Christopher Monckton forgets about the sun then greets the men in white coats

One of the most-used denier myths about the cause of global warming has been "it's the sun".  It's still number two on the SkepticalScience.com list. You'll be surprised to find that at WUWT, Christopher Monckton is now ignoring the sun's role in keeping Earth warm.

First there's CO2

Yesterday's article (archived here) is a bit of pseudo-science, in which Christopher fudges some numbers that he claims came from an older IPCC report (from 2007) and proclaims that:

Broadly speaking, the IPCC expects this century’s warming to be equivalent to that from a doubling of CO2 concentration. In that event, 1 Cº is indeed all the warming we should expect from a CO2 doubling. And is that going to be a problem

I don't know if he's talking about an additional one degree rise this century or if he's arguing there will only be another 0.2 degree rise this century.  If the former, many scientists would disagree.  If we continue with business as usual we'll probably be in for at least two degrees of warming by 2100, so that would mean another 1.2 degrees this century.  That's being optimistic. It could be four degrees.

The thing is, with only 0.9 degree rise in the temperature in Australia we're seeing events never before recorded, like the unreal summer of 2009 in south eastern Australia, our Angry Summer of 2012-13, our hottest year ever plus this past year, catastrophic fires and floods all over the nation at once - so much so it dropped the global sea level.  Another one degree and our summers will be monstrous. A four degree rise would be beyond monstrous.

What about the sun?

In the comments Christopher wrote about the Neoproterozoic era:

Mr Tyler asks whether there were earlier periods when CO2 concentrations were higher than today and the weather was colder. The best example of many is the Neorproterozoic (sic) era, 750 million years ago, when I was young. At that time there was at least 30% CO2 in the atmosphere, compared with 0.04% today, and yet glaciers came and went, at the equator, twice. It is fascinating watching true-believing paleoclimatologists trying to explain that one away. They usually do it by saying that the CO2 concentration must have been much more variable than it was. But we know it was at least 30%, for otherwise the dolomitic limestones could not have precipitated out of the oceans.

Thing is that there were a lot of things different about the the Neoproterozoic world.  Days were shorter, the moon was closer, land masses were organised differently and, most particularly for climate, the sun was fainter.  We're talking about a period spanning from around 1,000,000,000 years ago to 540,000,000 years ago.  Before there was much life on Earth at all.  Some organisms appeared over that time - mostly in the water of course.  There were no plants on land so silicate weathering, an important part of the long term carbon cycle, would have been less efficient than now.

I'm no expert in paleoclimatology but I found a review paper called "Climate of the Neoproterozoic" written by some experts, Raymond Pierrehumbert and colleagues.  Here is an excerpt by way of a short introduction to the era:

The Neoproterozoic is a time of transition between the ancient microbial world and the Phanerozoic, marked by a resumption of extreme carbon isotope fluctuations and glaciation after a billion-year absence. The carbon cycle disruptions are probably accompanied by changes in the stock of oxidants and connect to glaciations via changes in the atmospheric greenhouse gas content. Two of the glaciations reach low latitudes and may have been Snowball events with near-global ice cover....

...Until near the end of the Neoproterozoic, however,much of the Neoproterozoic show played out on the microbial stage and was recorded only dimly in the fossil record. The Neoproterozoic is like a dark tunnel. The ancient microbial world enters the far end, endures the biogeochemical and climatic turbulence of the Neoproterozoic, and comes out into the light of the metazoan-rich Phanerozoic world on the other side. 

The paper is fairly easy to read at the beginning. (It gets technical further in.)  In regard to carbon dioxide and climate, this is some of what was written:

The Neoproterozoic glaciations provide the main indication of climate variability, but apart from that and the broad inferences that can be drawn from survival of various forms of marine life, there are no proxies to tell us how hot it may have been between glaciations.

Christopher Monckton seems a lot more sure of himself than are scientists, when he talks about the Neoproterozoic.  He's convinced that "there was at least 30% CO2 in the atmosphere, compared with 0.04% today, and yet glaciers came and went, at the equator, twice" - implying that CO2 levels didn't change in 460 million years or so.  Given how CO2 has increased by 40% in the blink of an eye since industrialisation, that seems a strange position for him to take.  Not so strange when you know something of the potty peer I suppose.

The paper states that the "absorbed solar radiation averaged over Earth’s surface would have been approximately 14Wm^-2 less than it is at present".  Therefore, to keep the temperature the same as today, there would have had to be around 12 times as much CO2 as there was prior to industrialisation. That is, around 3,360 ppmv - with perhaps some CH4 substitution.  However in the non-glacial periods of the Neoproterozoic, it was probably warmer than the Ordovician, with higher levels of CO2 than 3,360 ppmv.

What about the glacial periods? It's likely or at least possible that there were two periods in the Neoproterozoic era during which Earth probably or possibly had snowball earth events. That is, most of the oceans froze over. What would have caused that to happen would be a large reduction in CO2.  And to come out of the snowball earth would have taken probably an even greater rise in CO2 or other greenhouse gases.

The paper I referred to discusses how δ13C had enormous fluctuations during the Neoproterozoic and puts forward potential mechanisms for this. If, like me, you're not all that familiar with these topics, then you might find you need to concentrate. I won't attempt to distil the information here at HotWhopper.  I've learnt a lot more than I knew before reading the paper but my knowledge of the subject is way less than the authors (and probably less than many HW readers). One little fact I can impart - the enormous shifts in global temperatures during the 460 million years or so of the Neoproterozoic era had much to do with greenhouse gases.

The point is that Christopher Monckton doesn't have much of a clue when it comes to climate science. Whether it's science of the present day climate or that of a thousand million years ago.  And given how deniers love to claim "it's the sun", it's ironic that Christopher ignores the sun when he talks about climates of the deep past, arguing as if the world back then was in the same situation as it is today.  It was different in so many ways.

From the WUWT comments

A swag of comments - here are some for you to enjoy - or whatever.

Martin A says:

March 26, 2014 at 7:31 am
I’d like to thank the quaintly named Monckton of Brenchley for his kind reply (3:05 am) to my comment and my question.

The quaintly named Monckton of Brenchley goes some small way to redeeming himself (extract):

March 26, 2014 at 8:01 am
...Mr Kelly says that because CO2 concentration change lags temperature change by an average of 800 years the overall temperature feedback gain factor must be zero. Mr Haynie makes a similar point. However, theirs is a common misconception. Though it is clear on paleoclimate timescales that it is temperature that changed first and CO2 concentration change that followed, the CO2 concentration change was – and is – capable of reinforcing and amplifying the temperature change.

KevinK isn't buying the idea and says:

March 26, 2014 at 6:04 pm
Go on, pull my other leg while you are at it. That is not only a bad example of circular logic it isn’t even a good example of mobius strip logic.

So to state it another way; temperature drives CO2 levels AND CO2 levels drive temperature, UM KAY….. If you say so.

Surely you are joking….. (Ok, apparently you are serious and I’ll refrain from calling you Shirley).

It has to be ONE or the OTHER, not BOTH.

CO2 levels could conceivably affect the response time of the gases in the atmosphere (causing them to warm/cool more quickly after sunrise, for example), but they cannot be controlled by AND ALSO control the average temperature.

How, one would reasonably ask, can this mythical molecule (CO2) know when to “obey” the temperature and when to “command” the temperature ?????

Your logic would lead to a runaway train…….

Cheers, Kevin. 

highflight56433 says:

March 26, 2014 at 9:14 am
I cannot buy into CO2 warming a H2O system as it (the CO2) would dilute molecule for molecule any concentration of H2O vapor, resulting in a cooling response as CO2 is less a heat absorbent than water. The cooling would then dry the atmosphere causing even further cooling. How many time do we have to look at the ice cores to verify an increase in CO2 cools the planet? And then there is the fact that it is the surface that warms the atmosphere, so first there must be warmer temps on the surface to increase air temperature. All being equal, less concentration of H2O is a cooler atmosphere. 

GogogoStopSTOP (as Bernard) said he was having a problem viewing WUWT and wondered if it was the site or him, to which Anthony replied in a somewhat condescending manner.  GogogoStopSTOP wasn't impressed and says:

March 26, 2014 at 9:57 am
Well pardon me Anthony! The last time I spoke with you personally, it was at the Heartland meeting in DC a few years ago. You seemed like such a pleasant, knowledgeable gentleman.
I’ve followed your blog for years. I have an Apple Macbook pro, running Mac OS X 10.7.5…

Thanks for the advice, but it’s a little unbecoming of you, as was, probably, my asking if there was something affecting your operation more broadly.

Christopher greets the men in white coats

Let's finish up with one of Christopher's incomprehensible ravings as he toddles off to greet the men in white coats. The quaintly named Monckton of Brenchley says (excerpt):

March 26, 2014 at 3:56 pm:
As it becomes ever more apparent to all that the claims of the totalitarian Left about the climate are in all material respects exaggerated, people will perhaps look more closely at the habit of routine and egregious mendacity that is a consequence of the enormous campaign of disinformation by a million agents of Soviet propaganda, that infected our media, our academe and our other institutions for decades. Though the evil empire that promoted that vicious campaign of lies was eventually flung into oblivion, today’s hard Left, having learned how to dissemble on the grand scale, have now largely lost the ability to tell the difference between that which is true and that which is not. To them, as to the Soviets who trained them so well and often without their knowledge, it is not the truth but the Party Line that matters. On the climate, the Party Line is now being daily demonstrated to have been in substance false. As more and more people come to realize this, they will begin to question everything they are told by the left/Green inheritors of the Communist/fascist mantle, and the world will be a merrier place for that.

---

Pierrehumbert, R. T., D. S. Abbot, A. Voigt, and D. Koll. "Climate of the Neoproterozoic." Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 39, no. 1 (2011): 417. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-earth-040809-152447

Question of the day at WUWT: Why doesn't CO2 stay near the ground?

Seen at wattsupwiththat, a comment by cnxtim, who says:

March 25, 2014 at 6:07 am
I am still waiting to find out hoe CO2 generated at ground level by the burning of fossil fuels, makes it’s way to the upper atmosphere to join other molecules of CO2? , Or was I asleep in class and somehow missed that very important first step in the ‘science’ of AGW?

surely there is a pro CAGW teacher out there who could enlighten me?

I'd say cnxtim has been asleep for a long time.  Ferdinand Engelbeen was the only person to give an answer and he says it quite well. Although I'll add that most CO2 doesn't make it to the upper atmosphere.  Most of it stays in the troposphere. Here is what Ferdinand wrote:

March 25, 2014 at 7:26 am
Not that difficult: if sand grains can be transported for thousands of km from the Gobi desert in Mongolia to Arizona, while sand is about 1,000 times more heavy than air, it is no problem for air to transport CO2 which is only slightly heavier a lot of times around the earth. Further, upwards air flows are available at a lot of places and certainly in the tropics by thunderstorms and other ascending and descending air flows.

It takes some time to mix the releases and uptakes of CO2 into the bulk of the atmosphere: a few days to a few weeks for the same altitude and latitude, a few weeks to a few months for different altitudes and latitudes, and 6 months to 2 years for the transfer from the NH to the SH, as only 10% per year of air is exchanged between the hemispheres.

But in general, CO2 levels are within 2% of full scale from sealevel to 20 km height and beyond. Only near ground on land, there are a lot of local sources and sinks which makes that you can measure any level of CO2, depending of the proximity to these sources and sinks and wind/mixing speed.

One other thing I'll add is that gas molecules move.  They don't just move downwards, they move sideways and up.  And they move quickly.  Here is an extract from an education website, which is probably the class that cnxtim dozed off in.

In gases the particles move rapidly in all directions, frequently colliding with each other and the side of the container. With an increase in temperature, the particles gain kinetic energy and move faster. The actual average speed of the particles depends on their mass as well as the temperature – heavier particles move more slowly than lighter ones at the same temperature. The oxygen and nitrogen molecules in air at normal room temperature are moving rapidly at between 300 to 400 metres per second. 

Unlike collisions between macroscopic objects, collisions between particles are perfectly elastic with no loss of kinetic energy. This is very different to most other collisions where some kinetic energy is transformed into other forms such as heat and sound. It is the perfectly elastic nature of the collisions that enables the gas particles to continue rebounding after each collision with no loss of speed. Particles are still subject to gravity and hit the bottom of a container with greater force than the top, thus giving gases weight. If the vertical motion of gas molecules did not slow under gravity, the atmosphere would have long since escaped from the Earth.

Dunning and Kruger in the Cenozoic Era at WUWT - very uplifting :)

Anthony Watts has a new article on his blog today (archived here).  It's about a paper in Nature about some research estimating the amount of CO2 released by tectonic activity, I suppose you'd call it.  When mountains are formed and fresh rock is exposed the scientists postulated that there was more chemical reactions going on than previously thought, releasing CO2.  The work was done by Mark A. Torres, A. Joshua West & Gaojun Li.

As usual, Anthony didn't link to the paper or press release itself but it wasn't hard to find either.  The paper has a dry title: Sulphide oxidation and carbonate dissolution as a source of CO2 over geological timescales.

Some science media outlets jazzed up the research up with a catchy headline, which Anthony borrowed (and no sign of a "claim"):

The Goldilocks principle: New hypothesis explains earth's continued habitability

Goldilocks & the 3 bears minus Goldilocks.
Robert Southey 1837

The Goldilocks principle was invoked because the paper was about how CO2 keeps the earth "not too hot and not too cold" - though it isn't always "just right" for everyone and everything, is it.


Anyway, the scientists worked out that over the Cenozoic era, marine analysis suggests there was extensive weathering of silicates when mountains were popping up all over the world, but there wasn't enough CO2 released from volcanic eruptions to balance the books.  They reckoned that "The resulting imbalance would have depleted the atmosphere of all CO2 within a few million years7."

So they put on their thinking caps and had a close look at some mountains in Peru.  They figured that there was CO2 being released from fresh rock exposed during tectonic activity.  The way I read their research, what they are saying is that when there's a lot of tectonic activity there was both more CO2 absorbed by weathering as well as more CO2 released by chemical reactions.

This is all on geological time scales, needless to say.  We're not talking in time frames of decades - this is the slow carbon cycle over thousands to millions of years.  That's for the CO2 absorption by silicate weathering and the release by chemical activity.  If volcanoes are big enough they can affect CO2 on much shorter time frames.

From the University of Southern California:

Torres and West studied rocks taken from the Andes mountain range in Peru and found that weathering processes affecting rocks released far more carbon than previously estimated, which motivated them to consider the global implications of CO2 release during mountain formation. ...

...Like many other large mountain ranges, such as the great Himalayas, the Andes began to form during the Cenozoic period, which began about 60 million years ago and happened to coincide with a major perturbation in the cycling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Using marine records of the long-term carbon cycle, Torres, West and Li reconstructed the balance between CO2 release and uptake caused by the uplift of large mountain ranges and found that the release of CO2 release by rock weathering may have played a large, but thus far unrecognized, role in regulating the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last roughly 60 million years.

(If you go to the USC website, I suggest use Firefox or IE, not Chrome. It's not Chrome-friendly.  But the USC has the full press release.  Other sites have only got a short version.)

Here's a link to one of NASA's Earth Observatory articles - on the slow carbon cycle and more.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony didn't have anything to add to his copied press release.  The rabble, they are another story. Get a load of this comment from devijvers, who is crying out for someone to call Poe when s/he strums a variation on the "scientists don't know nuffin'" theme:

March 20, 2014 at 1:10 am
The CO2 cycle:
Ocean plant life syncs to the bottom, becomes part of the sediment and eventually becomes rock. This is how CO2 is sequestered in rock.The tectonic conveyor belt slowly takes the ocean floor to the subduction zones, melting the rock by means of magma.The CO2 now mixed in magma is ejected by volcanoes. Wheatering of the newly formed rocks releases CO2.
This article is pure nonsense. More CO2 needs to be released by the wheatering than is used for the wheatering, otherwise we would have ran out long time ago. Where did these people get their degrees?

Matthijs seems to think we could end up like Venus in the blink of an eye - or maybe like Mars and says:

March 20, 2014 at 1:16 am
Another one that claims nature is in balance.
It is not.
It is a chaotic system that will flow from state to state depending on events that occur.
No way of telling what the next state is.

AleaJactaEst has it all figured out.  Scientists can pack up and go home:

March 20, 2014 at 1:17 am
…”While human-made atmospheric carbon dioxide increases are currently driving significant changes in the Earth’s climate….” and what would those be then?
The Earth has and will continue to go through several oxidising and reducing cycles (Devonian Permian e.g.) base solely on land mass accretion and subduction whose engine is the deep mantle plumes, the heat of which is derived from radioactive decay. The rest of our surface cycles are simply reactions, not balances, to the aforementioned cycles.

Paul Pierett calls on scientists to lend authority to his argument that scientists don't know nuffin' - (yeah, he's a bit mixed up) - but he's yours, most sincerely, if you'll take him:

March 20, 2014 at 1:29 am
I think they are close but have the cart before the horse. They still blame man. Too, not too many look beyond man for command and control of CO2 levels and there is the fail point.
Let’s begin with Milankovitch Cycles and Sunspot Cycles for the cause in geological cycles. From there gain and understanding of Topography shifts North and South of the Equator As the Earth emerges from and Ice Age and Returns again with mini-ice ages in the middle.
The Glaciers, Polar Ice Caps store the excess CO2 and releases them in the Ocean exchange as the Earth warms up and Topography expands and is allowed to expand. For example, when Lord Monckton testified before Congress a couple of years ago, the woman tree ring scientist testified that the tree line in the Sierra was higher for tree stumps were at a much higher elevation than at the present tree line. Thus, less Glaciers and Polar Ice mass released more CO2 to the Oceans and more provided for Topography at higher elevations and Latitudes.
As for the Pyrite, adjustments were made as much for the Volcanoes over time which we saw with Mt. Pinatubo.
Most Sincerely
Paul Pierett 

Talking of being mixed up.  A prize for anyone who can figure out what is going on in Mike Alger's little brain when he says:

March 20, 2014 at 1:39 am
Once again there is an overriding paradigm assumption that it is CO2 that is the main driver of the climatic system throughout geologic history…an assumption that I think is flawed in its very core. Even the warmists admit that the direct contribution of another doubling of CO2 is probably at most 1degree C…it’s the feedbacks that cause the catastrophic warming they are so worried about. But the feedbacks aren’t caused directly by CO2, they are caused by the slight warming the CO2 allegedly causes. So why focus on what controls the CO2 throughout geologic history? Instead focus on what causes the warming and cooling, which probably has much more to do with CO2 concentrations than the other way around.

My oh my, and I've hardly skipped over any comments.  Dunning and Kruger would have a field day at WUWT today.  Okay, just one more.  This time from our good friend, Leo Geiger, who is no doubt destined for the WUWT bin sooner rather than later:

Leo Geiger says:

March 20, 2014 at 3:36 am
I wonder what the criteria is for deciding whether or not published research needs to be introduced here with the word “Claim:” added as a prefix in the title? This one avoids that particular characterization.

---

Mark A. Torres, A. Joshua West & Gaojun Li. "Sulphide oxidation and carbonate dissolution as a source of CO2 over geological timescales." Nature 507, 346–349 (20 March 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13030

Scottish (Fake) Sceptic: A legend in his own lunchtime but no survey expert

Results are out - see below.

Anthony Watts has an article up by/about Mike Haseler (archived here), who going by uknowispeaksense is regarded as a "legend in his own lunchtime".  What he isn't is a true sceptic, though that's what he's called his blog, and I'm not even sure that he's Scottish.  (Then again he also calls himself a climate scientist though from his own blog, the closest he's got to anything remotely related to climate science is designing precision temperature controllers and who knows what they were used for!)

What is clear is that he is tied up with another shonky organisation that call themselves (or their blog at any rate) the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum.  Mike describes himself as "Chairman".  According to the blog there are six on the committee.  They had a bit of a natter one day and decided that with six people they could form a club, from the look of things.  (I mean, if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization.**)

Anyway, like the ScottishSceptic blog, the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum blog is just another dime a dozen anti-science blog.  (The third most recent article on the blog is promoting Murry Salby of all people!  You can see an archive of their home page here if you're curious about them.)

A month or so back Mike Haseler asked fellow fake sceptics to complete a survey.  According to UKISS, he did the rounds of various science denying blogs in the UK and the USA. A month later and he's got some preliminary results.

Mike reckons he got 5,000 responses, so he managed to get as far as reading the respondent count.  He also managed to process some of the questions, but he reckons it will take him a year to write a report.

It's pretty obvious that Mike Haselaar doesn't design or analyse surveys for a living.  Still, to take a year, even part time, to write up the result of a 21 question survey, of which most were just demographic questions and of which only two were open ended (including the last "any other comments" question) probably means he hasn't got a clue what to do with the responses.  Nevertheless, he's going to try to get some funds from the "guvmint" he so despises to tide him over while he tries to figure it out.  He wrote to Anthony Watts:

Given the huge number of responses and detail of questions a full assessment will take up to one year to complete. 

Do you reckon he's going to go through each response one by one?  Or what?  Weird that the number of responses is a factor in writing up the results.

What about the "detail of questions"?  Well, all but two were tick the box questions so that would take no time at all to analyse.  In fact he should by rights have prepared the analytic framework before he asked people to respond, as part of the survey design.  He should have already set up the crosstabs or whatever he was doing. Then all he needed to do was plonk the numbers in.  If he wanted to do any fancy analysis on the basis of the initial results he could still do that.  But a year? Sheesh!

Now normally if a person wanted someone to pay for something they'd write up a proposal and pitch it to the prospective funder.  You wouldn't write a mickey mouse survey that has no apparent design, is filled with loaded questions and pitched to the scientific illiterati and then say "it's all too hard to analyse and will take me a year, how about some dosh!"  But that's exactly what Mike Haselar is doing.  He wrote to Anthony Watts that he's:

... looking to rub shoulders with the politicians in the hope of scrounging more public money...

Oops - nope.  I accidentally (on purpose) got that from one of his articles when he was writing about something else.  I'll try again.  What he says about his twenty-one question quiz:

This is a huge commitment from an organisation that has no outside funding and is reliant on one full-time volunteer (Mike Haseler). We will therefore be approaching the Scottish and UK government with a view to obtaining funding to complete the analysis.

A huge commitment? Uknowispeaksense has the survey here.  See for yourself.  It's a short quiz with only one six-part question about climate.  (The rest are mainly demographic questions and voting preferences etc. although there is a strange question which I'll get to shortly)  The vaguely climate sciency question was simple in the extreme, or I should say simplistic.  Mike prefaced the survey asking people to "Please say if you agree or disagree with the following statements" and then proceeded to give them three more choices. So he couldn't even get the simplest question straight.

Anyway, here is the one and only climate question.  Feel free to complete it.  I'll let it run for a while and let you know the results FWIW :)

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Mike had one other question that was, well I don't know what he was trying for with this one.  I think he may have been trying to figure out the extent to which his respondents had a tendency for conspiracy ideation.  Maybe you can figure it out.

What he did was offer a number of statements about a flu epidemic and wanted people to put them in order from most trustworthy to least trustworthy.  In case people didn't understand what he wanted he put the question another way and told them their highest ranking should be at the top and the lowest ranked at the bottom.   Then, because he still wasn't sure his readers would understand what he wanted, he tried a third time, telling them the highest ranking should be at the top etc.

Here it is, thanks to UKISS. Click to enlarge it.

Source: scef via uknowispeaksense

All the statements except the top one provide a source for the information.  What do you reckon Wondering Willis Eschenbach would put up the top :)

Anyway.  That's it.  Just goes to show that despite their scorn of guvmint and guvmint-funded research, some fake sceptics have no hesitation in putting their hands up for taxpayer funding.  And it just goes to show why fake sceptics have such a hard time getting research published.  Some of them are so hopeless they can't even design and analyse a simple little survey on their lonesome.

As for Mike Haseler - given his history, I'm waiting for him to come running crying "copyright" and "libel" and "sue".

PS If you want to know Mike's preliminary results, you can read them in the WUWT archived article here.

PPS**

.

Results - 97% agree

Okay - the survey has run long enough. The numbers are actually just survey respondents so they don't necessarily reflect the readership of this blog.  Having given that caveat, I'll extrapolate the results to HotWhopper readership anyway.  It makes life more interesting :)

• 3% of HotWhopper readers are science deniers of the "sky dragon slaying" type.
• 3% of HotWhopper readers aren't aware that burning hydrocarbons results in CO2 - or maybe they aren't aware that coal and oil are hydrocarbons or maybe they don't know how a lot of electricity is produced or maybe they don't know that most motor vehicles run by burning petrol or diesel.
• 3% of HotWhopper readers don't know that earth has warmed, rather a lot actually, and rather quickly.
• One HotWhopper reader says climate doesn't change naturally.
• 15% of HotWhopper readers don't agree that CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, 68% agree that it will and 17% are "neutral", though I can't tell what proportion of that 17% took "neutral" to mean "don't know" vs "neither agree nor disagree" vs "I'm not saying".
• 97% of HotWhopper readers understand something about CO2 and greenhouse gases and climate.  Now that number seems awfully familiar.

Kevin Trenberth's microwaves are disgusting...

Manfred, over at WUWT, says a microwave grill is disgusting:

February 19, 2014 at 8:23 pm (excerpt)
The microwave grill is in one disgusting league with the Hiroshima bomb analogy.

I've never seen a microwave grill. I used to have a combined microwave/grill oven, but it wasn't the microwaves that did the grilling.  The oven didn't really grill either.  It was a pseudo-grill.  One might argue the process was analogous to a grill but not really.  It was nothing like a barbecue grill :D

Does Manfred do any cooking I wonder? Maybe, given his comment, Manfred is a vegetarian who has never cooked with a microwave oven.



Anyway, what Manfred was complaining about was an analogy made by Kevin Trenberth to describe how much the earth is warming.  Kevin Trenberth was reported by Roger Pielke Sr as saying (archived here):

You can add up how much of that heat there is and over a six month period it’s equivalent to running a very small microwave over every square foot at full power for about ½ hour

Roger, with a lot of repetition, said that Dr Trenberth said the above "in the discussion on added heat during droughts that is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2".  I couldn't get the broadcast to work, so I can't vouch for whether that's what Dr Trenberth said or the context.  But that's not the main point of this article.  My point is that Roger Pielke Sr feld so strongly about this analogy that he wrote an article for Anthony Watts pseudo-science blog trying to dispute it.

Roger wrote that it was "scientifically wrong for several reasons".  Let's look at his reasons:

First, the reduction of long wave radiation emitted to Space due to the added CO2 occurs over the six month time period, not in a short duration burst. Clearly, a short ½ burst of such heat would have a very different effect than when this heat is distributed across a six month time period.

I think he meant to write "a short ½ hour burst".  And he'd be correct.  It would have a very different effect.  But I don't see that as a reason to complain about the analogy.  Dr Trenberth was wanting to help people understand how much energy is being retained on earth because of global warming.  His analogy would work for many people.

Roger's next objection was as follows:

Second, the effect of long wave radiative flux divergence on surface temperatures from added CO2 (or other greenhouse gas including water vapor) is much larger at night. This is because during daylight, most of the time, vertical turbulent mixing dominates. The atmospheric boundary layer is typically much deeper during the daytime, so that added heat from the increase of CO2 is distributed through a much deeper depth. While the effect on nighttime minimum temperatures can be significant as we showed in our paper

This was a chance for Roger to give a plug to a paper he co-authored.  It seems to me to have little to no relevance to the analogy made by Dr Trenberth.  Roger complained that: "Kevin did not properly inform the audience how the added heat would be processed differently during the day and night."  Was the audience all agog waiting for an explanation of how the "added heat was processed"?  It looks to me as if Roger has missed the point and is making a mountain out of a molehill and is barking up the wrong tree - to use a bunch of analogies :)

Roger's used his third complaint in the same manner, to plug another paper he co-authored.  This paper was about the biological effect of doubling atmospheric CO2.  The authors modelled (Horror of horrors! Oh My! How could they?) the impact on central grasslands of the USA.  Again, I don't see the direct relevance.  Roger seemed to think it was relevant, however.  He wrote:

The ½ hour of added heat from the microwave forcing that Kevin presented, when properly input over the entire growing season would only result in a trivial effect on maximum temperature (ie. The hottest part of the day)!

Interesting that in complaining about the analogy Roger himself used the analogy.  That doesn't seem very logical to me.  Nor is it terribly relevant to the point Dr Trenberth was reportedly making, which was simply to help people visualise how much extra energy is being retained on earth by the added CO2.

From the WUWT comments

Roger's article dropped like the proverbial lead ballon at WUWT (to use another analogy).  Even sillier than Roger's complaints was the reaction at WUWT (archived here):

Pamela Gray doesn't see the point of Roger's article and says:

February 19, 2014 at 7:46 pm
So basically, in spite of a poor analogy, all this is supposed to show up at night, and a bit during the day, and in large scale weather patterns. Sorry. I just don’t see it. And I don’t buy it. It seems to me that the two of them are arguing over the size of the cooties on a gnat’s head.

Firey says irrelevantly:

February 19, 2014 at 8:04 pm
Oh, I thought it was hiding in the deep ocean.

Truthseeker says:

February 19, 2014 at 8:10 pm
Stick with the stuff that matters – land use and weather event mitigation choices. Talking about the disputed effect of trace gases in a free flowing atmosphere is arguing about the insignificant with regard to the pointless.

rgbatduke says that heat magically disappears out of the system (excerpt - as usual, the batty duke has much, much more to say than this:

February 19, 2014 at 8:17 pm
There is little point to an analogy such as this one. Suppose one DID run a microwave oven for half an hour on every square foot of the planet. Is there anyone who thinks that any of that additional heat would still be around in, say, six months? Exponential decay back to the running not-exactly equilibrium is the only thing that would be observed, with a time constant of at most hours.

Rud Istvan (who has been favoured by Judith Curry) says that Roger Senior should keep Roger Junior in line:

February 19, 2014 at 8:27 pm
The stupid burns. See rgbatduke lest you cannot grok for yourselves.
RP sr, how did you not counsel JR into not getting into such a situation.
Debating with morons cannot end well. Never did, never will.

And how's this for radiating a convective mess from the mountains to the oceans - from jmorpuss who says:

February 19, 2014 at 10:07 pm
@ Hysteria
The pause lines are were the atmosphere stops working up and down (convection) and air moves north south (conduction) these pause lines are electromagnetic field lines and create a closed system NO greenhouse effect without this process. As man digs away the crust we speed up the natural radiative decay process created by the 6000k core. Winds at the surface are created by the interaction of aerosols positive ions (high pressure system) working in the down direction and electrons negative ions (low pressure system) working in the up direction . There is a scattering from mountain ranges and land mass both in the atmosphere and oceans because of rotation.

---

Eastman, Joseph L., Michael B. Coughenour, and Roger A. Pielke. "The regional effects of CO2 and landscape change using a coupled plant and meteorological model." Global Change Biology 7, no. 7 (2001): 797-815. DOI: 10.1046/j.1354-1013.2001.00411.x

McNider, R. T., G. J. Steeneveld, A. A. M. Holtslag, R. A. Pielke, S. Mackaro, A. Pour‐Biazar, J. Walters, U. Nair, and J. Christy. "Response and sensitivity of the nocturnal boundary layer over land to added longwave radiative forcing." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 117, no. D14 (2012).  doi:10.1029/2012JD017578

More denier weirdness @wattsupwiththat - How much CO2 have we put in the air?

Anthony Watts has reverted to form with a silly article by someone called Ryan Scott Welch (archived here, updated here).  Ryan's social circle of acquaintances are scientifically illiterate when it comes to climate and Earth's atmosphere.  He wrote:

...when questioned about how much CO2 is in our atmosphere most people give me a guess of somewhere between 30% and 70%.  When I tell them that CO2 is only 0.04% or really about 395 ppm (parts per million) they generally look at me as if I was speaking some kind of foreign language.

There would be a lot of people who don't know how much carbon dioxide is in the air.  We who inhabit the blogosphere can easily overestimate the level of climate knowledge in the general populace.  Science education is pretty poor in some school systems.  Even where it's done well, lots of people would have no use for the information.  So even if they once learnt about the air we breathe, they've probably forgotten what they were taught.

However, we who inhabit the climate blogosphere don't make the mistake of overestimating the level of climate knowledge at WUWT, that boasts (incorrectly I'd say) of being "The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change".   That blog is known for posting utter nuttery on global warming and climate change and today's article is no exception.

Ryan Scott Welch started off with an analogy that he felt suited his acquaintances and the readers of WUWT.  He suggested people think of The Dallas Cowboys Stadium, which he said seats 100,000 for special events.  (I'll skip over the obvious that nitrogen, oxygen and argon between them take up almost all of the seats, provided you are talking about dry air.) He said that if all the molecules in the air were represented by the 100,000 seats then CO2 would comprise 40 of those seats.  So far so good.

Then he said that before industrialisation, 25 seats would have been occupied by CO2 but that now that's risen to 40 seats.  Again, so far so good.

Then he went off the rails claiming that of the extra 15 seats that CO2 has occupied, only three were filled because of human activities.  He wrote:

And since humans only contribute 3% of all CO2 emitted into the atmosphere each year (97% is from nature), the human contribution is 3% of the 15 remaining seats in our sample.  3% of 15 is 0.45.

Now that's a good example of arithmetic failure and scientific failure.  The arithmetic failure is obvious.  Ryan wrote humans contribute 3% of all CO2 emitted into the atmosphere each year, but then decided to use that number as the total human contribution over all the years.

The scientific failure is implied, because Ryan didn't address the question of how long all this extra CO2 remains in the air. What he should have written, to save him going into all that, is that until industrialisation, the CO2 in the atmosphere didn't change a great deal.  Whatever came off the surface into the air was balanced by what came out of the air into the surface.  What we're doing is adding huge amounts of CO2 to the air.  So much so that even though it's warming up, oceans are absorbing CO2.  (Usually when oceans warms up CO2 is released. But the pressure of atmospheric CO2 is so great the reverse is happening.)

And, of course, Ryan's 15 extra seats are only occupied by CO2 because human activity has increased atmospheric CO2 by 40%.

Anthony Watts didn't pick up this big mistake when he posted Ryan's article.  Why would he?  The article had lots of pretty pictures and large coloured text repeating this nonsense for a few more lines for the hard of reading.  All of which suited Anthony's blog perfectly.  (The only thing missing was a Josh cartoon.)

It was only after the comments started coming in that Anthony Watts figured maybe something was amiss.  The batty duke was the second person to comment and he wrote this:

rgbatduke says (excerpt):

January 27, 2014 at 10:46 am
The half-seat analogy is selling something, not a fair appraisal. The real question is, of the fifteen seats, how much of the are human produced CO_2 that has hung around from the half-seat contributed PER YEAR. That would be all of it, so the presentation should have stopped at 15 seats. A second objection is that this has nothing to do with whether or not the first 25 seats are an important component of the overall GHE, or whether or not the addition of 15 more seats produces a measurable, possibly significant, increase in greenhouse trapping of heat. It’s all about helping people to visualize small numbers which is just fine but obscures the simple fact that the GHE is real and that the 0.04% atmospheric concentration contributes a lot more than 0.04% of it. Sure, it isn’t as important overall as water vapor, but water vapor is highly variable and CO_2 is more or less well-mixed and hence provides a widespread and consistent base to the overall GHE.

HW readers know rgbatduke is not usually quite as canny and has written some very silly things in the past.  So it's comforting to know (because he teaches undergrad physics at Duke) that he's not completely ignorant about the atmosphere.

A few others joined in, for example:

davidmhoffer says:

January 27, 2014 at 10:53 am
I was about to go an on rant, but RGB beat me to it.

Willis Eschenbach sent a mixed message, showing why the article was wrong, but with a proviso - putting in a plug for his "emergent phenomena" hypothesis and ending up saying the article was well written with good graphics - I'll just post an excerpt:

January 27, 2014 at 10:59 am

I agree with Robert Brown. You were doing great until you got to the end. Yes, humans only contribute a small percentage PER YEAR, but over time that addition builds up. For an illustrative example, if you were to save a small percentage of your salary every year, soon it would end up as a large percentage of your savings …

Second, I don’t see the point of the analogy. Your argument seems to be, CO2 is only a trivially small part of the atmosphere, so we can ignore it.

However, compare it with something like say cyanide. ...

...Thanks for an interesting post, however, well written, good graphics.
w.

Joel O'Bryan was one of the people who argued for Anthony to remove the article:

January 27, 2014 at 11:08 am
For the reasons RGBATDUKE outline above (which I wholeheartedly concur with), WUWT should this take down completely or in a comment from Andrew, WUWT should strongly distance itself from this piece by Welch. Once Welch introduced the time factor (CO2 per year) into his argument, he was lost.

Eventually Anthony added the following to the article:

[NOTE: per Dr. Robert Brown's comment pointing out an oversight, this half-seat visualization analogy is on a PER YEAR basis, not a total basis - Anthony]

Except that's not correct either, is it. We've been adding 0.45 of a seat a year?  Divide the 15 extra "seats" by 0.45 and you'd conclude that we have only been adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the past 33 years. That is, since 1980.


There are quite a few comments of the usual calibre of WUWT.  For example, Martin says:

January 27, 2014 at 11:01 am
It’s not Argon that is 0.9% of the atmosphere, its water (H2O) that is around 1%.

And here are some of Ryan's own responses. He's not shy about demonstrating his ignorance and I bet he's thrilled to bits to get his article published on the world's most visited anti-science blog.


Ryan Scott Welch says:

January 27, 2014 at 12:26 pm
I don’t think the human contribtion to CO2 is .5 seats per year. According to the Mauna Loa record, atmospheric CO2 rose from 394.28 ppm in December 2012, to 396.81 ppm in December 2013, and increase of 2.53 ppm in a year. If the human contribibution was to atmospheric CO2 is 3% of the yearly output, then 3% of 2.53 ppm is 0.0759 ppm.

Ryan's obviously not aware that for thousands of years CO2 was pretty much in balance with only a small addition from human activities until we started burning vast amounts of fossil fuels.  He's got stuck on his magic number of 3%.  He doesn't say where he got this number from but I think it's now getting closer to 4% of the total annual exchange between the atmosphere and the surface.  Also, he's multiplying the 3% with the wrong number.  In fact the additional CO2 from human activity is more than double his 2.53 ppm, 55% of emissions are being absorbed by the oceans and biosphere.

There's a chart in the IPCC AR5 report, but it's complicated and I don't have time to work out all the pluses and minuses or percentages.  Here it is - with descriptive text on page 6-8 of the full report (click to enlarge).

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Figure 6.1

Ryan Scott Welch is wrong when he says:

January 27, 2014 at 12:37 pm
I submit that most of the rise in atmospheric CO2 is from oceanic outgassing as the earth has warmed from the last Ice Age and the LIA. As the eath warms CO2 rises regardless of any human factor.

If earth was warming naturally and humans weren't adding CO2 to the air, then yes, the oceans would release CO2 as they got hotter.  However, we've added so much CO2 that the oceans are a net sink not a net source right now.  Oceans are absorbing something like 30% of all the extra CO2 we're adding to the air and another 25% or so is being taken up by plants etc.

4 degree limit on plants and how Anthony Watts is an ignoramus when it comes to CO2

As readers of HotWhopper know by now, Anthony Watts peddles disinformation.  He's scatty about it. He'll put up contradictory articles without batting an eyelid.  There is no rhyme or reason to the various bits of pseudo-science he promotes.   It ranges from "OMG it's insects" to "a massive ice age cometh" by 2020.

Up to 33% of the extra CO2 will stay in the air for a thousand years...

Today Anthony Watts claims (archived here):

One has to wonder though, since CO2 residence time has been said to be anywhere from  five year to hundreds, or even thousands of years, with no solid agreement yet, how they can be so sure of themselves?

He's wrong (again), of course.  There is a reasonable understanding of how long CO2 stays in the air at least in human time frames.  It might not be all that precise because it can't be all that easy to predict how the plants and oceans will respond, given the rapidity of the changes we're subjecting them to.  There's no precedent.

Anthony is too lazy to read the science or else he's deliberately peddling lies.  Or maybe it's just another example of how he doesn't have a clue. On par with his confusion over temperature anomalies and baselines.

He's wrong on his numbers, most definitely.  There is no suggestion that CO2 only stays in the atmosphere for five years.  And his "thousands of years" could be "hundreds of thousands of years".  According to David Archer's 2005 research, a lot of CO2 would drop out in the first few decades if we stopped adding any at all.  After 300 years it would have flattened out with somewhere between 17% and 33% of what we've added staying in the air for a thousand years.  After 100,000 years there would still be about 7% of the added CO2 in the air.

Anthony Watts posts a ludicrous chart

Have a gander at this silly chart that Anthony put up.  Click to enlarge it as always.

Source: WUWT of course. Where else would you find such a dumb chart!

Notice the age of the papers in the chart?  The chart is all wrong even with the old papers.  I checked out the Keeling and Bacestow paper (which, interestingly, says a lot about CFCs and the destruction of ozone).  Needless to say, it doesn't say that CO2 can all drop out of the air in less than 10 years.  In fact, here are some quotes (my bold italics):

As discussed below, the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is likely to vary considerably over the next several hundred years. This time is too short for the atmosphere and ocean to attain equilibrium either with respect to climate or chemical processes....

... The present discussion principally emphasizes that the world’s oceans cannot be expected to remove a major fraction of the industrial CO2 from the air for a long time in comparison with the lifetime of human institutions. Although other mechanisms of CO2 withdrawal may exist, it is probably prudent to expect the concentration of atmospheric CO2 to persist above twice the preindustrial level for at least several centuries.

And I also checked his "100 years" from IPCC AR4.  Anthony Watts is wrong again.  Here is a quote:

 While more than half of the CO2 emitted is currently removed from the atmosphere within a century, some fraction (about 20%) of emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere for many millennia. 

Do the sums

By my calculations by our actions we've added more than 900 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the air in only 150 years or so.

What Anthony Watts is claiming is that "someone said" that if we stopped adding CO2 to the air tomorrow, all that we've added could all be absorbed by the land and oceans in five years. All 900 billion tonnes of it.  That represents about 255 billion tonnes of carbon.  All being absorbed by plants and oceans in five years.

Think about that.  The total mass of biomass, minus bacteria, is estimated at 560 billion tonnes.  So far, plants have taken up about 25% of all the extra carbon we've dug up and thrown away.  That's about 141 billion tonnes. Another 30% or around 170 billion tonnes has been absorbed by the oceans.  It's unimaginable that plants could absorb, say, another 116 billion tonnes in only five years. Biology wouldn't allow it. Just as it's unimaginable that the waters of the world could absorb 140 billion tonnes of carbon in only five years.  Physics wouldn't allow it.

The net flux into the ocean in 2000 was estimated at around 2 billion tonnes of carbon a year.  For the  oceans to absorb 140 billion tonnes in five years, that would be 28 billion tonnes a year or a fourteen fold increase.  If we stopped adding CO2 to the air, each year the partial pressure of CO2 in the air would drop as CO2 was absorbed.  So each year a bit less would be absorbed by the ocean.  But even if the oceans could absorb at the same rate as in 2000, it would take 70 years to absorb 140 billion tonnes of carbon.

Leaving my basic calculations alone, scientists have done the sums and estimated how long it would take for carbon to be absorbed.  As I said above, according to David Archer (2005), after about 300 years much of the added CO2 would have dropped out of the air but "17– 33% of the fossil fuel carbon will still reside in the atmosphere 1 kyr from now, decreasing to 10– 15% at 10 kyr, and 7% at 100 kyr".

Below is a graphic prepared by Robert Rohde of Global Warming Art.

Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art

There's fat chance of us stopping all CO2 emissions in the immediate future but a chance we can seriously cut them over the next two or three decades if we put our minds to it.  The sooner we start in earnest the better.

Four degrees could be the limit for plant absorption of CO2

The article that Anthony Watts scoffed at when he wrote his "five year" residence time lines were as an introduction to a press release of a new paper.  The paper by Friend et al in PNAS is about a study of plant uptake of CO2 (open access at the moment).  The researchers found that at 4 degrees of warming, the biosphere will become saturated with carbon and will lose its capacity to absorb CO2 because of the heat and drought associated with global warming.  Anthony as usual didn't provide a link to the paper or the press release, but the research is getting a bit of publicity.  From the Cambridge press release:

As the world continues to warm, consequent events such as Boreal forest fires and mid-latitude droughts will release increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere - pushing temperatures ever higher. 

Initially, higher atmospheric CO2 will encourage plant growth as more CO2 stimulates photosynthesis, say researchers. But the impact of a warmer world through drought will start to negate this natural balance until it reaches a saturation point.

The modelling shows that global warming of 4 degree will result in Earth’s vegetation becoming “dominated” by negative impacts - such as ‘moisture stress’, when plant cells have too little water - on a global scale.

Carbon-filled vegetation ‘sinks’ will likely become saturated at this point, they say, flat-lining further absorption of atmospheric CO2. Without such major natural CO2 drains, atmospheric carbon will start to increase more rapidly - driving further climate change.   

From the paper itself:

Vegetation carbon residence time not only is important because of its contribution to GVM [global vegetation model] uncertainty, but also represents a key stage in the cascade of carbon from the atmosphere, through various organic and inorganic surface pools, and back to the atmosphere. Changes in vegetation carbon residence times can cause major shifts in the distribution of carbon between pools, overall fluxes, and the time constants of terrestrial carbon transitions, with consequences for the land carbon balance and the associated state of ecosystems.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts has the audience he deserves. There are a few silly people who talk about how the temperature in their area can vary a lot in a day or a year therefore they aren't scared of a piddly four degree increase in the average global surface temperature! They don't understand how averages are worked out or that there is a huge difference in terms of human comfort (or lack of) between a top of 43 degrees Celsius and a top of 53 degrees Celsius. (Comments are archived with the WUWT article here.)


talldave2 says:

December 16, 2013 at 1:04 pm
My area experiences a 100-degree annual temperature swing. The notion 4 degrees would have any noticeable effect on vegetation is laughable.

RHS says "those plants won't notice a thing!":

December 16, 2013 at 1:08 pm
I’m with talldave2, being in Denver, we’ve experience lows last week of minus 10 and an expected high today of 60. With a swing of 70 degrees in about 7 days, it is hard to imagine we’d notice a thing with a 4 degree difference.

nicholas tesdorf says "scientists don't know nuffin'":

December 16, 2013 at 1:08 pm
German and Austrian taxpayers who are funding this sort of alarmist nonsense from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria should feel savagely aggrieved. One glance at the chart of peer reviewed literature would tell one that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for less than 10 years, not 100 years. The IPCC might as well claim 1,000 years and make a real meal of it all.

Actually, nicholas, the IPCC "says" 20% of our CO2 pollution stays in the air for many thousands of years.


Richard111 says:

December 16, 2013 at 1:26 pm
A warmer world will create drought??? I stopped reading at that point.

Umm, the warmer world means that there is more drought and fires and plants will die and burn and give up CO2 making it warmer still.


Rob Potter is another one who commits the logical fallacy of personal incredulity and thinks that "scientists don't know nuffin'".  He says that he doesn't like the definition of residence time of carbon in vegetation.  He's not interested in that.  In fact he doesn't even believe that droughts will get worse as the world heats up. He thinks that all the moisture in the air will stop droughts from happening.  Silly Rob doesn't know that we will have more droughts and more floods, sometimes in the same place at the same time.  I suppose he thinks he knows all this because he thinks that scientists (who don't know nuffin') told him so.

December 16, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Wait a minute, all the discussion of residence time has referred to CO2 in the atmosphere, not plants. In the very first sentence they have re-defined this as “the length of time carbon remains in vegetation during the global carbon cycle – known as ‘residence time’ -”. This is a bait and switch as non-one is concerned with residence time in plants, only in the atmosphere.

And even more junk when they use 4 degrees as the end of the world scenario, but the effect on plants is the supposed widespread drought that this 4 degree rise creates. Really? Such a rise in temperature is going to remove water vapour from the atmosphere? Despite the fact that such an increase would release a great deal of frozen water from glaciers and get it into liquid form where it will evaporate easier? The simplistic idea that warmer equals drier is the complete opposite of the basic CAGW meme that CO2 effect in the atmosphere is amplified by the increased water vapour which it causes.

No, pile of junk from the first to the last. No basis in physical or biological fact (as the people who have pointed out how well plants grow at a wide range of temperatures have already pointed out).

RockyRoad says the Earth system has no limits.  All the world is infinite.

December 16, 2013 at 1:50 pm
There’s somehow a limit to how many trees grow, or how much grass the earth supports, or how many newspapers end up in landfills, or….

These guys are lying like a lot of other politicians I’m familiar with.

Richard M says it's not going to get any warmer:

December 16, 2013 at 2:31 pm
It isn’t going to warm anywhere near 4° which makes the entire paper a big s0-what. We will likely experience two cool PDOs this century and a solar minimum of some unknown degree. Chances are it won’t be any warmer in 2100 then it is right now, and it could be cooler.

james griffin keeps referring to "previous Holocenes".  He used to have six of them IIRC.  This time he's reduced it to five and says:

December 16, 2013 at 3:16 pm
At least one of the previous five Holocene’s had temperatures 5C higher than today….as soon as one sees the words “climate models” we know it is a waste of time

RicHard. says blithely, ignoring the references to boreal forest fires and mid-latitude droughts :

December 16, 2013 at 3:21 pm
4 degrees is meaningless in agriculture. Each country has its own indiginous plants that are well able to withstand this increase. It is when you plant non indiginous plants that there could be a problem.

bob prudhomme doesn't think that humans were able to breathe until well into the twentieth century at the earliest and says (excerpt):

December 16, 2013 at 3:41 pm
If co2 drops to 200 to 300 ppm then human beings quit breathing . 

Arno Arrak is a physics denier and says:

December 16, 2013 at 4:09 pm
Regarding the carbon residence time. It is actually irrelevant because carbon dioxide is not warming the world 

---

Archer, D. (2005), Fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time, J. Geophys. Res., 110, C09S05, doi:10.1029/2004JC002625

Andrew D. Friend, Wolfgang Lucht, Tim T. Rademacher, Rozenn Keribin, Richard Betts, Patricia Cadule, Philippe Ciais, Douglas B. Clark, Rutger Dankers, Pete D. Falloon, Akihiko Ito, Ron Kahana, Axel Kleidon, Mark R. Lomas, Kazuya Nishina, Sebastian Ostberg, Ryan Pavlick, Philippe Peylin, Sibyll Schaphoff, Nicolas Vuichard, Lila Warszawski, Andy Wiltshire, and F. Ian Woodward. Carbon residence time dominates uncertainty in terrestrial vegetation responses to future climate and atmospheric CO2. PNAS, December 16, 2013 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222477110

Flashback to 1884: A few hundredths of carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere...the surface...would become like a vast orchid house

Border Watch (Mount Gambier, SA : 1861 - 1954)

Saturday 14 June 1884

Click for larger view.

COLD AND HEAT NEAR THE POLES

LAST Wednesday's issue of the Border Watch contains some remarks contributed by the Duke of Argyle on the above subject, but dealing more particularly with the traces of fossil flora found in extreme northern latitudes. After referring to the striking and curious natural phenomena found in the rocks of Greenland, the Duke refers to an older flora than the Miocene, and says that this is the flora of the coal measures. He remarks-"Yet this flora, too, in long ages before the Miocene, has certainly flourished on the area which is now occupied by Greenland, and that it must have been associated with a tepid and steamy atmosphere. It is needless to point out what curious questions these facts raise."

In connection with the above, and without referring to the beautifully elaborated theories of La Place, there is such a large amount of reasoning presenting to one's mind-that it is so difficult to know how to condense in one short and readable article something that will be instructive.

Referring to creative agencies in the past ages it will be necessary to abandon the very prevalent idea that climate, atmosphere and earth surface, were then as now. When we read of gigantic animals, men, and forest trees, we must remember that all these had their birth, life, and decay in a period of time when the operations of natural law were as they always have been, the inevitable result of the physical forces of the period. In asserting this I do not desire to be classed amongst "those who deny the requirements of the addition to ordinary matters of an unmaterial and spiritual essence, substance, or power, general or local, whose presence is the efficient cause of life." On the contrary, I believe that the forces and the director of them are both eternal.

Let us, however, glance at one or two of the most notable deductions of modern science. Dr. Sterry Hunt says, in his observations on the chemistry of the primeval earth "This crust is now everywhere buried beneath its own ruins, and we can only from chemical considerations attempt to reconstruct it. If we consider the conditions through which it has passed and the chemical affinities* which must have come into play we shall see that these are just what would now result if the solid land, sea, and air were made to react upon each other under the influence of intense heat. To the chemist it is at once evident that from this would result the conversion of all carbonates, chlorides, and sulphates into silicates, and the separation of the carbon, chlorine, and sulphur in the form of acid gases, which, with nitrogen, watery vapour, and a probable excess of oxygen, would form the dense primeval atmosphere. The resulting fused mass would contain all the bases of silicates, and must have much resembled in composition certain furnace slags or volcanic glasses. The atmosphere charged with acid gases which surrounded this primitive rock must have been of immense density. Under pressure of such a high barometric column, condensation would take place at a temperature much above the present boiling point of water, and the depressed portions of the half-cooled crust would be flooded with a highly-heated solution of hydrochloric acid, whose action in decomposing the silicates is easily intelligible to the chemist. The formation of the chlorides of the various bases and the separation of silica would go on until the affinities oi the acid were satisfied, and there would be a separation of silica taking the form of quartz, and the production of a sea-water holding in solution, besides the chlorides of sodium, calcium, and magnesium, salts of aluminium and other metallic bases. The atmosphere being thus deprived of its volatile chlorine and sulphur compounds would approximate more to that of our our time, but would differ in its greater amount of carbonic acid. It is only necessary for the casual reader or elementary student to bear this italicised portion of the above in mind while I take him a step further in advance, and quote again from the same author, as quoted by Mr. J. W. Dawson, L L.D.,F.R.S., F.G.S., in his work on the origin of the world according to revelation and science. He says :-

"The agency of plants in purifying the primitive atmosphere was long since pointed out by Brongneart, and our great stores of fossil fuel have been derived from the decomposition, by the ancient vegetation of the excess of carbonic acid of the early atmosphere, which, through this agency, was exchanged for oxygen gas. In this connection the vegetation of former periods presents the curious phenomenon of plants allied to those now growing beneath the tropics flourishing within the Polar circles. Many ingenious hypotheses have been proposed to account for the warmer climate of earlier times, but are at best unsatisfactory; and it appears to me that the true solution of the problem may be found in the constitution of the early atmosphere, when considered in the light of Dr. Tyndall's beautiful researches on radiant heat. He has found that the presence of a few hundredths of carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere, while offering almost no obstacle to the passage of the solar rays, would suffice to prevent almost entirely the loss by radiation of obscure heat, so that the surface of the land beneath such an atmosphere would become like a vast orchid house, in which the conditions of climate necessary to a luxuriant vegetation would be extended even to the polar regions.

ALBERT K. VARLEY, F.R.S. Mount Gambier, June 12, 1884.


Click to jump to the following mentioned in the newspaper article:

• Duke of Argyll
• Laplace
• Sterry Hunt
• J. W. Dawson and his referred book
• Brongniart
• Tyndall
• Albert K. Varley

Click here for  more flashbacks.

Flashback to 1909: Professor Skeats on CO2 and water vapour acting as "a kind of a blanket"

Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931)

Tuesday 30 March 1909

Assuming then, that the astronomers' contention is correct, what other phenomena may have existed in bygone ages to enable vegetation to flourish in the South Polar regions?

I apprehend two other contingencies which might have modified the South Polar climate in bygone ages. In the first place, changes in Earth's crust, which, geographically speaking, are a constant factor, may have been of such a nature as to modify the direction of ocean, winds and currents, so that the climate of the region has passed from a temperate one into its present frigid conditions.

'A second alternative,' continued the Professer, 'depends upon possible atmospheric changes. There are, in fact, two gases suspended in the earth's atmospheric envelope, which have a most pronounced effect upon climatic conditions. These are aqueous vapor and carbonic acid gas.'

'How do these affect climate?'

'These gases act as a kind of blanket, and while transparent to heat coming from the sun, are relatively opaque to heat rising from the earth. They tend, in fact, to check radiation.'

'If these atmospheric conditions had obtained, what deductions do you make from them?'

'On the assumption that the atmospheric envelope contained an abnormal amount of these two gases, the temperature of the whole earth would have risen in consequence, and conditions would conceivably have existed at the South Pole quite consistent with extensive plant and animal life. The samples of coal brought home will, however, be required to be carefully examined before it can be accurately ascertained if tropical or sub-tropical conditions ever existed at the South Pole.'

In conclusion, Professor Skeats stated that a rise in temperature of a comparatively few degrees Fahrenheit would suffice to seriously modify climatic conditions right down to the Pole itself.

Ernest Willington Skeats

Source: The University of Melbourne

From the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

Ernest Willington Skeats (1875-1953), geologist, was born on 1 November 1875 at Berais Town, Southampton, England, son of Frank George Skeats, bank clerk, and his wife, Alice Erena, née Martin. Educated at Handel and Hartley colleges, Southampton, he entered the Royal College of Science, London, in 1893 with a studentship, receiving a first-class associateship in chemistry (1896) and geology (1897). He graduated from the University of London (B.Sc., 1st-class honours, 1899; D.Sc., 1902), with a thesis entitled 'The chemical composition of limestones from upraised coral islands, with notes on their microscopical structures'. He became a demonstrator in geology at the Royal College in 1897.

Skeats's early research work, which established his reputation as a petrologist, centred on the chemical and microscopical characteristics of limestones and particularly on the origin of dolomite. He studied samples from several Pacific islands and undertook field and laboratory studies on the stratigraphy and origin of the Dolomites of the Southern Tyrol. Using his work and that of others on modern coral reefs as a basic for comparison, he was able to show that the Dolomites owed their origin to ancient coral reefs and had undergone changes similar to those affecting modern reefs.

Appointed to the chair of geology and mineralogy in the University of Melbourne in 1904 as successor to J. W. Gregory, Skeats served as dean of the faculty of science in 1910-15 and was president of the Professorial Board in 1922-24. He retired in 1941 as professor emeritus.

In Australia he chiefly studied the petrology of igneous rocks, particularly those of Victoria. He published papers on the Devonian volcanics and granites of Central Victoria, the Cambrian basic lavas of Heathcote, the basic dyke rocks, and the Tertiary volcanic rocks of central and eastern Victoria, particularly the alkali lavas. For his scientific work he received the first award of the Daniel Pidgeon Fund from the Geological Society of London (1903), the (W. B.) Clarke medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (1929), and the Mueller medal from the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (1937).

Skeats's research interests were reflected in the work of his postgraduate students, who concentrated mainly on petrological studies, often following on from his own pioneering work. He insisted on clarity and simplicity in research reports and encouraged publication of results. Under his leadership, the department won an international reputation as a specialist school in igneous petrology and petrography and his students, who included F. L. Stillwell and H. C. Richards, rose to high positions in the Commonwealth Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Australian universities, and in Geological Surveys in Africa and India.

A benevolent autocrat, who ran an extraordinarily neat and efficient department, Skeats was genuinely interested nevertheless in the welfare of his staff and their families and his students. He had a ready wit and a great love for Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which he played and sang by heart whenever he had occasion, particularly on student excursions. In his youth he played Association football, as captain of the Royal College of Science team in 1895-97. In Melbourne he took an interest in Australian Rules football, was an avid cricket fan and served as president of the university sports union from 1920 to 1941.

Outside the university, Skeats was active in scientific circles at local and national levels. A council-member of the Royal Society of Victoria from 1906 until his death, he served as vice-president (1908-09), president (1910-11) and trustee (1929-53). He was president of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (1924-25), a councillor for many years and elected honorary member in 1952. A founder of the Australian National Research Council (1919), he was for many years Victorian representative. He was president of section C (Geology) of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1909. In 1925 he served on the projects and finance committee for the foundation of C.S.I.R., and after its establishment in 1926 chaired its mineragraphic committee.

Skeats died, childless, on 20 January 1953 at Glen Iris and was cremated. He had married, first, Mary de Fraine Whitaker (d.1932) on 23 December 1904 at Croydon, Surrey, England, and, second, a widow Anne Sheppard, née Hayes, on 4 May 1940 in Melbourne. Following the death of his wife on 18 June 1967 his estate, valued for probate at £37,617, was shared equally between the Royal Society of Victoria, the Geological Society of London, and the University of Melbourne, which also holds a portrait by Max Meldrum.

Other Flashbacks

Click here for more flashbacks relating to climate and earth science from the National Library of Australia.