Santa Monica, CA
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Aug 30, 2014 - 11:41am PT
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As for the cycles, that seems to be a point of debate. One person here says they exist are are not necessarily even and that this needs to be accounted for, the other says that they exist but that the sun warming up would have a negligible effect since the temperature difference between winter and summer is greater than the temperature difference between summer when the sun is hotter and when summer when the sun is colder. One argument just makes no sense in that it does not even address the points of the other argument, and I thought I would point this out. It also just seems irrational, unless I am misreading something there. Hence I asked the question.
Actually there is no debate. One person holds various advanced degrees in physics while the other, well, he builds houses but thinks he knows better.
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TLP
climber
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Aug 30, 2014 - 01:07pm PT
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We have already been through all of this many months ago, and now it is being trotted out again with all the same completely unsupported statements and incorrect numbers. Many pages ago, Rick provided a link to a really thorough and authoritative recent article (Gray et al., 2010), entitled "Solar influence on Climate," which reviewed and cited hundreds of other peer-reviewed references. This source is as close as it is possible to get to The authoritative summary of the current state of the science relating to solar effects on climate. But evidently, hardly anyone else who continues to post up about the subject has actually read it. Or has, but simply rejects its contents without supplying similarly scientific counter arguments.
Among other things, Gray et al. concluded that the influence of solar variation is much smaller than that of "anthropogenic forcings" (greenhouse gas emissions directly and via forest removal). Certainly, there's much more to learn about solar science, as there is also about atmosphere-ocean and within/among-ocean energy flows. But after reviewing all the relevant science exhaustively, this huge team concluded that, basically, it's just not all that big of a contributing factor. Not zero, but relatively minor compared with atmospheric gases.
The subject of continued planetary warming (including the oceans that constitute most of the surface of planet Earth, which some people apparently would prefer not to do) as shown by the increase in heat content of the deeper oceans seems to have be dropped like a stone into a dark well. The amount of energy that has gone there is absolutely staggering: the recent Science paper says 69 zettajoules (new prefix to me!) which is 10^21 joules. To use a ghoulish analogy, this is more than the amount of energy that would be released by 1 million of the most powerful nuclear bomb that the U.S. ever tested.
That amount of energy doesn't just disappear. It reminds me of a project I was peripherally involved in some decades ago, where a reservoir was leaking 70,000 gal/minute of water into the ground (a fault, no doubt) for years. One of the guys said once on a field trip "it's bound to turn up somewhere one of these days," and sure enough, a year or three after that, suddenly a 2,000 acre wetland appeared in the middle of nowhere and kept getting bigger. Similarly, all that heat in the ocean will sooner or later reappear, at least in part, at the surface or be transferred (back?) to the atmosphere. Temporarily setting aside whether this heat absorption by the oceans has anything to do with atmospheric CO2, can anyone seriously deny that we ought to be thinking about what might happen when that much energy returns to the atmosphere in a few years or decades?
Just for fun, I'll lob a construction analogy out there. Undeniably, the science about solar radiation has much to find out still. But the numbers are all there, it is a relatively small variation. When I'm doing carpentry (slowly and badly - only when my expert neighbor isn't available to hire), I don't get a micrometer dial gauge out to check the length of the boards. If it's 14 1/2", it's going to fit between the average pair of nearby studs. Whether the late wood fiber tracheids stick out a few thousandths further than the early wood from the rough cut surface doesn't really matter. Given the state of the science, that's about what we're talking about here with solar variation and climate. In terms of unidirectional changes over multidecadal time spans (contrasted with oscillatory ones like some ocean phenomena, where the cycles of change are numbered in years rather than a century or more), I'll go out on a limb and say, yes, I think the current status of our knowledge is that effect of solar variation is relatively negligible compared with that of human-caused atmospheric and ecological changes. I'll futher speculate, with zero solid reason to do so other than the time scales quoted above, that we'll experience the effects of the return of that considerable ocean heat to the surface sooner than we'll see very much effect of the slightly decreasing amount of solar energy arriving. Have at it, bros!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 30, 2014 - 08:12pm PT
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If, as the predictions of Livingston and Penn are bearing out, we now go into a millenial scale Grand Solar Minimum, the textbooks will have to be rewritten and the CAGW scroundels keel hauled and fed to the sharks.
If...
if not, what then rick?
the science doesn't agree with you on this.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2014 - 08:43pm PT
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Jammer-TLP is referring to a wide ranging study (Gray et al) I dug up and posted a long time ago. I posted this not because I was interested in the conclusions, but rather because it was the most complete compilation of Solar/climate change mechanism's I had seen. Since the publication of that study there has been extensive new research and publications of additional mechanisms by which the sun could influence climate on Earth.
Over the period of the last twelve thousand years, the present interglacial, there have been several periods of global average temperatures as high or higher than the present temps. The longest lasting and warmest was known as the Holocene Climate Optimum (from 9000 years before present to 5000 b.p.) which exceeded the present warmth substantially. This period saw the rise of modern civilizations and life flourished around the planet. The majority of this period coincided with the neutral phase of the orbital and axial cycles (Milankovitch Cycles) and preceded industrialization, therefore solar/climate variance mechanisms were likely of primary causation.
While its true that i am just a general contractor, i have taken the time to educate myself on the basics of this debate. I used to take for granted that the largely government funded scientists knew what they were talking about since the arctic (Alaska) where i lived did noticably warm through eighties and into the late nineties. At the beginning of the 00's a funny thing happened, it began to noticably cool again, all the while the hype coming from the anthro climate community said the warming continued unabated and phony studies were trotted out claiming climate doom for Polar Bears ( whose population is unquestionably increasing) and native coastal communities stupidly relocated to permanent settlements on seasonal summer time fishing camps on barrier islands and eroding beach front by federal government bureaucracies. The state was under seige by enviromental organizations, and the government bureaucracies they largely now control, to the point that almost all rational development was opposed. These conditions prompted me to inform myself on this issue. What i have found is what the majority of people labeled deniers have found-this issue is any thing but settled science and the genesis and preferred course of this movement to a "sustainable future" is rotten to the core. Don't take my word for it, study up for yourself.
There are several highly intelligent individuals, holding high degrees, posting here that are of the opinion that CAGW is a done deal-settled science, but i believe are tainted by the bias of their ideologies and the doctrine of those they are in the employ of.
Here is a link to a primer mentioning scientific studies finding more solar contribution to climate change than the IPCC gives credit to Sol for.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/m/summaries/csccsi.php
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 30, 2014 - 08:48pm PT
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...but i believe are tainted by the bias of their ideologies and the doctrine of those they are in employ of.
because they disagree with your beliefs...
as for settled science, there is much science to be done, but there has also been a lot of science successfully done...
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2014 - 09:02pm PT
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Yes Ed! Thankyou for your significant contributions to science that make this relatively wondrous age the pleasure it is to live in. Seriously, i mean this. But, no thankyou for what i believe is a one sided viewpoint on the state of climate science, or lack thereof.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 30, 2014 - 09:14pm PT
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above rick suggests cosmic rays as a possible explanation for increased albedo associated with solar activity due to the modulation of the galactic cosmic rays by the magnetosphere of the sun.
an experiment at CERN called CLOUD set about to measure the rate of cloud nucleation using a realistic target mocking up the atmosphere and a beam of particles from the CERN PS (proton synchrotron, Frank Sacherer's beloved accelerator) to simulate the activity of the cosmic rays.
At first CERN didn't know what to do with the experiment, it wasn't about High Energy Physics, which is where their mission is... but eventually they approved the experiment and scheduled it...
back in 2011 there was a lot of expectation of what the CLOUD experiment would find... some of it coming from the spokesperson's personal opinions
http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2011/07/cern-to-confirm-cloud-cosmic-ray-link.html
rick mentions it a little more than a year ago
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=970221&msg=2132421#msg2132421
but in the mean time the experiment is run, the abstract from a recent Nature article:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7471/abs/nature12663.html
Nature 502, 359–363 (17 October 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12663
Molecular understanding of sulphuric acid–amine particle nucleation in the atmosphere
João Almeida, et al.
Nucleation of aerosol particles from trace atmospheric vapours is thought to provide up to half of global cloud condensation nuclei1. Aerosols can cause a net cooling of climate by scattering sunlight and by leading to smaller but more numerous cloud droplets, which makes clouds brighter and extends their lifetimes2. Atmospheric aerosols derived from human activities are thought to have compensated for a large fraction of the warming caused by greenhouse gases2. However, despite its importance for climate, atmospheric nucleation is poorly understood. Recently, it has been shown that sulphuric acid and ammonia cannot explain particle formation rates observed in the lower atmosphere3. It is thought that amines may enhance nucleation4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, but until now there has been no direct evidence for amine ternary nucleation under atmospheric conditions. Here we use the CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) chamber at CERN and find that dimethylamine above three parts per trillion by volume can enhance particle formation rates more than 1,000-fold compared with ammonia, sufficient to account for the particle formation rates observed in the atmosphere. Molecular analysis of the clusters reveals that the faster nucleation is explained by a base-stabilization mechanism involving acid–amine pairs, which strongly decrease evaporation. The ion-induced contribution is generally small, reflecting the high stability of sulphuric acid–dimethylamine clusters and indicating that galactic cosmic rays exert only a small influence on their formation, except at low overall formation rates. Our experimental measurements are well reproduced by a dynamical model based on quantum chemical calculations of binding energies of molecular clusters, without any fitted parameters. These results show that, in regions of the atmosphere near amine sources, both amines and sulphur dioxide should be considered when assessing the impact of anthropogenic activities on particle formation.
I supplied the underline emphasis. While the initial opinion of Kirby (the spokesperson) was that the climate was dominated by galactic cosmic ray induced cloud formation, it turns out the the experiment didn't show that.
In fact, what the experiment showed was that the aerosols released by human activity have a large influence on the nucleation of droplets.
So good science wins out in the end... we understand more about cloud formation from this set of experiments, and rule out a hypothesis, cosmic rays are not a factor in cloud formation...
but somehow, rick hasn't reported this recently... it seemed to have gotten by him....
one sided?
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 31, 2014 - 07:22am PT
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wow you guys, it isn't that hard to figure out...
maybe if you asked Chiloe nicely he'd show you how to do it...
But the Central Limit Theorem was invented by Al Gore!
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 31, 2014 - 10:50am PT
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A few pages back we had a bit of discussion, and Ed posted a fine summary, from Chen & Tung's new Science paper "Varying planetary heat sink led to global-warming slowdown and acceleration." This interesting paper was embraced by blog denialists (and their fan base), but its reception by scientists who actually read the paper was mixed, sometimes skeptical. For example And Then There's Physics has a characteristically thoughtful post, followed by good discussion.
Skepticism by (physicist) ATTP and others hinges on concern that Chen & Tung's findings are more statistically than physically based, and in claiming a longterm cycle they are trusting problematic indicators (e.g., the Central England Temperature series) and overlooking other relevant data (e.g., aerosol forcing). The press release for this paper (widely quoted in the blogosphere) seems to overstate what is actually shown in their paper. There is nevertheless an intriguing new contribution here IMO, which comes from CT14 disaggregating their analysis of ocean heat content from global to ocean-basin scales. CT14 start from world ocean heat content data like these, but look closer.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 31, 2014 - 11:20am PT
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I posted the article because it made me think about the transient response of the climate to an impulse of heating brought on by the CO2 emissions...
while we don't usually think of a 100 year process as an "impulse" the climate response is generally measured on time periods not much shorter than 30 years averaging... maybe that could change as we understand these "transient" behaviors better.
Of course, such statements can be misrepresented and rick is sure to do it... but the idea that the energy is sloshing around the system as the Earth comes to equilibrium makes sense when you view it as a dynamical system. We already see the effect in the mean global temperature as it rises in response. The little bumps and wiggles on that rise, like the recently ballyhooed "hiatus" give us insight into how the energy moves around in the system.
But lacking the slightest understanding of physics leads to some weird interpretations as to what is going on...
jammer wrote:
I too speculate about all the heat going into the oceans. I would imagine it is heating up the earth (or at the very least letting the ocean dissipate less thermal heat, or changing the rate of dissipation) at least to some extent at the surface, so who knows what will happen. Supervolcanos? Slow dissipation considering we quit adding heat? Will the continents just begin to move faster? It seems like anyone's guess.
as if it were all a mystery, "anyone's guess." But it isn't anyone's guess. First off, it is elementary that when you heat something it doesn't just store up the energy represented by that heat. At some point, it starts to radiate that heat away. In equilibrium, it radiates as much heat as it receives. The idea is to calculate the equilibrium between the energy received and the energy radiated, which provides a temperature of equilibrium.
It's a simple application of the conservation of energy, but while simple, it is not very well understood to the public. We see the same misconception, that the energy is absorbed but not reemitted in this thread... and then we have the bizarre contributions of rick who goes to the length of rejecting everything we know about thermodynamics to avoid having to satisfy the equilibrium conditions, including the rejection of the physics of the 20th century. He's not alone in this...
The dynamical system is certainly more complicated, and how the energy moves around from atmosphere to ocean and back again on open area of research. One way of studying these system response is to provide an impulse, or a step function input and see how the system responds. We are doing this, inadvertently (though as we understand more, it becomes a choice we are making) with the climate. A huge experiment to understand the dynamics of climate.
The paper by Chen and Tung provides another way of looking at the system, in particular the exchange of energy from the Atlantic to the Pacific by considering the oceans in a more regional manner (instead of one giant body of water). From a science point of view, it reflects the increasing level of detail necessary to explain the observations. Importantly, this is because our observations are becoming accurate enough to indicate departures from the expected behavior. These departures are not large, but the increasing accuracy of both observation and model expectation begin to reveal more of the system behavior and lead to speculations like Chen and Tung made.
This is an aspect of doing science that rick categorically states is not happening... but it is. The problem for rick is that the larger body of research that has been done is consistent with the observations, and that body of research requires anthropogenic CO2 emissions as an important part of the explanation of climate change in the 20th century.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 31, 2014 - 11:23am PT
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What CT14 see is that the large recent gains in ocean heat content (OHC), during the surface-temperature "hiatus," occur in deep waters of the Southern Ocean and Atlantic. CT14 attribute this to downwelling associated with a persistent salinity anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic -- which is interesting to me because I wrote a few papers years ago about the fisheries effects of NA salinity anomalies, now I need to get up to date. But other commenters suggest the deep Atlantic/Southern Ocean changes also are consistent with Pacific downwelling and circulation as described by England et al. (2014), and with circulation results from the well-known trade winds changes (e.g., Rob Painting's comment in the ATTP post cited above).
Anyway, being a skeptic myself ... thought I'd try to disaggregate the OHC content to find out whether I could see what CT14 were looking at. Here's a first pass, separating OHC 0-700m (Keeping It Simple) geographcally.
Yep, something like it is there. The steepest OHC climbs in recent years, 0-700m depths, occur in the S Atlantic and S Indian Oceans. Or worldwide, in the past few years acceleration has been a southern hemisphere phenomenon.
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TLP
climber
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Aug 31, 2014 - 11:52am PT
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There are all kinds of hypotheses and mechanisms by which solar variations could influence climate, but the point is that they always turn out to be either incorrect hypotheses (which is still a core activity of science: think up ideas, whether plodding ones or wacky, and go test them with experiments or accumulated observational data) or minor influences.
Rick oversimplifies somewhat about the so-named Holocene Climatic Optimum. Though it's very well established that higher-latitude Northern Hemisphere temperatures were a lot warmer than at present, tropical temperatures were the same or only slightly higher. At the inception of the HCO, axial obliquity was at a maximum, which results in a very significant warming of higher latitudes. Well known feedback effects (albedo) can then maintain high latitude warm conditions for a long time thereafter, in exactly the way (albeit with opposite sign) that an ice age persists for a long time after it is triggered. Contrary to Rick's suggestion, the most likely cause of the HCO was orbital variations, not solar output ones; exactly as for the Ice Ages. And it's at the present time that the orbital variations are relatively neutral, yet there's a substantial spike in atmospheric temperature and ocean heat content in the last decades. As of yet, the only plausible mechanism for that has to do with people and CO2 emissions. When solid new information that accounts for that amount of energy shows up, I'm ready to adopt a modified hypothesis. But it hasn't yet.
We can't do the same kind of science about conditions thousands or millions of years ago as we can today, because the direct data just wasn't collected then. But to refuse to consider directly observed present-day facts and analysis because there isn't a full and final explanation of something thousands of years ago is not sensible or scientific at all, it's just a straw man type of argument.
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