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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 29, 2013 - 11:44am PT
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Putting air and surface temperatures in perspective, John Nielsen-Gammon (the Texas state climatologist and a lively, analytical blogger) reports on a keynote talk at last month's Davos Atmosphere and Cryosphere Assembly.
The Tuesday evening talk was by Greenland expert Valerie Masson-Delmotte. She started out by giving some numbers on where the excess heat (caused by the Tyndall-gas-induced radiative imbalance) was going: 1% into the atmosphere, 3% for melting ice, 3% into the land surface, and 93% into the ocean.
http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2013/07/greenland-update/
How much do we know about ocean warming, and the uncertainties in its calculation? A new paper in Reviews of Geophysics, by John Abraham and 27 others, addresses these questions in detail (emphasis added in the quotation below).
A review of global ocean temperature observations: Implications for ocean heat content estimates and climate change
The evolution of ocean temperature measurement systems is presented with a focus on the development and accuracy of two critical devices in use today (expendable bathythermographs and CTDs – conductivity-temperature-depth instruments used on Argo floats). A detailed discussion of the accuracy of these devices and a projection of the future of ocean temperature measurements are provided. The accuracy of ocean temperature measurements is discussed in detail in the context of ocean heat content, Earth's energy imbalance, and thermosteric sea level rise. Up-to-date estimates are provided for these three important quantities. The total energy imbalance at the top-of-atmosphere is best assessed by taking an inventory of changes in energy storage. The main storage is in the ocean; the latest values of which are presented. Furthermore, despite differences in measurement methods and analysis techniques, multiple studies show that there has been a multi-decadal increase in the heat content of both the upper and deep ocean regions, which reflect the impact of anthropogenic warming. With respect to sea-level rise, mutually reinforcing information from tide gauges and radar altimetry show that presently, sea-level is rising at approximately 3 mm yr-1 with contributions from both thermal expansion and mass accumulation from ice melt. The latest data for thermal expansion sea-level rise are included here and analyzed.
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Despite these potential future improvements to ocean monitoring, past and present measurements show that the Earth is experiencing a net gain in heat, largely from anthropogenic factors [Hansen et al., 2005; Levitus et al., 2001]; although, the magnitude differs among individual studies. For ocean heat content, there have been multi-decadal increases in energy content over the entire water column. Two recent detection and attribution analyses [Gleckler et al., 2012; Pierce et al., 2012] have significantly increase confidence since the last IPCC AR4 report that the warming (thermal expansion) observed during the late 20th century, in the upper 700 m of the ocean, is largely due to anthropogenic factors. For sea-level rise, despite spatial and temporal non-uniformity, the global trend is approximately 3 mm yr-1 over the past 20 years, with a large contribution from thermal expansion.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rog.20022/abstract
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Mad69Dog
Mountain climber
Superior, CO
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Aug 29, 2013 - 11:56am PT
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"Your comment about research grants raises a red flag. You are implying that perpetuating a myth is advantageous to researchers for financial reasons. Is that true? You think this is a significant factor in the formation and perpetuation of the present consensus?"
Environmentalists always have and always will feed off of media hype to keep their grant money coming in. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Go out on missions with these top scientists and the media hype vanishes and they talk about the real issues involved to get to the point where the community truly knows cause and effect.
"As you can see you have a lot of persuading to do."
No. I have no expectations of persuading anyone of anything. That's not how this works. We're way past the point of coming to conclusions. The guilty verdict was announced long ago, yet what is being done? Very little. I'm just saying the the hype the layperson hears is very different than what active environmental scientists hear when out on research missions.
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Mad69Dog
Mountain climber
Superior, CO
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:06pm PT
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"Are you saying that acid rain wasn't a problem?"
I'm saying that it is an example of media hype followed by political posturing, policy decisions, declarations of success, etc. And yet, in 2006, atmospheric SO2 measurement doubled the previous high point.
But wait... Wiki said this was a success story? With documentation of rising SO2 - which along with NO2 are the chief acid rain culprits, why are we no longer hearing about increased acid-rain induced damage? Simple - the hype didn't understand the actual chemistry involved, so it projected a future that has not been borne out by actual experimental results.
"but it better make sense or your case is lost"
I'm confident the science will move forward and that, like acid-rain hype, the new science will bring unexpected twists and turns. And what about the elephant in the room? The media hype says that greenhouse gases are the culprit and FFC is the cause. But even with a stacked agenda, what is being done and what will be done? I do not expect much.
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:13pm PT
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Was the 2006 SO2 doubling a global value or was it for the NE US, where we know acid rain was a problem?
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Mad69Dog
Mountain climber
Superior, CO
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:21pm PT
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"Was the 2006 so2 doubling a global value or was it for the NE US, where we know acid rain was a problem for the US?"
If memory serves, the previous high point had been matched near Riverside (CA), Hong Kong, Beijing and Berlin. The numbers for the NE US were down a bit from that previous high point. The 2x record high was measured in '06 near Mexico City.
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:27pm PT
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There you go. Doubling near Mexico city is not evidence about our NE acid rain problem.
So it was a misleading statement.
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Mad69Dog
Mountain climber
Superior, CO
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:48pm PT
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"There you go. Doubling near Mexico city is not evidence about our NE acid rain problem. So it was a misleading statement."
Some people simply do not get science, especially the political influence part of the picture...
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:50pm PT
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And yet, in 2006, atmospheric SO2 measurement doubled the previous high point.
Er, um, for near Mexico City, not globally.
If you want to be perceived as a scientist, you are going to need to be more precise.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 12:51pm PT
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13,000+ posts settling the science.
Not one workable solution among them.
Time for you scientists to quit wringing your hands, and tell the rest of us how you intend to reverse the problem.
Maybe you need to partner-up with the Political Science department.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:03pm PT
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Dr F,
I said workable solutions.
One of the first things I learned, the first day of my very first job, is don't ever go to the boss with a problem unless you have a solution in mind. Nobody wants to hear someone complain about things that can't be fixed. You'll get a reputation as a whiner.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:04pm PT
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Some people simply do not get science.
Dude, you're the one who led off here with nonsense about Al Gore, "correlative proof," and claims about "the vast majority of the world's leading scientists."
Perhaps that was just a bad start. What do you get from the Abraham et al. (2013) paper I quoted earlier, addressing the ocean temperature, measurement and attribution issues you mention?
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:07pm PT
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Chaz, maybe the boss is smarter than you?
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:09pm PT
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Hey Chef,go to the General Accounting Office's website,[those pesky liberal accountants]show me how much we ,the U.S.A.,spend on global warming research,adaptation,and prevention.
Show us.
Till then ,you are just some guy spraying.
As for its going to cost us billions,yeah,death panels,weapons of mass destruction.Your teams spray is just so accurate.
Afraid you are going to lose your pension?
Get a Job.
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Chaz
Trad climber
greater Boss Angeles area
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:15pm PT
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I'm thinking all our resources will be better utilized in just dealing with the changing climate, seeing how the great minds can't tell us what they would do to roll it back.
Monolith writes:
"Chaz, maybe the boss is smarter than you?"
All the bosses I had any respect for were.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:27pm PT
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I'm thinking all our resources will be better utilized in just dealing with the changing climate, seeing how the great minds can't tell us what they would do to roll it back.
I don't know if anyone thinks we can roll back the changes already in motion, but maybe hope to reduce how far and fast they go in the future. We've already bought quite a bit of change in the pipeline.
One discovery in the paleoclimate record has been some large climate swings in the past, out of proportion to any known changes in solar or orbital factors. So they have to be explained by feedbacks where relatively small initial changes, such as solar/orbital variations or transient volcanics, kick off greenhouse-gas changes that amplify the consequences. And along the way, change how the wind blows, the ocean currents flow, and where the rain or snow falls -- which is how you get those abrupt transitions in some ice core records, that show regional heating/cooling much faster than the planet itself could warm or cool.
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Mad69Dog
Mountain climber
Superior, CO
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Aug 29, 2013 - 01:53pm PT
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"Dude, you're the one who led off here with nonsense about Al Gore, "correlative proof," and claims about "the vast majority of the world's leading scientists."
Yes, I realize that was confusing, but it was a troll because I'm so sick of hearing the mainstream press spew what science has "proven" about global warming. And I do agree that Al Gore is a big windbag of nonsense.
"Perhaps that was just a bad start. What do you get from the Abraham et al. (2013) paper I quoted earlier, addressing the ocean temperature, measurement and attribution issues you mention?"
I didn't get anything startlingly new from the Abraham paper. The red flag popped up in my mind WRT ocean temperature about 1980 and the trend continues. We've been seeing the effect of T on sea water vaporization and the increased intensity of tropical storms. I envision a time when FEMA and others convince Congress to not allow the coastline to be rebuilt with disaster relief funds.
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Chief: "Sorry, but the higher over educated Scientism minds DO NOT UNDERSTAND this very fundamental thought process."
In the first place, science has failed too often. The funding process is part of the problem - researchers get plenty of clues about which hypotheses are likely to get funded. WRT the whole GW debate, I believe the political process has fueled the current failure. Deepwater Horizon was just the latest clue of how deeply our leadership is committed to big oil. I see their involvement in GW as simply a mechanism to bring in more votes.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Aug 29, 2013 - 02:08pm PT
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I didn't get anything startlingly new from the Abraham paper. The red flag popped up in my mind WRT ocean temperature about 1980 and the trend continues.
Did you get that Abraham et al are writing not about sea surface temperature but ocean heat content, specifically its measurement, uncertainty and attribution? In the short term, SST and OHC can move in opposite directions.
Also just published:
Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling
Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie
Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970–2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12534.html
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Mad69Dog
Mountain climber
Superior, CO
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Aug 29, 2013 - 02:16pm PT
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"Did you get that Abraham et al are writing not about sea surface temperature but ocean heat content, specifically its measurement, uncertainty and attribution? In the short term, SST and OHC can move in opposite directions."
Sure, but I heard a similar position voiced by Simonson years ago. I see this as incremental improvement to the knowledge base, which does nothing to depreciate its value. The magnitude of the heat sink is staggering.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Aug 30, 2013 - 12:29am PT
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Yesterday i mentioned posting papers about reconstructions of the pronounced swings of climate change, like the little ice age and medieval warm period compared to the late 20th centuries little climate swing. Well lo and behold here is a review paper from co2 science doing exactly that for China.
http://www.co2science.org/subject/c/summaries/chinatemptrends.php
Looks like you doomists have been taking a bit of a beating lately from somebody actually in the research field of atmospheric science. Can't say i feel sorry for you guys.
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