Calculating your carbon footprint - a load of bollocks

Oh, you can't have been listening. Ther are many mecahnisms of localised psitive feedback. to name buta few

- methane hydrate in the oceans released at a certain temperature along with CO2 to exacerbate warming.

- polar ice that extends further south and acts as a reflector to exacerbate global cooling.

- increased desertification causes loss of plant cover, thus reducing the ability to sink CO2.

Thats 3 positive feedback mechanisms

Then there are the impacts on global air and water circulation patterns, that causes localised changes that may in fact be contrary to the average global movement of temperature.

As to what triggers these changes, it can be solar activity, volcanic activity meteorite impact or burning lots of stuff.

Whatever you want to think, the fact remains that CO2 is a strong infra red absorber, and an excess of it in the atmosphere will reduce re-radiation of heat at night.

Whatever you want to think, there is absolutely no doubt that atmospheric CO2 is increasing, and that the amount its increasing correlates extremely well with world consumption of carbon based fuels.

What is in contention, are the other complex interrelated mechanisms that come into play when temperatures start to change. Some of these are broadly negative feedback, acting to stabilise temperature: others are positive feedback mechanisms, exacerbating the initial inputs.

Refining these parts of the global model is where climatology is right now: Arguing about whether its happening at all, or if it is, its not our fault, is just a political and economic issue.

Not at all. You statement is about as sensible as saying that maybe its the rain that causes the clouds, as all the rain evoporates and forms clouds.

Annual variations of that order of magnitude are statistically insginificant: plenty of mechanisms within the models can account for that. My guess is that arctic ice has melted to a huge extent, and dumped a load of cold water elsewhere than the poles.

Consider a bowl of water with an ice cube in it. At the start, you have a lot of warm water and one cold spot. The ice cube. 'Average' (by area) temperatures are high. The cube melts, lowering the average temperature. But in fact the total heat in the system has increased due to absorption from the room..

If we measured the total heat in the ecosphere, rather than the average temperature, it might be a very different story.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher
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Typical power staion generates at about 25-30% (gas turbine) up to maybe

30-40% (coal or well made oil fired)

Nuclear is not any more efficient: it just doesn't release carbon dioxide.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I think that is correlated with several things: firstly a altogether slower thames due to muck and structures in it, and secondly some hard winters due to possibly a volcanic eruption somewhere.. and thirdly, a generally colder and pre-industrial climate.

and (2) what happened to the hole in

We found that we didn't need to use fluorocarbons and stopped using them. CFCS were banned

The hole repaired itself.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I doubt you have the capacity to understand how little I care what you think.

Still, before I killfile you, consider this; the greenhouse effect is a well known, properly characterised, scientifically demonstrable physical effect. Anthropogenic glbal warming is none of these things. Conflating the two is ignorant at best and seeking to decieve at worst. Which are you?

Reply to
Huge

The greenhouse effect is real, measurable, demonstrable. But "greenhouse effect" does not mean "anthropogenic global warming". Roger is either an idiot or seeking to deceive - either way he should be ignored.

Reply to
Huge

Roger is confused between the "greenhouse effect" (a real physical phenomenon discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896) and "anthropogenic global warming".

Reply to
Huge

We have been fixing the particulates in the atmosphere, for a few decades. You may have noticed a slight warming due to it.

Reply to
dennis

That's three *potential* local feedback mechanisms, none of which is man-made.

Who is to say the one isn't balanced by another?

No-one has disputed that, and in any case I never said it.

But that proves nothing. It is merely an observation, like the outside temperature here is 14 degC.

There was an ice-age in place about 20,000 years ago, whereby the Salutrians paddled in their kayaks from the south of France to mid north America, along the edge of the ice-cap. The science that backs this up is indisputable and it is not a supposition.

Subsequently, the planet warmed and the ice receded. But with probably only a million people on the planet, living a subsistence lifestyle, there was no human input whatsoever to the warming of the globe.

So what warmed the globe then, and why isn't it operating now?

I'm afraid that's an evasion.

The evidence is that CO2 lags 'global warming', and no-one now takes that part of Al Gore's alarmist film with any seriousness.

Stop guessing. So far, I haven't guessed anything, but reported the science.

Only if the bowl is below room temperature. If the room's at 4 degC and the bowl at 50 degC, there certainly won't be any net absorption from the room.

No, what we need to do is quantify all the effects. So far only one is known with any degree of certainty; there are many others that are known but unexplored, and possibly some currently unknown.

To focus on the one is essentially fraudulent.

Reply to
Terry Fields

Where does it say, incorrectly, CO2 is causing the greenhouse effect? Most of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapour and methane not CO2. Ask a climatologist how much of the greenhouse effect is water and be shocked by the answer.

Reply to
dennis

This is "complete s**te". the fact that you have heard of clathrates does not make them responsible for regular and rapid *localised* positive feedback.

Ibid.

Ditto.

You may now go back to clutching at straws.

Reply to
Steve Firth

ditto.

You haven't mentioned any science at all, nor seemingly posted any responses to my quoting e.g. from the Met Office web site, so please don't parrot phrases like "(the) science hat you are unsuccessfully trying to wear".

You proposed it, I don't have to prove a negative. You prove the positive - that's how science works.

CO2 is the one effect that has been heavily if badly researched, of the many mechanisms that exist. That doesn't mean it is the most important, as I said elsewhere, using Met Office publications to back up my statement.

Feel free to quote any science that supports your statement.

Thanks, but science isn't suppositions, reasonable or otherwise.

Christ...because the experimentation is costly. You can't do cosmic ray flux measurements with a Blue Peter approach.

I think that point whooshed.

Argumentum ad populem. No place in science.

Apart from an almost-irrelevant Wikipedia reference, and personal prediliction for being warm, what science do you have to support your position - I have seen none at all. And you have totally failed to counter my science-founded points. Do you wish to continue this non-exchange any further?

Reply to
Terry Fields

My findings too. I tried to post founded statements, but he's ignored them in favour of populist arguments and personal feelings. Hardly scientific.

Reply to
Terry Fields

1/. They are not potential, they are actual. The only doubt is how much effect they have. 2/. You cannot balance two positives..they are on the same side of the scales.

I am beginning to doubt your ability to understand science at all.

Never said what? I made no assertions about what you said, merely pointed out that the greenhouse effect is largely based on what the lay public term 'scientific fact'

Science never *proves* anything. I am more convinced you don't understand science and its methods at all.

I am constructing a chain of logic. Man burns fuel, fuel makes CO2. Co2 is an infrared absorber, ergo man causes changes in the infra red absorption of the atmosphere, which, given that the incident sunlight is in the visible, but the main heat loss is in the infra red inevitably leads to a greater retention of heat by the planet.

Now, do you disagree with that?

Sure it iognores the levels of incident radiation and a plethora of other effects, but that is always has been and always will be the main thrust of the anthropogenic climate change argument. Do you refute that that is a valid chain of logic based on factual data?

That isn't science: science is about the construction of hypotheses and the testing thereof. That is factual data, as nears as we can have 'facts;' about the past.

The sun, stupid. The are fluctations in solar output, and there are other issues..the magnetic flux variation of the world which affects the way the solar wind goes, and volcanoes and other causes of dust can be triggers..what is more worrying, is that it seems now, from temperature data on a long timescale, that the climate 'flips' between various states: ther eare positive feedback elements in there, and changes can be rapid and large once certain thresholds are reached.

Not at all. We are talking cause and effect: Just the samae. Is CO2 the result or the cause, of global warming?

The horrifying possibility that is looking stronger by the minute, is that in facts its both.

Which leads to a nightmare positive feedback scenario. CO2 causes temperature rise: that leads to release of CO2 from the oceans, and plant destruction, leading to more CO2 and less being 'fixed' and the climate rushes along to a point where seal levels rise, most land plant life is extinguished, along with most animal life, reaching a new balance where marine photosynthsesis and e.g. shellfish abound, laying down carbonates and organic muds that sink, form rocks, and remove CO2 gradually..over the next ten million years or so.

Of course if it gets too hot, there would be a permanent Venus like cloud cover and most life would cease..

That is not proven. Its more disinformation.

No, you have reported a lot of pseudo scientific opinion.

That was the assumption. Stop raising straw men. You know what I mean. If you dont know, you are a bigger fool than you appear to be.

Not if we are trying to establish whether global warming is a fact or not. We need to measure *total heat*, which may absolutely NOT correspond to average surface temperatures of the earth at all.

All that melting ice doesn't cool the sea surface temperature at all. It goes way down deep, and does things like drive the gulf stream. Stellites dont measure deep sea temperatures..

So far only one is

I agree, when someone is dying of cancer, it is fraudulent to not focus on the splinter in his left toe. That could after all - to a completely unscientific mind- easily be the cause of death....

In the final analysis, you need to really answer three or for questions honestly to yourself.

1/. Is the world getting warmer: The answer is yes, it is. To a level we haven't seen before probably in human history. Geologically, its been this hot before, if not hotter, but what lived on earth then doesn't live on Earth now. Largely. 2/. Is the effect likely to be a minor and slow one? the answer is no it isn't: all the historical evidence shows that climate change happens swiftly over decades, not over centuries. 3/. Irrespective of whether its man made or not, is this something we should be trying to do something about or not? The evidence suggests that if we don't, we are in for a tough time irrespective of the cause.. 4/. Are the current ecological and green movement and the government measures that are being proposed effective and likely to solve the problem? The answer is they are as much use a throwing a cupful of water at a volcano.

In fact, ecobollox is a smokescreen, designed to lull the public into a sense of security, because the governments have less clue than anyone how to proceed. Its also a handy source of taxes.

However, because ecobollox is bollox, does not imply that global warming on a vast scale isn't happening: And whether or not mankind is implicated in it, is utterly irrelevant in the decisions on whether we should in fact attempt to do something about it.

Carbon emissions will come down, simply because the global costs of carbon fuel are now exceeding the costs of alternatives - especially nuclear power.

The current worldwide recession - probably a decade of stagnation in economic terms - buys us a decade or so of time to find alternative energy sources. Managing climate in a micro or macro scale is not beyond our abilities. The task is to identify the most efficient way to achieve it.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The message from Huge contains these words:

For heavens sake get back out of the gutter Huge.

Reply to
Roger

The message from Terry Fields contains these words:

You know someone who was there and can vouch for this tall tale?

Reply to
Roger

The message from Terry Fields contains these words:

snip

Just for the record very little of what you have been saying could be classed as science if you apply the same test to what you say as you do to what I have said.

Your claim that CO2/global warming is a myth is entirely unscientific as is your subsequent claim that it is irrelevant and/or may be masked by other factors. If the greenhouse effect is real then reducing atmospheric CO2 will mean that the Earth will be cooler than it otherwise would have been. Likewise increasing CO2 will mean that the Earth will be be warmer than it otherwise would have been.

snip

But these 15000 are the bulk of the 17000 you claimed were already involved.

snip

Not a latin tag I have come across before but looking for it did point me in the direction of another that seems to fit both Huge and, to a lesser extent you - Argumentum ad hominem.

"An argumentum ad populum (Latin: "appeal to the people"), in logic, is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or all people believe it; it alleges that "If many believe so, it is so.""

Not exactly appropriate to my opinion of the majority wanting to live in warmth rather than cold but entirely appropriate to the dedicated band of fundamentalist denyers who refuse to accept the possibility of climate change.

snip.

Reply to
Roger

On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:27:44 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields wrote this:-

"Minor" detail - it has not been shown to be flawed.

is a good introduction to this subject from 2007.

"The lag between temperature and CO2. (Gore?s got it right.)

"When I give talks about climate change, the questi "'In your movie, you display a timeline of temperature and compared to CO2 levels over a 600,000-year period as reconstructed from ice core samples. You indicate that this is conclusive proof of the link of increased CO2 emissions and global warming. A closer examination of these facts reveals something entirely different. I have an article from Science magazine which I will put into the record at the appropriate time that explains that historically, a rise in CO2 concentrations did not precede a rise in temperatures, but actually lagged temperature by 200 to 1,000 years. CO2 levels went up after the temperature rose. The temperature appears to drive CO2, not vice versa. On this point, Mr. Vice President, you?re not just off a little. You?re totally wrong.'

"Of course, those who've been paying attention will recognize that Gore is not wrong at all. This subject has been very well addressed in numerous places. Indeed, guest contributor Jeff Severinghaus addressed this in one of our very first RealClimate posts, way back in 2004. Still, the question does keep coming up, and Jeff recently received a letter asking about this. His exchange with the letter writer is reproduced in full at the end of this post. Below is my own take on the subject.

"First of all, saying 'historically' is misleading, because Barton is actually talking about CO2 changes on very long (glacial-interglacial) timescales. On historical timescales, CO2 has definitely led, not lagged, temperature. But in any case, it doesn't really matter for the problem at hand (global warming). We know why CO2 is increasing now, and the direct radiative effects of CO2 on climate have been known for more than 100 years. In the absence of human intervention CO2 does rise and fall over time, due to exchanges of carbon among the biosphere, atmosphere, and ocean and, on the very longest timescales, the lithosphere (i.e. rocks, oil reservoirs, coal, carbonate rocks). The rates of those exchanges are now being completely overwhelmed by the rate at which we are extracting carbon from the latter set of reservoirs and converting it to atmospheric CO2. No discovery made with ice cores is going to change those basic facts.

"Second, the idea that there might be a lag of CO2 concentrations behind temperature change (during glacial-interglacial climate changes) is hardly new to the climate science community. Indeed, Claude Lorius, Jim Hansen and others essentially predicted this finding fully 17 years ago, in a landmark paper that addressed the cause of temperature change observed in Antarctic ice core records, well before the data showed that CO2 might lag temperature. In that paper (Lorius et al., 1990), they say that:

"'changes in the CO2 and CH4 content have played a significant part in the glacial-interglacial climate changes by amplifying, together with the growth and decay of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, the relatively weak orbital forcing'

"What is being talked about here is influence of the seasonal radiative forcing change from the earth's wobble around the sun (the well established Milankovitch theory of ice ages), combined with the positive feedback of ice sheet albedo (less ice = less reflection of sunlight = warmer temperatures) and greenhouse gas concentrations (higher temperatures lead to more CO2 leads to warmer temperatures). Thus, both CO2 and ice volume should lag temperature somewhat, depending on the characteristic response times of these different components of the climate system. Ice volume should lag temperature by about 10,000 years, due to the relatively long time period required to grow or shrink ice sheets. CO2 might well be expected to lag temperature by about 1000 years, which is the timescale we expect from changes in ocean circulation and the strength of the "carbon pump" (i.e. marine biological photosynthesis) that transfers carbon from the atmosphere to the deep ocean.

"Several recent papers have indeed established that there is lag of CO2 behind temperature. We don't really know the magnitude of that lag as well as Barton implies we do, because it is very challenging to put CO2 records from ice cores on the same timescale as temperature records from those same ice cores, due to the time delay in trapping the atmosphere as the snow is compressed into ice (the ice at any time will always be younger older than the gas bubbles it encloses, and the age difference is inherently uncertain). Still, the best published calculations do show values similar to those quoted by Barton (presumably, taken from this paper by Monnin et al. (2001), or this one by Caillon et al. (2003)). But the calculations can only be done well when the temperature change is large, notably at glacial terminations (the gradual change from cold glacial climate to warm interglacial climate). Importantly, it takes more than 5000 years for this change to occur, of which the lag is only a small fraction (indeed, one recently submitted paper I'm aware of suggests that the lag is even less than 200 years). So it is not as if the temperature increase has already ended when CO2 starts to rise. Rather, they go very much hand in hand, with the temperature continuing to rise as the the CO2 goes up. In other words, CO2 acts as an amplifier, just as Lorius, Hansen and colleagues suggested.

"Now, it there is a minor criticism one might level at Gore for his treatment of this subject in the film (as we previously pointed out in our review). As it turns out though, correcting this would actually further strengthen Gore's case, rather than weakening it."

Feel free to read the rest and follow the references.

Reply to
David Hansen

On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:19:05 +0100 someone who may be Roger wrote this:-

Indeed. They must all be part of the grand conspiracy to promote false knowledge about climate change we hear so much about from the antis. Subsequent postings in the thread did not provided a convincing argument about the "silence" of these "15000 scientists". It would be a most remarkable feat if the IPCC had managed to get just the 2000 scientists involved in the "conspiracy" and at the same time muzzle the 15000 not involved in the conspiracy. A most remarkable feat.

On the "science" point in this sub-thread the article at

is worth reading, this is the first few paragraphs

"I often get emails from scientifically trained people who are looking for a straightforward calculation of the global warming that greenhouse gas emissions will bring. What are the physics equations and data on gases that predict just how far the temperature will rise? A natural question, when public expositions of the greenhouse effect usually present it as a matter of elementary physics. These people, typically senior engineers, get suspicious when experts seem to evade their question. Some try to work out the answer themselves (Lord Monckton for example) and complain that the experts dismiss their beautiful logic.

"The engineers' demand that the case for dangerous global warming be proved with a page or so of equations does sound reasonable, and it has a long history. The history reveals how the nature of the climate system inevitably betrays a lover of simple answers.

"The simplest approach to calculating the Earth's surface temperature would be to treat the atmosphere as a single uniform slab, like a pane of glass suspended above the surface (much as we see in elementary explanations of the 'greenhouse' effect). But the equations do not yield a number for global warming that is even remotely plausible. You can't work with an average, squashing together the way heat radiation goes through the dense, warm, humid lower atmosphere with the way it goes through the thin, cold, dry upper atmosphere. Already in the 19th century, physicists moved on to a 'one-dimensional' model. That is, they pretended that the atmosphere was the same everywhere around the planet, and studied how radiation was transmitted or absorbed as it went up or down through a column of air stretching from ground level to the top of the atmosphere. This is the study of 'radiative transfer,' an elegant and difficult branch of theory. You would figure how sunlight passed through each layer of the atmosphere to the surface, and how the heat energy that was radiated back up from the surface heated up each layer, and was shuttled back and forth among the layers, or escaped into space.

"When students learn physics, they are taught about many simple systems that bow to the power of a few laws, yielding wonderfully precise answers: a page or so of equations and you're done. Teachers rarely point out that these systems are plucked from a far larger set of systems that are mostly nowhere near so tractable. The one-dimensional atmospheric model can't be solved with a page of mathematics. You have to divide the column of air into a set of levels, get out your pencil or computer, and calculate what happens at each level. Worse, carbon dioxide and water vapor (the two main greenhouse gases) absorb and scatter differently at different wavelengths. So you have to make the same long set of calculations repeatedly, once for each section of the radiation spectrum."

The rest of the article is worth reading too.

Reply to
David Hansen

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:10:32 +0100 someone who may be Roger wrote this:-

I also have yet to notice a single link from any of these sayings to a reference. It is entirely possible that there is one (or more) somewhere which I have missed, in which case I apologise, but so far all I have seen are vague claims like the "Met Office web site".

Reply to
David Hansen

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Terry Fields saying something like:

Am I the only one that finds Iain Stewart an annoying git?

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

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