I would like to see the moderator snip those posts and point the poster to useful links, and I would like to see the rest of the group ignore such posts entirely.

I’ll check back from time to time to see if this otherwise excellent blog gets any better at that.

I agree with JR. The fact that Pielke accepts the IPCC findings does say a lot. It says that that Pielke is not a climate skeptic

Maybe some things are worth repeating?

Which is not really much of a surprise because A.D., in the bit of his post that we can read, says that Pielke … “is not a climate skeptic”.

Maybe some things are worth repeating?

Full Comments by Scientists:

1) Dr. Roger A. Pielke, Jr. Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado reacted to this study in the journal Nature by declaring: “Climate models are of no practical use.” Pielke, who is not a climate skeptic, said on April 30, “There is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun. This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy.” (LINK)

[JR: I deleted the rest of this post, since he is just a repetition of long-debunked denier talking points. But it is interesting that the first "scientist" you pick as an example of non-Global Warming is 1) a political scientist and 2) someone who has repeatedly said on this blog and elsewhere that he accepts the IPCC findings. Says a lot, no?]

I would hope both would also take a little time to pick up Dr. Hayden’s book at a library and give it a read.

What strikes me further is the AGW believers acceptance that GHG warming can be climate altering or any great significance in scope. Pending a read of the materials suggested, I haven’t yet come across anything yet that can positively point to a human signature in the climate record with any degree scientific validity. There seems to be a grand assumption that greenhouse gases work in Earth’s atmosphere as an actual greenhouse does to warm plants. That, of course, is a flawed analogy and the term “greenhouse” is more misleading than not when used with respect to heat retention in Earth’s atmosphere. Greenhouses on Earth keep their space warm because they are a closed system. The atmosphere is not and weather is the great spoon that stirs the pot. The dynamics of weather (cloud formation, precipitation, advection, convection) are massively involved with the stabilization of Earth’s atmosphere, yet those factors are the least understood and most poorly represented (when at all) in GCMs.

Frankly, it’s hard to get worked up over a theory that claims rising CO2 levels from humans are going to overwhelm a system that the present and historic record indicates is relatively insensitive to CO2 as a driving mechanism. Chart the rise in CO2 over the past 100 years with the change in global temperature. There is no correlation whatsoever. Then chart variability of solar magnetism, sunspot cycles, and radiation over the same period. A remarkable correlation emerges. The slow response time of ocean temperatures to forces that control global temperature changes produces a delayed release and absorption of atmospheric CO2. When looked at over a just the right scale of 100’s of thousands of years, their appears to be a correlation (pointed out by Mr. Gore) that might suggest that CO2 drives temperature changes. Yet, when looked at over either a longer time frame (millions of years) or a vastly shorter time frame (100s or 1000s of years), the apparent correlation vanishes. Even when the correlation appears, it is only valid with a delay of 100s of years (which is why it cannot be seen over shorter time periods). Unless one is prepared to believe in retroactive causality, it’s time to acknowledge that the CO2 demon in climate change theory needs to reflect on the phrase, “we’ve got a problem here.”

Nylo and Leebert nail the problem skillfully.

Now to check out those links.

The canonical logarithmic formula for CO2-driven warming is more like 1.2 degrC from 280 – 560 ppm increase in CO2 level. It’s been covered over at climateaudit. That’d fit your 0.7 degrC current temp increase since 1880, but most of it ascribed to CO2. I tend to suspect that soot’s playing a big role here & I might bring that CO2 value down a bit, maybe down to 0.45 degrC, discounting for tropospheric soot’s net heating effect (40% over the Pacific alone) and the largely soot-driven boreal thaw (about 20% of total AGW).

Here’s a thought: In favor of your argument is the 1998 el Nino. It burped a huge amount of heat into the atmosphere and the next year, not only did the heat dissipate, in 1999 temperatures fell in the exact opposite trend, leveling out to temperatures reflecting a negative mini-PDO from 2000 – 2004.

So, where did all the el Nino heat in 1998 go in 1999? It didn’t get swept under the rug in some temporal pipeline, the Argo data do not show this (AFAIK). Likewise, where did all the coolth from Pinatubo go? It was all gone in two years as well (except for a residual trace that naturally sank, being cooler).

So what happened to the heat from el Nino? It went away! But how. Maybe it got cycled out of the system using one of the solar system’s biggest heat-exchange systems there are: The Earth’s ocean surface & rain clouds.

What’s a hydrological cycle without some energy to drive it and speed it up? The atmosphere is dynamic, this can be readily observed in the difference between spring showers and summer thunderstorms: The hotter the system runs, the faster it runs, the more heat differential gets cycled (pumped) out of it.

There’s more than thermal inertia at play here in the oceans, there’s a natural heat-exchange role that is just now being modeled in models that couple air & ocean.

The 1998 el Nino was a shift-over event that put the Pacific (& Earth with it) into a different cycle. When it belched out 0.2 degrC of warmth GST, the planet disgorged a fair amount of energy, externalizing it into space through more massive thunderheads.

That energy flux did in fact go somewhere, nor did it lead to a runaway greenhouse (as you mention). If it got swept back under the rug, we would’ve seen it by now. But that sudden injection of heat into the atmosphere was instead externalized, and not back into the oceans.

This isn’t to exculpate CO2, but to characterize what the atmosphere is up to. It somehow self-regulates. The Aqua data appear to indicate that warmer temperatures simply invoke a vaster hydrological cycle, with taller convective cloud structures (cooling) and more rain (cooling) that offset the increased energy input.

Will it always work this way? It is canonical, as I mentioned before, that CO2’s additional effects will start to level off, in a leveling slope. Since the trend line plateau we have now would jibe with the basic CO2 curve, then it appears the heat we have now is not heat we have to deal with 12 years from now.

And then we have the question of our spotless sun….

I haven’t received your email. No rush, but wanted to let you know in case there was some error in the address you used, and you are waiting for me to reply.

Sean

You didn’t get the point. The point is that the 100 ppm rising of CO2 levels compared with the total ammount of GH effect we already had before, and comming primarily from water vapour in the atmosphere, calls to a really minimal change in the total warming because of CO2’s GH effect. Maybe 0.2ºC, at most, without additional feedbacks. The models believe in H2O immediately joining the party in the form of water vapour and causing the remaining 0.5ºC increase.

But that is very stupid. First, because the response in water vapour content in the atmosphere for a temperature increase at sea level is VERY quick. A matter of a few hours. So, if an increase of 0.2ºC leads to extra water vapour adding an extra 0.5ºC increase, it happens a very short time later. So that if natural events led to a month being especially warm, say +0.2ºC in average, worldwide, and the kind of feedback AGWers expect from water vapour was true, we would have an additional +0.5ºC bias for the next month, and then +1.2, and +2ºC, and the very hell in a year.

But this doesn’t happen, therefore either the positive feedback of water vapour is not that strong, or it comes together with aditional strong negative feedbacks too, or both. But a permanent addition of +0.2ºC because of CO2 cannot lead to additional +0.5ºC of forcing by positive feedbacks, because 0.2ºC is very little compared to the natural variability of the Earth’s climate. If a +0.2ºC forcing could cause positive feedbacks bigger than the initial forcing itself, the Earth would not be enjoying the rather stable climate it has had for millenia. We would rather be exchanging ice ages and hellfire every other decade. The water vapour feedback cannot be bigger than the initial forcing. And the initial forcing caused by CO2 alone is very small.

So yes, we have had a +0.7ºC increase, but no, it’s not just because of CO2. CO2 causes about 0.2, then “something else” may have been adding +0.3 and water vapour feedback may have raised the resulting +0.5 into +0.7. When the “something else” forcing disappears or lowers down, we will cool, like we did between 1940 and 1970. And if it turns negative, we will reverse all the previous warming. But fortunately, thanks to CO2 we will still be a little warmer than in 1750.

Except we aren’t adding water vapour, Nylo. We couldn’t even if we tried.

Unless we warm the atmosphere first, that is. That’s why it’s called a feedback.

Oh wait, we ARE warming the atmosphere first. Silly me.

Moreover, the amount of water vapour drops rapidly with elevation as both temperature and pressure drop, while CO2 remains well mixed into the stratosphere, so that CO2 comes to dominate H2O well below the stratosphere. Its here that increasing CO2 raises the elevation at which energy can escape to space and cool the atmosphere, which means that that energy remains in the atmosphere longer before escaping, which means the atmosphere warms.

It’s really not that hard to understand