[jawagord]

Plant I'm sure you recognize the temperature constructions are made up numbers, the earth doesn't have an average temperature that can be measured, it's all competing calculations to give some meaning to the chaos that is climate and give rival egghead scientists something to aurgue about. Unfortunately the politicians in the IPCC use these numbers scare the sheeple and promote their agenda of impending doom. Climate is like politics, it's all local, someone gets hit by a hurricane, someone else is getting a snowstorm, the nebulous average is meaningless and the trends are full of inconsistencies and revisions, just like the climate models they are compared against.

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/clim ... ature.html

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/ver ... 1-cdecade/

[rockdoc123]

Its a bogus reassessment. Prof. Grub wants to pretend that the earth has only warmed by ca. 0.9°C when the data shows the earth has actually already warmed by 1.3°C.

The paper in question is:

Millar, R et al, 2017. Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 C. Nature Geoscience. DOI: 10.1038/NGEO3031

Here is what was said in the introduction:

Human-induced warming reached an estimated 0.93◦C (±0.13 ◦ C; 5–95 percentile range) above mid-nineteenth-century conditions in 2015 and is currently increasing at almost 0.2 ◦ C per decade2. Combined with the effects of El Niño and other sources of natural variability, total warming exceeded 1◦C for the first time in 2015 and again in 20163. Average temperatures for the 2010s are currently 0.87◦C above 1861–80, which would rise to 0.93◦C should they remain at 2015 levels for the remainder of the decade.

And here is a plot of GISS (along with linear regression) that verifies the numbers regarding warming he references. Note that HadCrut 4 agrees well with GISS.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/XEr5bk]

[Plantagenet]

egghead scientists...

Thats enough of that. I don't go around insulting your profession, whatever it is.

Climate is like politics, it's all local, someone gets hit by a hurricane, someone else is getting a snowstorm, the nebulous average is meaningless and the trends are full of inconsistencies and revisions, just like the climate models they are compared against.

Actually, the average global temperature is not meaningless, and the trends are not full of inconsistencies. Yes, there is a lot of local and annual variation, but the overall climatic trend is statistically robust and indicates the planet is warming, with the rate of warming increasing through time.

The last three years have been the warmest in the historic record. The chances of that happening in a random time series are negligible. Last year, 2016, is the warmest year ever recorded.

scientists-react-to-earths-warmest-year-we-are-heading-into-a-new-unknown

So far, 2017 is the 2nd warmest year ever recorded, lagging only very slightly behind 2016. If 2017 finishes like this, we will have had the four warmest years on record in the last four years, i.e. more evidence we are not seeing random annual climate variation but instead a pronounced trend towards warming.

Why not face facts---the planet is getting warmer.

Cheers!

[jawagord]

Climate is like politics, it's all local, someone gets hit by a hurricane, someone else is getting a snowstorm, the nebulous average is meaningless and the trends are full of inconsistencies and revisions, just like the climate models they are compared against.

Actually, the average global temperature is not meaningless, and the trends are not full of inconsistencies. Yes, there is a lot of local and annual variation, but the overall climatic trend is statistically robust and indicates the planet is warming, with the rate of warming increasing through time.

scientists-react-to-earths-warmest-year-we-are-heading-into-a-new-unknown

Why not face facts---the planet is getting warmer.

Cheers!

It's still meaningless Plant. In Calgary we can usually count on getting a few days each year of +30C and a few days of -30C, (records at +35, -45) typically a 60C temperature change in 1 year, how does a 1C "average" increase over a 100 years have any meaning compared to actual temperatures? It doesn't tell us if it is going to be hot or cold, wet or dry, it tell us nothing about weather or climate, doesn't tell you when to plant your crops or when to harvest, totally useless to people living on earth, an artificially calculated artifact of interest to a few scientists, nothing else. Snow in the forecast for this Friday, that's useful information to know, that the planet got 1 degree warmer over 100 years is not.

[Plantagenet]

how does a 1C "average" increase over a 100 years have any meaning .... that the planet got 1 degree warmer over 100 years is not.

A 1.3°C T increase over 100 years actually does have meaning.

It tells us the planet is getting progressively warmer just as the "anthropogenic greenhouse warming" mode predicted.

Now that we know that Greenhouse warming is occurring just as predicted, the predictions of additional warming, several meters of sea level rise, extensive droughts, killer heat waves, etc. etc. over the next 100 years become very interesting indeed.

CHEERS!

[jedrider]

how does a 1C "average" increase over a 100 years have any meaning .... that the planet got 1 degree warmer over 100 years is not.

Good question. 0.5C doesn't seem like a lot at all. Well, 1C is a bit more. 2C, well, that could be the difference between being comfortable and not so comfortable. We just can't see it for all the variation we experience. Now, on top of that, the poles are already experiencing 5C warming (I don't have all the facts in my head). Now, that's a huge amount of warming and easily means the difference between snow and rain. So, you see, these little, seemingly insignificant differences are actually very significant.

Add humidity to the equation and ice being converted into water, and the problem is magnified a LOT. Now the statistics of uncomfortable, extremely warm events happens much more often. Well, humanity, you have a problem here.

No question, computing a number is a difficult task. That's why we have scientists do it and not financial analysts. So quit getting your climate science from the Wall Street Journal

[dohboi]

nice points, as usual, jed

add to that that you're talking about changing the temperature of the entire biosphere of a planet--the entire atmosphere, all the oceans, the ice sheets, land masses....---

And yeah, that's quite a big f'n deal

[dissident]

Global mean temperature changes do not imply all of the local changes are the same magnitude. A 0.5 C change is an enormous amount of extra energy in the system and a substantial amount of extra water burden. Since the system is subject to nonlinear circulation effects, the impact on weather can be large. This includes heat waves and cold waves and extreme wind and rain events. There is no barrier acting to stop these impacts for a global mean temperature change of 0.5 C. Humanity's congenital idiocy will ensure we see well over 4 C global mean temperature changes before 2100. The associated impact essentially varies exponentially with the temperature. (This is related to the Clausius-Clapeyron relation and the exponentially increasing water burden. Water is an effective heat reservoir and interacts nonlinearly with the circulation.)

[jedrider]

http://www.realclimate.org seems to have lost it's edge over the last year, but not entirely:

Does it all matter?

We still live in a world on a path to 3 or 4 °C global warming, waiting to finally turn the tide of rising emissions. At this point, debating whether we have 0.2 °C more or less to go until we reach 1.5 °C is an academic discussion at best, a distraction at worst. The big issue is that we need to see falling emissions globally very very soon if we even want to stay well below 2 °C. That was agreed as the weaker goal in Paris in a consensus by 195 nations. It is high time that everyone backs this up with actions, not just words.

So that is a sober assessment and not the wild arm-waving of a doomer, I suppose.

[onlooker]

Too bad that Paris accord, weak as it is, is not even enforceable and pretty much voluntary. An emergency that is not seen as such apparently by many countries or at least their leaders.

[vtsnowedin]

A question for the modelers. Rising CO2 levels have kept energy from radiating away from the planet? (As the theory goes , not saying for or against it). So the ocean surface temperatures are higher then they would be without humans releasing so much CO2 into the atmosphere? So when hurricanes form they have warmer water under them which feeds them and creates storms that have more energy (higher winds, more water in the clouds as rain etc.). Is this extra energy used up by the friction of the winds on fixed objects like mountains and buildings and therefore removed from the planetary budget that needs to be removed from the planet.
So in other words, How many cat. five hurricanes dose it take to balance out seven billion humans CO2 emissions?

[Plantagenet]

A question for the modelers. Rising CO2 levels have kept energy from radiating away from the planet? (As the theory goes , not saying for or against it). So the ocean surface temperatures are higher then they would be without humans releasing so much CO2 into the atmosphere? So when hurricanes form they have warmer water under them which feeds them and creates storms that have more energy (higher winds, more water in the clouds as rain etc.). Is this extra energy used up by the friction of the winds on fixed objects like mountains and buildings and therefore removed from the planetary budget that needs to be removed from the planet.

Thats a very good question.

I asked a friend who is a Ph.d. what her opinion is, and she didn't think any heat energy was "used up" by a hurricane. The hurricane is simply redistributing the energy from the warm ocean to the atmosphere and the land. Yes there is friction when hurricane force winds come up against trees or buildings....but that friction creates heat which in turns warms the objects involved...i.e. the heat energy in the hurricane does't "disappear".


Applying a force which moves one object past another creates friction which creates heat energy.

in other words, How many cat. five hurricanes dose it take to balance out seven billion humans CO2 emissions?

The hurricanes will never balance out the emissions, because the emissions themselves are not creating the heat for global warming. They are simply trapping more of the solar energy that reaches the earth, i.e. the sun is the source of the heat.

AND the amount of extra solar energy being trapped is ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS---its currently estimated to be the equivalent of about 2.5 BILLION hiroshima bombs....with another 4 hiroshima bombs of extra heat energy being trapped every second. We could have category 5 hurricanes every day and that extra solar heat energy would still keep accumulating in the atmosphere and ocean, gradually heating the planet more and more.



Cheers!

[jawagord]

Here is a link to temperature changes associated with a 2 °C target.
Graph A shows change in hottest daytime temperatures, graph B shows change in coldest night time temperatures, graph C is change in mean temperature. Note greatest change is in Northern Canada/Russia land based night time temperatures, whereas ocean temperatures show the least change at less than 2c.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 42_F2.html

In the scary doomer narrative the added ocean energy is equivalent to many many nuclear bombs but what's not said is it's spread out over a vast area and volume of water. On a percentage basis it is quite small, if we assume a mid ocean temperature of 28C changing to 30C the added energy is equivalent to the change in temperature in absolute units:

(30+273)/(28+273)=1.0066 which is an increase of 0.66% in energy, no wonder the AGM effect is difficult to detect.

[dohboi]

"AGM effect"

wtf is that?

And of course your scale is meaningless in human terms. Humans can't live on a planet too many degrees K colder than what it has been over the holocene. So most of those 273 degrees you are using are irrelevant. We exist in a rather narrow 'Goldilocks' range, and it is only that range of temps that are relevant in any discussion of what is or isn't scary for us.

But of course people who intend to distract others or erroneously down play real dangers for whatever reasons they may have will always grasp at whatever irrelevant scale or whatever cherry picked data best serves that purpose. Have lots of fun with that.

[jawagord]

"AGM effect"

wtf is that?

And of course your scale is meaningless in human terms. Humans can't live on a planet too many degrees K colder than what it has been over the holocene. So most of those 273 degrees you are using are irrelevant. We exist in a rather narrow 'Goldilocks' range, and it is only that range of temps that are relevant in any discussion of what is or isn't scary for us.

But of course people who intend to distract others or erroneously down play real dangers for whatever reasons they may have will always grasp at whatever irrelevant scale or whatever cherry picked data best serves that purpose. Have lots of fun with that.

AGW Dohboi, AGW. If you are going to employ sarcasm in your comments you should at least have a basic understanding of what you are commenting on. Your response displays a sub High School level comprehension! Perhaps you are better suited to politics than science?

[dohboi]

Soooo, you can't even manage to spell AGW right, but you are disparaging my level of education.

Okey dokey...

[dohboi]

from something Dr. Masters wrote in September 2016:

” … I don’t recognize the climate anymore. I mean I look at the weather maps in the morning sometimes afraid of what I’m going to see. It’s just gotten so insane. The climate of the 20the century is gone. The climate I knew is not here anymore. We’re in an entirely new climate regime, and it is extremely intense.”

– Dr. Jeff Masters

[dohboi]

Why the 97% climate consensus is important

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -important

...A 2011 study found that support for climate policy was linked to perceptions about scientific agreement on climate change. This finding has since been independently replicated by other research, as well as randomized experiments conducted in Australia and the United States. Still other research confirmed these results using John Oliver’s viral TV segment illustrating the issue of “false balance” to the public...

[jawagord]

Getting your science facts from John Oliver and Bill Nye is not helping Dohboi. Try going to the source.

The main problem they seem to have with it is described right there in the abstract of the 2013 Environmental Research Letters paper from which it is derived. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... omplicated
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.10 ... 8/2/024024

[dohboi]

?

The Guardian was my immediate source. Oliver and Nye just found a clever way to present the "97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming" fact that you nicely point out.