The Irony of the Bali Global Warming conference

TimBikes - I'm pleased to see that you've established that the physics of climate change is so mind-bogglingly simple that it's only a simple immediate linear response to CO2 concentration, with no other factors, feedbacks, or time lags involved.

Might I suggest presenting your methodology to the IPCC? Clearly their own physical models are in error. Silly of them to have wasted all that time actually doing full-scale physical simulations, when they only needed 3 lines of arithmetic.

For any such trivial calculation as yours to even start to make sense, you'd have to assume that the planet's climate was currently in equilibrium. And do you really think that's the case, given the huge impulse dump of CO2 we've shot into it recently?

The IPCC estimates that if the CO2 levels stabilised at current levels immediately (ie we stop pretty much all fossil fuel use tomorrow), you'd get another 0.4-0.8C of warming over the next century as the climate settled back into equilibrium for that CO2 level.

Of course, I'm not really explaining this for your benefit, as I suspect you're intelligent enough to know that your calculations are specious. And you're clearly not discussing the subject in good faith, given your decision to totally ignore the point of my last comment.

 

Tim, I'm off to a phone banking volunteer thing for Clover Valley but I'll get back to you on this. I'll also rework my summary term paper on ocean acidification and upload it so you can read it if you like. It may give you a basic overview of what I'm talking about and will definately give you a list of good papers to read. I waded through about 20 of them for the report even though I only used 7 of them.

 

You do the maths that proves me wrong.

Try this Tim, when you are perfectly comfortable in bed, just dead right, put another blanket on the bed.

 

i have to agree that the CO2 concentration is not linear to the temps...

now, i have no real scientific knowledge on this, but the Earth sequesters by its natural processes a certain level of CO2 on its own...

so we have to look at that amount verses the differences in concentrations now and its effects on temps.

presently, we could be just beyond the tipping point and even a moderate 100 ppm rise could significantly raise the average temps...

in prehistoric times other things controlled the temps along with CO2 concentrations like a much higher level of volcanic activity. but the Earth was much greener then, so its "baseline" for CO2 concentration could be higher...

with our paving of the world, we no longer enjoy that resilience.

to be honest with ya, i think we are screwed.

technology to combat the rise of CO2 is here...but "not cost effective"

imm a pretty stupid conclusion since no one truly understands the cost of inaction...

 

Tim, you're cherry picking a chart from a book that makes no such conclusion as to the use of radiative forcing in current climate models. The book, while acknowledging the limitations of radiative forcing and making recommendations for its improvement, concludes:

The current global mean top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) radiative forcing concept with adjusted stratospheric temperatures has been used extensively in the climate research literature over the past few decades and has also become a standard tool for policy analysis endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is a useful index for estimating global average surface temperature change resulting from changes in well-mixed greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, surface albedo, and nonabsorbing aerosols. The relative ease of calculating radiative forcing and the associated temperature response has enabled the use of climate models, simpler versions of those models, and chemical transport models to investigate the many factors that may influence climate. In short, the TOA radiative forcing concept still has considerable value and should be retained as a standard metric in future climate research.

While water vapor is obviously important, using it to downplay the effect of today's CO2 concentrations of is misleading.

See Busy Week for Water Vapor

The authors do not fall into the trap of assuming that water vapor is the root cause of the observed warming. They understand fully well that water vapor acts as a feedback to amplify forcing due to CO2 increase, and make this clear in their paper.

These same authors also published in 2004 along the same lines, predicting they would "knock the stuffing out" of the consensus position on climate change science. It didn't happen then. Those papers were based on a great deal of over-confidence in observational data accuracy (see here or here for how that turned out) and an insufficient appreciation of the statistics of trends over short time periods.


See Tropical tropospheric trends

It turns out that the radiosonde data used in this paper (version 1.2 of the RAOBCORE data) does not have the full set of adjustments. Subsequent to that dataset being put together (Haimberger, 2007), two newer versions have been developed (v1.3 and v1.4) which do a better, but still not perfect, job, and additionally have much larger amplification with height. The authors of Douglass et al were given this last version along with the one they used, yet they only decided to show the first (the one with the smallest tropical trend) without any additional comment even though they knew their results would be less clear.​

Another paper published this year reaches the opposite conclusion of Douglass.

Trend amplification uncertainty in both models and observations decreases as the timescale increases. Depending upon choice of dataset and time period, uncertainty in trend amplification estimates over 21 years lies between ±1.5 and ±0.2.​

 

Actually, the maths in Schwartz's paper don't work either. Schwartz was taking a shot at a different kind of model (a simple one) and stated so himself:

Finally, as the present analysis rests on a simple single-compartment energy balance model, the question must inevitably arise whether the rather obdurate climate system might be amenable to determination of its key properties through empirical analysis based on such a simple model. In response to that question it might have to be said that it remains to be seen. In this context it is hoped that the present study might stimulate further work along these lines with more complex models.​

Running other data through his model has shown it doesn't work.

One of the biggest problems with this method is that it assumes that the climate system has only one "time scale," and that time scale determines its long-term, equilibrium response to changes in climate forcing. But the global heat budget has many components, which respond faster or slower to heat input: the atmosphere, land, upper ocean, deep ocean, and cryosphere all act with their own time scales. The atmosphere responds quickly, the land not quite so fast, the deep ocean and cryosphere very slowly.​

...​

A response to the paper, raising these (and other) issues, has already been submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research, and another response (by a team in Switzerland) is in the works. It's important to note that this is the way science works. An idea is proposed and explored, the results are reported, the methodology is probed and critiqued by others, and their results are reported; in the process, we hope to learn more about how the world really works. ​

That Schwartz's result is heralded as the death-knell of global warming by denialist blogs and Sen. Inhofe, even before it has been officially published (let alone before the scientific community has responded) says more about the denialist movement than about the sensitivity of earth's climate system. But, that's how politics works​