An Inconvenient Rant?

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34328377
Do we really need climate change advice from the septics?

[Hypognosis]

This link suggests a period 100,000 years ago.

http://m.livescience.com/39575-ancient-saharan-rivers-existed.html

[Hypognosis]

Natural cycles, divebuddy. Natural cycles.

Stuff that happened while all the coal gas and oil was still underground.

You support the idea of natural cycles, dontcha?

[Hypognosis]

"Total cumulative emissions from 1870 to 2013 were 390±20 GtC from fossil fuels and cement, and 145± 50 from land use change.

The total of 535±55GtC was partitioned among the atmosphere (225±5 GtC), ocean (150±20 GtC), and the land (155±60 GtC)."

http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/14/hl-full.htm

It says GtC means "billions of tonnes of carbon" Gigatonnes, I suppose.

Small tap, NJ?

[Hypognosis]

If you like satellite data, birdie, you'll love this one

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2015/09/piomas-september-2015.html

As blog's go I have to say 80% of the richness comes from the comments section which is a rare treat compared to conventional comment sections.

I don't understand all of the jargon but can glean that arctic ice extent, thickness and (derived) volume has so many input influences (winds, current flows, sea state, gyrs, prior year's ice and more) that it is one of the most complex (as in difficult to predict) systems in nature that I can think of.


I wanted to construct an argument around latent heat and the way that change of state affects temperature rise but I guess the ice bath/bunsen burner lab demonstration doesn't... cut much ice.
(wince)

[Hypognosis]

Ocean temperature anomaly measurements have been **dded up by a change of methodology from labour-expensive bucket-on-a-rope sampling to a low cost water intake valve setup but suction/pumping or any turbulence inducing method would actually add traces of heat to the water and step-changes in the data were noticed after the new method came in (ca. WWII).

Satellites can measure sea surface temperatures from on high but cannot see deeper than the top few feet. Warming in deeper layers could be occurring undetected.


Urban heat island measured against rural weather stations
https://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm

This page says the largest anomalies on land are in the high latitude areas, northern Canada, Siberia.

ttbomk, these areas are not famed for their large cities but the permafrost is melting, regardless.

[vetuste_ennemi]

Thanks for your link on the ozone layer, Hypo. Only just noticed it.

[jim360]

Thanks divebuddy. Probably not an untypical funding request in the field. I suppose you will often need a reasonable buzzword to get funding in certain areas, especially if money is tight.

birdie -- I remember the 2014 result, and I was even slightly irritated at the 0.02 degree figure as it was a little conflated -- but I don't think that this counters my "some of the warmest on record", as you'd also have to ask the same about, say, most of the preceding decade. And on top of all that there's the point that the "no warming for almost the past 20 years" is based on "since 1998", which itself was the previous "warmest year on record". That has to be part of the context. That temperatures have remained at around the 1998 high for 20 years rather than increased is a bit of an anomaly, to be sure, but it would not be unexpected if, as I mentioned earlier, an additional natural cycle were in play. Climate science is hideously complex.

With respect to the satellite data I think you might be quoting only half the story there, too. Satellites don't directly record temperature anyway, so are subject to their own potential systematic flaws, and further there is data from multiple regions of the atmosphere, showing rises and falls in temperature in a manner that is interpreted as consistent with climate change models. I would need to do far more research to counter it properly, but if you don't quote the standard interpretation it seems like you are only giving half a truth.

I also wanted to quote the following:

"... towns and cities [retain] heat from the sun during the day and [cool] more slowly than any surrounding rural areas. Urban environments can be many degrees higher both during the day and at night than their more rural surroundings."

which, to me, reads like a tacit admission that humans can have a remarkably significant effect on local temperatures, measured not in fractions of degrees but whole numbers. If you ever wanted a more dramatic demonstration of how humans can affect the world around them, you've just found it yourself. The traditional interpretation of recent weather trends is measured typically in tenths of a degree per decade by comparison.

I'm inclined to leave things there in this thread, for the moment. You've evidently read into the methodology rather a lot more than I have lately, and I'd have to do more research to try to refute your claims more thoroughly -- in particular, I'd want to understand why the "traditional interpretation" of the satellite data supports climate change models (through increased atmospheric carbon levels).

[Hypognosis]

Some additions I would like to make about urban heat island: -

Heat lost as infra red is passing through the air without really heating it: horizontal surfaces are shining it straight out into space. A satellite designed to measure surface temperature in the form of infra red would certainly have its readings skewed by this radiant output.

Vertical building surfaces send it sideways, until it either hits terrain and gets re-radiated at slightly lower energy or it heads over the horizon and into space at an oblique angle that a top-down satellite might miss.

So, only conduction/convection heat transfer to the air is elevating local temperatures properly and the weather stations certainly do have their readings skewed by that.

Jim made the point for me that this means city sprawl, huge car parks and acres of roads certainly do add to human-caused climate change.

[Hypognosis]

@birdie

I've seen the wind gauge on that website get up to nearly 4GW on windy days. The history graph also shows how the gas and coal plants turn down the wick as the wind energy picks up. This is how renewables integrate to provide a good mix of sources.

Hover cursor over the wind dial and the help text says this:-

"Wind: This is the total contributed by metered wind farms. Wind power contributes about another 50% from embedded (or unmetered) wind turbines that shows only as a drop in demand. Wind like nuclear, will sell into any market price because turbines are expensive, wind is not and subsidies are always paid. The variability of wind leads to very high fluctuations in output."

This may need a rewrite if more categories of renewables subsidy get knobbled by Osbourne.