[mike777]

"The Earth’s oceans have never been this far beyond the bounds of normal.

New data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that Earth’s oceans reached a level last month not seen since humans have been keeping comprehensive records. Global ocean temperatures in August 2014 warmed to “the largest departure from average for any month on record” according to a NOAA statement. The previous record was set just two months ago, in June 2014."

Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still too short to adequately understand how the ocean will change and how that will affect climate.

[PassedOut]

Scientific American published this today: World May Blow Through Global Warming Pollution Limit in 30 Years

Quote

Human activities added 1,430 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere from 1870 to 2013. That's 45 percent of the total carbon budget the world has to maintain a rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. At this rate of emissions, the world will hit its carbon quota in the next three decades.

Conservatives want to implement a carbon tax to compensate for the externalities and allow the market to adapt. But time is not on our side, and if we don't act soon we may have no choice but to employ Ed's solution of a "government fiat."

[mike777]

PassedOut, on 2014-September-22, 11:25, said:

Scientific American published this today: World May Blow Through Global Warming Pollution Limit in 30 Years


Conservatives want to implement a carbon tax to compensate for the externalities and allow the market to adapt. But time is not on our side, and if we don't act soon we may have no choice but to employ Ed's solution of a "government fiat."

Ya we have discussed a carbon tax here for years and years. The congress and the president seem no closer to even having a vote on it. At this point it may be decades away.

I will stick with my prediction that by 2020 the science around solar energy will solved to the point this will help a lot with man made warming issues. In other words the predictions in your article will be incorrect.

[PassedOut]

mike777, on 2014-September-22, 17:59, said:

I will stick with my prediction that by 2020 the science around solar energy will solved to the point this will help a lot with man made warming issues. In other words the predictions in your article will be incorrect.

If you read more carefully, you'll see that the article presents a calculation, not a prediction: On the present trajectory, the milestone of 3,200 gigatons of carbon dioxide will be hit in 30 years. The authors would prefer a downward change in that trajectory.

You predict that cheap solar power will push the trajectory downward by 2020, six years from now. We'll see.

There are a number of wilderness camping areas in our neck of the woods. Most campers are very careful to leave nothing behind when striking camp. Some, though, leave a bunch of refuse around for others to clean up.

[mike777]

You predict that cheap solar power will push the trajectory downward by 2020, six years from now. We'll see.



yes...

Of course I repeated a prediction that in 2030 a computer brain will = a human brain in intelligence measure.
that in 2020 we will map the hardware(not software) of the human brain. /But in 2030 we will map the software of the human brain.

[Aberlour10]

How will London look like in the year 2100?

Whats your predict?

A) Venice of the North




or

B)




C ) So common like nowdays ;-)

[Daniel1960]

Very Nice. I choose C.

[Al_U_Card]

mike777, on 2014-September-22, 17:59, said:

I will stick with my prediction that by 2020 the science around solar energy will solved to the point this will help a lot with man made warming issues. In other words the predictions in your article will be incorrect.

They better giddy-up then, as the EROI appears to be way below what is actually needed to contribute effectively to our society's energy budget (to say nothing of future requirements to heat homes during the cold, cold winters to come...)

Just how well does solar comply with real energy needs?

[Al_U_Card]

Aberlour10, on 2014-September-23, 14:34, said:

How will London look like in the year 2100?

Whats your predict?

A) Venice of the North




or

B)




C ) So common like nowdays ;-)

or D) like it was in the fairly recent past (unlike either of the above pics)

[Lovera]

Actually is developing in Bari (Italy) a congress about climate change (22-25/9/14) in University of Bari where i work: this is the site http://www.els2014.eu/, thanks bye.

[Lovera]

In the hall of Old Central Post Office Building was presented also the "Isotope Ratio Infrared Spectrometer" by Thermo Scientific Delta Ray ( http://www.thermosci...tml?ca=deltaray ) . Ref. : adress Thermo Fisher Scientific , Strada Rivoltana Km.4, Rodano (Italia) C.A.P. 20090 Luca Simonotti (luca.simonotti@thermofisher.com Tel. phone number : +39 02 95059 1 fax +39 0295059256 mobile +39 3737444182 (my little contribution : let' save the habitat we live on).

[Daniel1960]

mike777, on 2014-September-20, 06:06, said:

"The Earth’s oceans have never been this far beyond the bounds of normal.

New data released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that Earth’s oceans reached a level last month not seen since humans have been keeping comprehensive records. Global ocean temperatures in August 2014 warmed to “the largest departure from average for any month on record” according to a NOAA statement. The previous record was set just two months ago, in June 2014."

Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still too short to adequately understand how the ocean will change and how that will affect climate.

It seems that the "missing heat" may not be stored in the deep oceans after all.
http://www.nasa.gov/...d/#.VDKvvPm2jp1

[PassedOut]

Daniel1960, on 2014-October-06, 12:09, said:

It seems that the "missing heat" may not be stored in the deep oceans after all.
http://www.nasa.gov/...d/#.VDKvvPm2jp1

From your link:

Quote

Coauthor Felix Landerer of JPL noted that during the same period warming in the top half of the ocean continued unabated, an unequivocal sign that our planet is heating up. Some recent studies reporting deep-ocean warming were, in fact, referring to the warming in the upper half of the ocean but below the topmost layer, which ends about 0.4 mile (700 meters) down.

Landerer also is a coauthor of another paper in the same journal issue on 1970-2005 ocean warming in the Southern Hemisphere. Before Argo floats were deployed, temperature measurements in the Southern Ocean were spotty, at best. Using satellite measurements and climate simulations of sea level changes around the world, the new study found the global ocean absorbed far more heat in those 35 years than previously thought -- a whopping 24 to 58 percent more than early estimates.

[Al_U_Card]

"Using satellite measurements and climate simulations of sea level changes around the world..."

Serial data molesters. They don't find the "missing" heat in the upper ocean so they say it is hiding in the deep ocean. When that doesn't pan out, re-analyse the data, add some computer model sims of SLR to proxy heat content....whaaaa?....and then declare the missing heat found!

So many climate research grant applications to fill, so little time...

[PassedOut]

Scientific American weighed in today: Mystery of Ocean Heat Deepens as Climate Changes

Quote

By 2004, they had launched Argo ("swift" in Greek), a network of 3,000 floating devices spread out throughout the world. The devices record the temperatures down to 6,500 feet, where only the deepest divers, like sperm whales and great white sharks, visit.

Scientists are decoding the oceans using these instruments. The oceans are major players in the climate system, absorbing about 90 percent of the heat of global warming. To understand global warming, scientists must first understand the oceans.

"When we think about global warming, what we should really thinking about, to be honest, is ocean warming," said Paul Durack, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Improved data about the oceans from the Argo floats caused a splash this week as two studies in Nature Climate Change challenged conventional thinking.

Durack and his colleagues at LLNL found that the Southern Hemisphere's oceans have warmed at a higher rate over the past 35 years than previously thought.

If that is true, the repercussions would be huge. It would mean that scientists have missed accounting for a portion of the heat resulting from human emissions. Scientists have calculated that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations would warm the planet by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. Durack's results would place the planet's sensitivity to CO2 toward the higher end of this range.

A second study, also published in Nature Climate Change, found that the deepest parts of the ocean, beyond 6,500 feet, have not warmed by very much in the past decade. Much of global warming's impacts are playing out closest to the surface, said Joshua Willis, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-author of the study.

No serious person doubts that putting billions of tons of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere each year will cause more heat to be trapped. Scientists are getting a handle on where that trapped heat is being stored.

[Al_U_Card]

PassedOut, on 2014-October-07, 09:01, said:

Scientific American weighed in today: Mystery of Ocean Heat Deepens as Climate Changes


No serious person doubts that putting billions of tons of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere each year will cause more heat to be trapped. Scientists are getting a handle on where that trapped heat is being stored.

Hmnnnn SciAm, you say? If by " beyond 6,500 feet, have not warmed by very much in the past decade" they mean "has cooled" then we start to get an idea of their agenda.


W. Llovel, J. K.Willis, F.W. Landererand and I. Fukumori

Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE2387 [link]

Abstract. As the dominant reservoir of heat uptake in the climate system, the world’s oceans provide a critical measure of global climate change. Here, we infer deep-ocean warming in the context of global sea-level rise and Earth’s energy budget between January 2005 and December 2013. Direct measurements of ocean warming above 2,000m depth explain about 32% of the observed annual rate of global mean sea-level rise. Over the entire water column, independent estimates of ocean warming yield a contribution of 0.77 +/- 0.28mmyr-1 in sea-level rise and agree with the upper-ocean estimate to within the estimated uncertainties. Accounting for additional possible systematic uncertainties, the deep ocean (below 2,000 m) contributes -0.13+/- 0.72mmyr-1 to global sea-level rise and -0.08 +/- 0.43Wm2 to Earth’s energy balance. The net warming of the ocean implies an energy imbalance for the Earth of 0.64 +/- 0.44Wm-2 from 2005 to 2013.





Anything to do with modeled values flies in the face of measurement. Why? Well...


An essay by Dr. R. G. Brown (Duke University) on why climate models are...well...of no value when it comes to using them to "project climate scenarios" (to use the officially sanctioned term).

"Here’s the climate model argument in a nutshell. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Increasing it will without any reasonable doubt cause some warming all things being equal (that is, linearizing the model in our minds before we even begin to write the computation!) The Earth’s climate is clearly at least locally pretty stable, so we’ll start by making this a fundamental principle (stated clearly in the talk above) — The Earth’s Climate is Stable By Default. This requires minimizing or blinding ourselves to any evidence to the contrary, hence the MWP and LIA must go away. Check. This also removes the pesky problem of multiple attractors and the disappearance and appearance of old/new attractors (Lorenz, along with Poincaré [Jules Henri Poincaré], coined the very notion of attractors). Hurst-Kolmogorov statistics, punctuated equilibrium, and all the rest is nonlinear and non-deterministic, it has to go away. Check. None of the models therefore exhibit it (but the climate does!). They have been carefully written so that they cannot exhibit it!

Fine, so now we’re down to a single attractor, and it has to both be stable when nothing changes and change, linearly, when underlying driving parameters change. This requires linearizing all of the forcings and trivially coupling all of the feedbacks and then searching hard — as pointed out in the talk, very hard indeed! — for some forlorn and non-robust combination of the forcing parameters, some balance of CO2forcing, aerosol anti-forcing, water vapor feedback, and luck that balances this teetering pen of a system on a metaphorical point and tracks a training set climate for at least some small but carefully selected reference period, naturally, the single period where the balance they discover actually works and one where the climate is actively warming. Since they know that CO2 is the cause, the parameter sets they search around are all centered on “CO2 is the cause” (fixed) plus tweaking the feedbacks until this sort of works.

Now they crank up CO2, and because CO2 is the cause of more warming, they have successfully built a linearized, single attractor system that does not easily admit nonlinear jumps or appearances and disappearances of attractors so that the attractor itself must move monotonically to warmer when CO2 is increasing. They run the model and — gasp! — increasing CO2 makes the whole system warmer!

Now, they haven’t really gotten rid of the pesky attractor problem. They discover when they run the models that in spite of their best efforts they are still chaotic! The models jump all over the place, started with only tiny changes in parametric settings or initial conditions. Sometimes a run just plain cools, in spite of all the additional CO2. Sometimes they heat up and boil over, making Venus Earth and melting the polar caps. The variance they obtain is utterly incorrect, because after all, they balanced the parameter space on a point with opposing forcings in order to reproduce the data in the reference period and one of many prices they have to pay is that the forcings in opposition have the wrong time constants and autocorrelation and the climate attractors are far too shallow, allowing for vast excursions around the old slowly varying attractor instead of selecting a new attractor from the near-infinity of possibilities (one that might well be more efficient at dissipating energy) and favoring its growth at the expense of a far narrower old attractor. But even so, new attractors appear and disappear and instead of getting a prediction of the Earth’s climate they get an irrelevantly wide shotgun blast of possible future climates (that is, as noted above, probably not even distributed correctly, or at least we haven’t the slightest reason to think that it would be). Anyone who looked at an actual computed trajectory would instantly reject it as being a reasonable approximation to the actual climate — variance as much as an order of magnitude too large, wrong time constants, oversensitive to small changes in forcings or discrete events like volcanoes.

So they bring on the final trick. They average over all of these climates. Say what? Each climate is the result of a physics computation. One with horrible and probably wrong approximations galore in the “physics” determining (for example) what clouds do in a cell from one timestep to the next, but at least one can argue that the computation is in fact modeling an actual climate trajectory in a Universe where that physics and scale turned out to be adequate. The average of the many climates is nothing at all. In the short run, this trick is useful in weather forecasting as long as one doesn’t try to use it much longer than the time required for the set of possible trajectories to smear out and cover the phase space to where the mean is no longer meaningful. This is governed by e.g. the Lyupanov exponents of the chaotic processes. For a while, the trajectories form a predictive bundle, and then they diverge and don’t. Bigger better computers, finer grained computations, can extend the time before divergence slowly, but we’re talking at most weeks, even with the best of modern tools.

In the long run, there isn’t the slightest reason — no, not even a fond hope — that this averaging will in any way be predictive of the weather or climate. There is indeed a near certainty that it will not be, as it isn’t in any other chaotic system studied so why should it be so in this one? But hey! The overlarge variance goes away! Now the variance of the average of the trajectories looks to the eye like it isn’t insanely out of scale with the observed variance of the climate, neatly hiding the fact that the individual trajectories are obviously wrong and that you aren’t comparing the output of your model to the real climate at all, you are comparing the average of the output of your model to the real climate when the two are not the same thing!

Incidentally, at this point the assertion that the results of the climate models are determined by physics becomes laughable. If I average over the trajectories observed in a chaotic oscillator, does the result converge to the actual trajectory? Seriously dudes, get a grip!

Oh, sorry, it isn’t quite the final trick. They actually average internally over climate runs, which at least is sort of justifiable as an almost certainly non-convergent sort of Monte Carlo computation of the set of accessible/probable trajectories, even though averaging over the set when the set doesn’t have the right probability distribution of outcomes or variance or internal autocorrelation is a bit pointless, but they end up finding that some of the models actually come out, after all of this, far too close to the actual climate, which sadly is not warming and hence which then makes it all too easy for the public to enquire why, exactly, we’re dropping a few trillion dollars per decade solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

So they then average over all of the average trajectories! That’s right folks, they take some 36 climate models (not the “twenty” erroneously cited in the presentation, I mean come on, get your facts right even if the estimate for the number of independent models in CMIP5 is more like seven). Some of these run absurdly hot, so hot that if you saw even the average model trajectory by itself you would ask why it is being included at all. Others as noted are dangerously close to a reality that — if proven — means that you lose your funding (and then, Walmart looms). So they average them together, and present the resulting line as if that is a “physics based” “projection” of the future climate. Because they keep the absurdly hot, they balance the nearly realistically cool and hide them under a safely rapidly warming “central estimate”, and get the double bonus that by forming the envelope of all of the models they can create a lower bound (and completely, utterly unfounded) “error estimate” that is barely large enough to reach the actual climate trajectory, so far.

Meh. Just Meh. This is actively insulting, an open abuse of the principles of science, logic, and computer modeling all three. The average of failed models is not a successful model. The average of deterministic microtrajectories is not a deterministic microtrajectory. A microtrajectory numerically generated at a scale inadequate to solve a nonlinear chaotic problem is most unlikely to represent anything like the actual microtrajectory of the actual system. And finally, the system itself realizes at most one of the possible future trajectories available to it from initial conditions subject to the butterfly effect that we cannot even accurately measure at the granularity needed to initialize the computation at the inadequate computational scale we can afford to use.

That’s what Goreham didn’t point out in his talk this time — but should. The GCMs are the ultimate shell game, hiding the pea under an avalanche of misapplied statistical reasoning that nobody but some mathematicians and maverick physicists understand well enough to challenge, and they just don’t seem to give a, uh, “flip”. With a few very notable exceptions, of course.

Rgb

[PassedOut]

It's easier to prepare for more wars than it is to reduce CO2 emissions: Pentagon: global warming will change how US military trains and goes to war

Quote

The Pentagon’s strategic planners have for years viewed climate change as a “threat multiplier”– worsening old conflicts and potentially provoking new clashes over migration and shortages of food and water in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and opening up new military challenges in a melting Arctic.

But with Monday’s report, climate change moved from potential threat to an immediate factor in a wide range of operational and budgeting decisions.

“It makes it a reality that climate change indeed is a risk today, and we need to plan, programme and budget for it now and into the future,” said Sherri Goodman, chief executive of the military advisory board, a group of former generals and other high-ranking officers that studies US national security.

It probably shouldn't shock us that the representatives in the US Congress who pretend in public that climate change isn't happening support these military plans nevertheless.

[PassedOut]

Because models are the essential tool for projecting future measurements from historical data, it's important to incorporate refinements as we go along. Here is an interesting piece from the BBC: Global climate models have underestimated the amount of CO2 being absorbed by plants, according to new research

Quote

Scientists say that between 1901 and 2010, living things absorbed 16% more of the gas than previously thought.

The authors say it explains why models consistently overestimated the growth rate of carbon in the atmosphere.

But experts believe the new calculation is unlikely to make a difference to global warming predictions.

The research has been published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I can say that Constance does her part in keeping plants thriving.

[Al_U_Card]

"The authors say it explains why models consistently overestimated the growth rate of carbon in the atmosphere.

But experts believe the new calculation is unlikely to make a difference to global warming predictions."

Of course not...

Meanwhile, considering updating the settled science, how about:




The shorter more hockeystick reconstructions included upside-down proxies as well as contaminated endpoints and did not include the warmer times past. This, too, will not likely change the global warming projections...

[PassedOut]

Global Summary Information - September 2014

Quote

September global temperature reaches record high;

January–September global temperature ties as record highest

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for September 2014 was the highest for September since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 38th consecutive September with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average global temperature for September occurred in 1976.

Just the facts.