Global Warmest defector says, "No smoking hot spot"

[EasyRider]

No smoking hot spot | The Australian

Ok boys, let the fight begin,

[Devil's Advocate]

SWEET!!! !!
The truth shall set you ... on fire!

[dragonfly]

Hmmmm, yet another opinion piece bandied about by the deniers as fact. He's an electrical engineer who wrote some code used in carbon modeling. Huh. I guess if you think he's such an expert you must think I am one too. And I say he's wrong. So there!

[richard schumacher]

What fight? An electrical engineer is not an expert in a field relevant to climate change no matter how many programs he wrote; he's a scientist wannabee whose opinions on global warming carry no weight.

For the facts of global warming discussed by atmospheric physicists and climatologists see
RealClimate

[chogan2]

His point 1: Tropical troposphere warming has been thoroughly discussed on realclimate.org. Read that. Model projections do not (yet!) deviate from the data enough to reject the hypothesis that C02 is the cause of recent global warming. So, the main hypothesis of the article is speculation. The signature of C02-based global warming has NOT been rejected based on any test that I've seen.

His point 2 can be neither proved nor disproved.

His point 3, regarding the satellite data, again, read realclimate.org to get a feel for this. The satellites don't measure temperature, they measure IR emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere, for the entire thickness of the atmosphere, from which temperature is inferred, based on a blending of the atmospheric layers. As late as 10 years ago, the satellite record showed no warming whatsoever. And accordingly was rejected. And since that time there have been fixes and adjustments upon fixes and adjustments to the satellite record, all of which have brought the satellite record into closer conformity with the ground-based observations. Sorry, but I'll stick with actual readings off actual ground-based thermometers, no matter how flawed that may seem.

His point 4 is just plain bullshit. Yeah, if some other factor (read: Milankovitch (sp?) cycle) warms the earth, it will release C02 from the ocean, same as warming up a bottle of Coke will release C02 from the Coke. Which way the equilibrium moves depends on the saturation of the gas in the liquid, the saturation of the gas in the air over the liquid, and the temperature.

But in the present, we know that the process is moving opposite to the way he describes. We've increased the C02 in the atmosphere over the liquid, and (at least for now) we're driving C02 into the ocean, despite the small increase in temperature. First, there's no uncertainty that the additional C02 in the atmosphere is man-made. We have receipts: from the statistics of trade, we know that the total burning of fossil fuels (plus manufacture of cement, plus clearing of rainforest) adds more C02 to the atmosphere each year than the net annual increment in C02 in the atmosphere. In other words, the simple accounting for carbon shows that the current increase is coming from fossil fuel burning, with Nature absorbing part of that, not the other way round, as his text would suggest. Second, independent measurements of dissolved C02 in ocean water suggest that the amount of carbon held on ocean surface waters is increasing (along with average ocean acidity). That's a hard thing to average, as ocean PH varies widely, but that seems to be the consensus and it correlates well with the amount of carbon absorbed annually out of the atmosphere.

Nothing here to make me change my mind about anything. And several things that are just clearly wrong on the face of it.

I'll say it again: if you see people scraping the bottom of the barrel, that usually means the barrel is empty.

In short, this guy doesn't know the basic facts about the atmospheric carbon budget.

[tripp]

So much tripe, so little food for thought.

[Godiva]

I understand tripe cooked properly can be quite delicious. Haggis notwithstanding.

[tripp]

There's a reason that Hadrian built that wall across northern England... the haggis.

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by chogan2

... Sorry, but I'll stick with actual readings off actual ground-based thermometers, no matter how flawed that may seem.

Drinking the KoolAid... see this discussion on GISS temperature data. It's a scandal. And this audit shows why the data is severely flawed.



Class 1 - Flat and horizontal ground surrounded by a clear surface with a slope below 1/3 (<19deg). Grass/low vegetation ground cover <10 centimeters high. Sensors located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces, and parking lots. Far from large bodies of water, except if it is representative of the area, and then located at least 100 meters away. No shading when the sun elevation >3 degrees.

Class 2 - Same as Class 1 with the following differences. Surrounding Vegetation <25 centimeters. No artificial heating sources within 30m. No shading for a sun elevation >5deg.

Class 3 (error 1C) - Same as Class 2, except no artificial heating sources within 10 meters.

Class 4 (error >= 2C) - Artificial heating sources <10 meters.

Class 5 (error >= 5C) - Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface."

[richard schumacher]

Of course, faulty thermometer placement! Therefore the arctic ice cap is not really disappearing, and CO2 is not really a greenhouse gas after all. Thanks for sharing.

For the facts of global warming discussed by atmospheric physicists and climatologists see
RealClimate