The Conversation

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   Mark Matthews

   General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

   Guys, this is not the forum for science (it states this very clearly at the top of the article).

   This article makes the very salient point that the opinion pages of a important national newspaper have become infected with pseudoscience and obfuscation of the facts and this is doing nothing but distorting the debate.

   Dr John Nicol, you know full well as a scientist that the correct forum for debate is the peer-review process. Instead you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to argue…

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   Guys, this is not the forum for science (it states this very clearly at the top of the article).

   This article makes the very salient point that the opinion pages of a important national newspaper have become infected with pseudoscience and obfuscation of the facts and this is doing nothing but distorting the debate.

   Dr John Nicol, you know full well as a scientist that the correct forum for debate is the peer-review process. Instead you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to argue scientific points in the blogosphere. If you have valid evidence that the theory of AGW is invalid, then publish through a respected journal... get the climate experts to look at it. That's how good science works. Otherwise all we have is a load of hot air, lots of numbers, lots of "facts", but nothing we can trust.

   I am still struggling to believe that half the arguments from the AGW denialists that I read that "disprove" the theory of AGW and its future implications have been somehow missed by the experts in the field. "Oh whoops, we forgot water vapour everyone... should have listened to that Monckton chap after all". "Silly me, I didn't realise that plants need CO2... Let's call all this off and go and plant more veggies" I mean really???

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      John Nicol

      (logged in via Facebook)

      Yes, Mark, I know the rules here as stated, and was not I believe the one who started including some claims of what science is correct or otherwise. However, I had no quarrel with its being introduced since it is quite illogical to debar such discussion when one is debating whether the Australian has given balanced coverage to two sides of the debate and whether what they have allowed to be said in their paper was right or wrong.

      If one is going into serious debate I accept the value of open…

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      Yes, Mark, I know the rules here as stated, and was not I believe the one who started including some claims of what science is correct or otherwise. However, I had no quarrel with its being introduced since it is quite illogical to debar such discussion when one is debating whether the Australian has given balanced coverage to two sides of the debate and whether what they have allowed to be said in their paper was right or wrong.

      If one is going into serious debate I accept the value of open publication, but as a retired physicist I can see nothing wrong with making some statments into the opublic forum which I believe help to correct some of the wild claims made by many people in the climate industry. The claims of drought and flood and increased cyclone activity are made in the public forum with no substantiation whatsoever, beyond the output from fairly ill defined models, just as the Victorian bushfires were blamed on global warming. There is absolutely no use in one side of the debate simply saying publicly that these are caused by carbon dioxide and others on the cross benches saying no they are not. The climate scientists make a meal of that label and publishing in the "climate" literature, when the whole of the basis for the global warming claims and the conveniently labelled "Climate Change" - meaning anthropogenic Global Warming, is tied up with the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide. I have spent a lot of time discussing the literature behind the assumption that CO2 provides this magic forcing, with persons in the various climate units, but they are basically unable to consider the issues because they do not have the appropriate background and provide "papers" to support their case which are nothing more than popular articles from a monthly science magazine or Scientific American. So yes, one needs to work in both areas, in trying to maintain some sense of proportion in the minds of the public and preparing material for publications. The public are not going to see most of the published articles. They are certainly not going to be able to understand the physics and mathematics which goes into the full details, but may well be able to grasp a few ideas about the behaviour of radiation and circulation. You may scoff if you like at any one daring to question the climatologists, as not having thought through this or that feature, but until one of them, just one, is prepared to nominate one or more papers, beyond Arrhenius, Callendar and Kiehl and Trenberth, which substantiates the claims for carbon dioxide, it is difficult to accept their arguments. Particularly when one realises that they will not even speak to a spectroscopist who goes to a conference and explains the physics of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is a fact. Andy Pitman's (UNSW Climate Unit Head) response to the question as to how carbon dioxide does what it does in the face of the spectroscopy which shows it can't is "Well it is the only thing which increased. What else could it be " - referring to the one period of correlation between increasing carbon dioxide and increasing global temperatures from 1979 to 1998. So yes, there is indeed a lot of evidence to suggest that they have omitted a lot of basic science as is clearly evident when opne reads the IPCC AR4 report and cited papers from it, most of which are ecological and not the physics of the green house effect. You may continue to be surprised if you like, but it is of concern to me that there a lot of holes in thieir physics and this is easily demonstrated. A good example is the warming of the upper troposphere in the tropics which their models showed was a definitive feature of the Green House Effect, to the extent that it was referred to as the "signature" of the GHE. In 25 years of searching this has not been found. Has any one looked into the issue to try to find out why? No, they simply claim that it is still there, hidden by some mysterious feature of the upper atmosphere. Do they consider other options for the warming during the 19 years between 1979 and 1998, when the temperature failed to follow their predictions for the past 13 years with carbon dioxide still increasing? No, they simply speculate that aerosols are masking the warming from carbon dioxide. Do they listen when people find feaures in the warming which might point to an other mechanism such as variations in cosmic rays under the influence of solar changes. No, even though their own plot of temperature changes over the earth show that the isotherms surrounding the quite small areas of maximum and minimum temperaure change over the past 30 years correspond to the magnetic North and South Poles. Just a coincidence perhaps?

      BTW, most serious discussions in physics at least, and I believe in most classicasl sciences such as mathematics, chemistry, geology, ...takes place intitially at conferences where discussions start in the sessions and carry on into the night. John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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         Chris O'Neill

         Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

         "until one of them, just one, is prepared to nominate one or more papers, beyond Arrhenius, Callendar and Kiehl and Trenberth, which substantiates the claims for carbon dioxide"

         Myhre, G., E.J. Highwood, K.P. Shine, and F. Stordal 1998. “New estimates of radiative forcing due to well mixed greenhouse gases.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2715-2718.

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            John Nicol

            (logged in via Facebook)

            Thanks Chris, I will try to get hold of that. Is it available on the net yet or could you shoot me a copy across by email without too much trouble?
            Otherwise I will go to the library of course.
            John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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   wilma western

   (logged in via email @bigpond.com)

   The above article like previous discussions of the Australian's opinion pieces and reporting on climate change clearly demonstrates the lengths reporters and denialist columnists will go to in order to discredit climate science and anyone who supports the mainstream climate science. Mistaken and distorted reporting of research is pointed out by the writers of the papers concerned but the Australian does not publish any correction . Qualifications and academic employment of denialists are frequently…

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   The above article like previous discussions of the Australian's opinion pieces and reporting on climate change clearly demonstrates the lengths reporters and denialist columnists will go to in order to discredit climate science and anyone who supports the mainstream climate science. Mistaken and distorted reporting of research is pointed out by the writers of the papers concerned but the Australian does not publish any correction . Qualifications and academic employment of denialists are frequently inaccurately stated but again corrections are not printed by the paper.This is repeated flouting of the paper's claimed ethics . The treatment of Tim Flannery reported above ( re his house on the Hawkesbury ) is outrageous and close to defamatory and the publication of a Google map with his house is not only an invasion of privacy but could even be seen as intimidatory in the present circumstances. Of course only a tiny proportion of the public read Conversation articles , slightly more form the audience of Media Watch . Add these groups together and you would have a considerably smaller group than the readership of The Australian . As Robert Manne argues in his recent Quarterly Essay, the Australian's influence is considerably wider than its immediate readership. This adds up to a big political and policy problem for Australia as recent polling shows. I'm not sure that a parliamentary media inquiry can do much to solve it but it possibly would enable some further counterbalancing of Murdoch media distortions.

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   stephen prowse

   (logged in via Twitter)

   I find the same type and style of polarising comments from the same protagonists tiresome and unhelpful in this debate. We all have personal bias and opinion as does the media. No one can stand up and say that they are providing an objective opinion, free from bias and vested interest, myself included. Surely we can accept a few realities. To a scientist with no climate background these seem to be:
   Global temperatures have risen over the last 100 years. There are some anomalies in the data and whether…

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   I find the same type and style of polarising comments from the same protagonists tiresome and unhelpful in this debate. We all have personal bias and opinion as does the media. No one can stand up and say that they are providing an objective opinion, free from bias and vested interest, myself included. Surely we can accept a few realities. To a scientist with no climate background these seem to be:
   Global temperatures have risen over the last 100 years. There are some anomalies in the data and whether temperatures will continue to rise remains to be seen.
   Sea levels also appear to have risen, again whether they continue to rise and by how much remains to be seen. Similarly with ocean acidity.
   The forecasts and based on complex models, hence the uncertainty. The contribution of greenhouse gas and human activity remains a hypothesis that cannot be tested. Correlation is not proof.
   Along with climate change we have a raft of challenging issues to address to move to a more sustainable culture including food security, water and soil conservation, biodiversity protection, population growth, infrastructure etc. Our current economic and political model seems to be failing us in the inability to seriously even consider these complex issues.
   So lets stop bickering over whether the Australian and the ABC are biased and put our minds to serious debate on the significant issues facing society.

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      Luke Monahan

      Software Engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

      Correlation is not proof, but multiple correlations from independent directions backed by solid theory constitutes a body of evidence -- one that most scientists of appropriate background (and plenty of other people) now accept points towards continued warming and sea level rise.

      You list obvious challenges facing humanity, but without honest reporting of scientific matters I can't see these ever being properly addressed. Wheras everyone and every media institution will have some bias, most try to recognise this and address it. Tim makes a good argument that in the case of the Australian they are taking a deliberate position and proselytising rather than making a serious attempt to report facts.

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   David Howard

   Home Duties (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

   I have read several articles on this topic and many seemed to quote the 97% figure, I decided to follow the link as to how the figure was arrived at

   Scientists Sent Survey 10,257
   Total Respondents 3146
   Respondents from US 2832
   Respondents from Canada 189
   Respondents outside US/Canada 125
   
   Respondents were asked to nominate/classify themselves by qualification (qualifications were not verified)

   Respondents Nominated as Climate Science with published papers 79
   Of those 79, those who believe human activity is a significant contributing factor
   in changing mean global temps 76

   I get 96.2% which is then rounded to 97%

   If we were to assume that the 79 was distributed evenly across the geography you could estimate that 3 climate scientists based outside North America participated in the survey.

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   Andy King

   Physics teacher (logged in via email @bigpond.com)

   It seems that the author of this article must agree with Bob Brown and Christine Milne's desire to see Australia limited to only those news outlets that agree with their position. Anytime anyone raises the voice of dissention they are villified and attempts are made to censor them. For people who believe in democracy and freedom of expression, this is reminiscent of fascism. To the scaremongers out there who say that we are all doomed if nothing is done about global warming, I ask you, "What difference with Australia's 5% reduction of 1 and a half% of CO2 emissions actually make?"

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   Timothy Curtin

   Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

   Re Derek Bolton who commented:

   "No-one's saying water vapour is not a GHG. That's a strawman of your making. And no-one is saying that all water vapour condenses out in a few weeks - only the excess. As you say, the relative humidity will tend to stay constant regardless of what we pump into the air. But the absolute humidity therefore rises as the temperature does, and it's the absolute humidity that matters for its GHG potential. That's why it is a feedback, not a forcing. But you only pretended…

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   Re Derek Bolton who commented:

   "No-one's saying water vapour is not a GHG. That's a strawman of your making. And no-one is saying that all water vapour condenses out in a few weeks - only the excess. As you say, the relative humidity will tend to stay constant regardless of what we pump into the air. But the absolute humidity therefore rises as the temperature does, and it's the absolute humidity that matters for its GHG potential. That's why it is a feedback, not a forcing. But you only pretended not to know that, right?"

   Derek, you can be very tedious.

   I have cited here the recent papers by Meinshausen, Raper, and Wigley which do indeed say "water vapour is not a GHG" - they do not even mention it even though their model MAGICC6 has already written AR5.

   Frankly, you have not got a clue about a forcing a la Tyndall and Arrhenius, and a feedback. Show me your calculus for the evaporation here in Canberra on Tuesday of 3.4 mm from a temperature range of 8.6 oC at 9 am to 14.8 at 3 pm, and the global evaporation due to feedback from a global rise in temperature of 0.0125 oC in 2010. Which is bigger? do tell.

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      Derek Bolton

      Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

      No, they do not say that water vapour is not a GHG. Those papers discuss refinements to existing models. It would be astonishing if those models did not incorporate water vapour as a GHG; such a model would have no hope of matching reality. Presumably the refinements make no changes in that area.

      I don't understand what point you are making with your Canberra weather report. So temperatures, and hence local absolute humidity, vary daily. Indeed, so does relative humidity. But for a given average global temperature, there is some average absolute humidity. The feedback is to do with the change in those averages.

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         John Nicol

         (logged in via Facebook)

         Derek, While I am not familiar with that particular paper, there are many papers which do make the claim that in spite of acknowledging that water vapour is responsible for absorbing about ten times the radaition in the lower atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is still NOT a green house gas. The distinction is clearly very artificial. The reason given for this is equally artificial - and has been repeated here somewhere above I believe, - that CO2 stays in the atmosphere effectively for ever…

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         Derek, While I am not familiar with that particular paper, there are many papers which do make the claim that in spite of acknowledging that water vapour is responsible for absorbing about ten times the radaition in the lower atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it is still NOT a green house gas. The distinction is clearly very artificial. The reason given for this is equally artificial - and has been repeated here somewhere above I believe, - that CO2 stays in the atmosphere effectively for ever, wheeas the life time of any sample of water vapour is for about three weeks! You are correct to say that the absolute humidity or ppmv is what matters, but simply because a particular set of molecules disappears in 3 weeks, only to be immediately replaced with a new set, no argument at all, and I am not suggesting for one moment that YOU have said that. But it is part of the arguments put forward. Two other very important points NOT discussed properly if at all in the IPCC reports, is 1. The initial loss of heat by the earth's surface which is generally considered in terms of radiation when most of it is lost through air contact/wing cooling over land and a huge amount through evaporation over water. Only about 20% is emited from the global surface by radiation per se. The green house gases initial absorption of energy is simply another mechanism and does not effect the global temperature sgnificantly since it only blocks 20% of 20% or 4% which causes a total effect on the temperature of the 1/4 power or 1%. A small fractional increase in this is of no consequence, since collisions immediately redistribute that energy as well among the other air molecules, so that it is indistinguishable from the rest of the energy acquired in the atmosphere by the other means.

         What is important, is first the retention of energy in the air. For starters, if there were no green house gases - no CO2, no H2O - the 4% of the energy referred to above would certainly escape to space, but there would be no further radiation, since the air molecules of O2 (20%) and N2 (80%) cannot radiate significantly at the temperatures of less than about 600 K because their lowest energy levels cannot be excited in sufficient number. Without evaporation, (no water), about 50% of the heat would radiate to space and 50% would be transferred to the non-radiative air, whose heat capapcity is much lower than water vapour and would become quite hot. However, there would be no radiative mechanism for it to cool in the upper atmosphere where it would still be cooler initially from adiabatic expansion so even less able to lose energy. These a of course hypothetical and to that extent meaningless ramblings, excpt that they do introduce some of the basic physics which even with the GHGs does still play some small role in the overall description of what is taking place in the real atmosphere, and indicate some of the basic physics which is completely over looked by the IPCC models. The only cooling mechanism for the globe is radiation to space from levels above those of denser concentrations of the green house gases. For water vapour this is above the cloud height which varies for diferent types of clouds. For carbon dioxide it is where the concentration decrease with height is such that radiation from its absorption/radiation bands can escape through the layers above.

         A second very cogent point which Ihave not seen addressed anywhere by IPCC supporters, is that any increase in a GHG causes the heat in the atmosphere from whatever surface loss mechanism, to be "trapped" by the GHG at a slightly lower height. The reradiation from that GHG which is directed bot up and down, is also more strongly rabasorbed in both directions, but more so of course in the downward direction where the concentration is always higher. This reabsorption compensates for the lowere level at which the heat resides in the atmosphere so that there is NO increase whatsoever in the radiation reaching the ground, in contrast to that depicted in the usual comments on "back" radiation. The intensity which reaches the ground, ignoring reductions by increasing density at lower heights and increased upward movement of air in convection, (both of which tend to reduce downwards radiation for increased GHG) is I/3 where I is the intensity of the radiation from the ground. John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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            Derek Bolton

            Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

            Show me a paper that says water vapour is not a greenhouse gas. I expect I will find either that it says nothing one way or the other, or that it only says it is not a forcing, or that anthropogenic water vapour doesn't matter (because it is not a forcing).

            As I said, the "only staying around for three weeks" refers to any excess of water vapour over whatever is sustained by the normal evaporation and precipitation processes at the given temperature distribution. That is, if you were to artificially…

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            Show me a paper that says water vapour is not a greenhouse gas. I expect I will find either that it says nothing one way or the other, or that it only says it is not a forcing, or that anthropogenic water vapour doesn't matter (because it is not a forcing).

            As I said, the "only staying around for three weeks" refers to any excess of water vapour over whatever is sustained by the normal evaporation and precipitation processes at the given temperature distribution. That is, if you were to artificially pump a billion tonnes of extra water vapour into the atmosphere things would be back to normal in a few weeks.

            It's this resilience to perturbations that makes it mostly a feedback, not a forcing. To the extent that the extra does hang around those few weeks, it is just a little bit of a forcing. So I suppose if mankind were to pump out vast quantities of water vapour persistently then that might maintain enough extra in the atmosphere to matter. But I haven't tried to calculate this.

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               John Nicol

               (logged in via Facebook)

               Ok Derek, I understand and agree with what you are saying regarding water vapour increases, which is quite obvious. However, can you explain to me in simple terms why water vapour is not a "forcing" while carbon dioxide is?
               Given the powerful effect of water vapour as a GHG, which it is recognised to be (about 9 times moore so than CO2), and also in clouds, where it effects the earth's albedo, and given that the total moisture in the air does vary quite dramatically from year to year, from decade…

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               Ok Derek, I understand and agree with what you are saying regarding water vapour increases, which is quite obvious. However, can you explain to me in simple terms why water vapour is not a "forcing" while carbon dioxide is?
               Given the powerful effect of water vapour as a GHG, which it is recognised to be (about 9 times moore so than CO2), and also in clouds, where it effects the earth's albedo, and given that the total moisture in the air does vary quite dramatically from year to year, from decade to decade and century to century, why are not these changes recognised as "forcings"? Secondly, given the claims that water vapour is a positive feedback following increases in CO2, why is not water vapour subject to feed back when the overall ppmv in air over the globe increases in any particular period? Since there is no instability arising from this, it seems logical that clouds must provide negative feed back, not "positive". In that sense, clouds and water vapour must also provide negative feedback for CO2 increases? You did not comment on my remark about the required consistency in back radiation which is a basic asumption of the Green House Effect, but is known to be wrong in principle. Nor did you remark upon my comments on the radiative cooling effects of GHGs. I would be interested to have your comments on these. Thanks. John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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                  Derek Bolton

                  Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                  The pigeonholing of any climate factor as a forcing or a feedback is rarely 100%. In principle, it is a feedback if its contribution to the rate of change of the system is pretty much determined by the present state of the system. Conversely, if its contribution is mostly independent of the state of the system it is a forcing.

                  Insolation is a forcing because the sunlight arriving is unaffected by the state of the earth. Water vapour is mostly a feedback because the absolute humidity depends…

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                  The pigeonholing of any climate factor as a forcing or a feedback is rarely 100%. In principle, it is a feedback if its contribution to the rate of change of the system is pretty much determined by the present state of the system. Conversely, if its contribution is mostly independent of the state of the system it is a forcing.

                  Insolation is a forcing because the sunlight arriving is unaffected by the state of the earth. Water vapour is mostly a feedback because the absolute humidity depends (apart from short term perurbations) on the state of the system (temperature mostly, but also cloud and wind patterns).

                  CO2 can be viewed as either depending on the circumstances. Pre-human, and in the absence of volcanoes, it's largely a feedback. That's why in ancient climate variations we see CO2 rise following temperature rise. Inject a little extra CO2 into that and eventually the system will return to its prior state, but it takes a very long time. In the near term, much of is taken up by oceans and life forms, but that leaves it in the "fast" cycle, so a fraction of it lingers as a forcing in the atmosphere. Over a much longer period it gets back into the slow cycle (geological deposition).

                  Now add industrial CO2 emissions. These overwhelm the transfer back to geology comprehensively, and even outpace absorption in other parts of the fast cycle. So now the feedback aspect is dwarfed by the forcing aspect. In the same way, if our industry were to pump out water vapour at an unimaginably great rate we could maybe turn that into a forcing - but that's a long way from where we are now.

                  If I'm reading your question correctly, you're puzzled that WV as a positive feedback does not lead to instability. There are several parts to that, and I don't pretend to know which is the most important.
                  First, there is a natural thermostat - Stefan's law. A 1% rise in earth's ambient temperature leads to roughly a 4% rise in thermal radiation. Secondly, greenhouse effects are nonlinear. A rise in WV causes a small rise in temperature, causes a rather smaller rise in WV, etc., and the terms get smaller sufficiently quickly that summing this infinite series produces a finite answer.
                  Third, as you say, clouds can both warm and cool. This makes things fearfully complex. Even if WV is a positive feedback today, at some higher ambient temperature it could become a negative feedback. But note that that does not mean temperatures will go down; it only means they won't rise as fast as if it were not a feedback at all.

                  Wrt "20% of 20%", I don't think that's valid. In steady state, all of the insolation that's not reflected must be lost by radiation. That most of it spends time evaporating water and otherwise warming the lower levels of the atmosphere first is irrelevant.
                  If that means 20% of the radiation comes back to earth, the earth must warm by 5% to compensate. 5% * 280C = 14C. That very crude calculation is getting close to the standard figure for the total greenhouse effect (18C, as I recall).

                  Likewise, your somewhat, ahem, handwaving argument about increased absorption at the lower layer of reradiation from the higher layer does not work, but I can't prove that by counter-handwaving. It will take a working through of the equations.
                  Consider a simple 2-layer atmosphere. We have ground G, layer A, layer B, and space S. Suppose earth emits a unit of radiation, A absorbs and re-emits fraction A, B absorbs and re-emits fraction B of whatever attempts to pass through them. In total, A is absorbing and re-emitting 2a, B is absorbing and re-emitting 2b.
                  We have a matrix for the heat transfers:

                  From\To G A B S
                  G 0 A (1-A)B (1-A)(1-B)
                  A a 0 aB (1-B)a
                  B (1-A)b Ab 0 b

                  E.g. G emits a total of 1, A being absorbed at A, (1-A)B at B and (1-A)(1-B) escaping to space.

                  Since A, B must each emit what it absorbs:

                  2a = A + Ab
                  2b = (1-A)B + aB

                  Barring algebraic blunders, the net reradiation received at the ground is
                  (A+B-AB)/2/(1-AB/4)

                  How does this change if A and B are each increased in the same proportion? For convenience, let's take A = B = x (by taking a thinner slice at the lower altitude). The above simplifies to x/(1+x/2). So increasing the absorption increases the net reradiation to ground.

                  HTH

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                     John Nicol

                     (logged in via Facebook)

                     Sorry Derek, I made a mistake in reading your algebra. I think you followed through the calculation correctly but I think the problem needs to be looked at more carefully.
                     John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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                     John Nicol

                     (logged in via Facebook)

                     Derek,

                     While the principle behind your calacualtion is approximately correct, I believe you have made a mistake early on, where you redefined
                     the value 1 - B*(1-A) as (1-B)*(1-A). What I believe is a reasonably straight forward analysis to follow and which conforms to the work of others can be found at http://www.ruralsoft.com.au/co2/downnflux.pdf if you were interested. You may like to comment on the analysis and I would be interested to hear your views. John Nicol
                     jonicol18@bigpond.com

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                        Derek Bolton

                        Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                        No, it looks right to me. Of the 1 from the ground, A is absorbed at A and 1-A goes through A. Of that 1-A, (1-A)B is absorbed at B and 1-A - (1-A)B = (1-A)(1-B) escapes straight to space.

                        I'll take a look at the referenced paper later in the week.

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                     Derek Bolton

                     Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                     Sorry - typo. I meant of course 5% * 280K = 14C

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   Marc Hendrickx

   (Geologist)

   In the interests of balance will the Conversation now publish an article by me that documents similar transgressions made by the ABC? It would be similar to this piece published in The Australian mentioned a few times here. Here's a sample...

   In its climate change coverage the ABC's news and science reporting that continues to let down its audience.

   It does this in several ways. First, the media's bias towards sensationalism results in the ABC and other media outlets picking science stories that…

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   In the interests of balance will the Conversation now publish an article by me that documents similar transgressions made by the ABC? It would be similar to this piece published in The Australian mentioned a few times here. Here's a sample...

   In its climate change coverage the ABC's news and science reporting that continues to let down its audience.

   It does this in several ways. First, the media's bias towards sensationalism results in the ABC and other media outlets picking science stories that can be beaten up. In this context the restraint of sceptical scientists simply does not attract as much attention.

   Second, certain ABC reporters seem to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome when it comes to interviewing scientists promoting climate alarm. They are failing to properly scrutinise experts and authoritative documents such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments and government reports. Without bothering to properly verify the facts, they act as echo chambers, spreading misconceptions.

   Third, the perception of bias in ABC climate reporting is not so much due to a conspiracy of amateurish environmental activists, though it seems many now walk the corridors of ABC's head office, but stems from ineptitude. Aunty's bias is most obvious in those stories that have gone unreported. In the same week the ABC failed to cover an important paper by Australian researchers that found no influence of climate change in last year's Victorian bushfires (a disaster our non-climate expert, Hamilton, was quick to trumpet as a sign of impending climate doom), it also missed another study that smashed the notorious hockey stick graph to pieces.
   The rest here...

   http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/aunty-is-mistaken-but-not-malicious/story-e6frg6zo-1225921441996

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      Michael J. I. Brown

      (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

      Marc Hendrickx has been frequently caught distorting evidence a number of times in Conversation discussions, and a number of his comments have been removed (off topic? abusive?). This being the case, it seems perfectly reasonable for The Conversation's editors to refuse Marc Hendrickx's frequent pleas to write upon what he perceives as bias at the ABC.

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         Marc Hendrickx

         (Geologist)

         If you look at the evidence presented on my blog and in articles published by the Australian it is more than just a perception. Seems Michael is only interested in a one sided conversation.

         As for you off the cuff remark, confirmation bias hangs off every word you write in this echo chamber.

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   Marc Hendrickx

   (Geologist)

   "The fact that sea levels will rise is one of the certainties of climate science." Sure, but as to how much the will rise and the rate of rise, that's another matter entirely.

   In regard to the Oz's coverage of Phil Watson's paper I'm afraid I cannot see what the fuss is about. It provided a balanced account of some of the current issues wrt sea level rise both local and global. If you look at the detail in Watson's paper it there remains considerable controversy about the rates of any future change…

   show full comment

   "The fact that sea levels will rise is one of the certainties of climate science." Sure, but as to how much the will rise and the rate of rise, that's another matter entirely.

   In regard to the Oz's coverage of Phil Watson's paper I'm afraid I cannot see what the fuss is about. It provided a balanced account of some of the current issues wrt sea level rise both local and global. If you look at the detail in Watson's paper it there remains considerable controversy about the rates of any future change in sea level. My only criticism would be that The Australian should have included comments from the CSIRO.

   In regard to calling Tim Flannery out on his hyperbole, good on them! I'm still waiting on the Climate Commission to provide an explanation for his comments on evacuations from the Torres Strait, with no answer yet to the following question:

   Climate commissioner Tim Flannery is quoted as saying:
   “There are islands in the Torres Strait that are already being evacuated and are feeling the impacts."
   LINK: http://manly-daily.whereilive.com.au/news/story/tims-grim-sea-warning/
   There are no islands in Torres Strait that are being evacuated due to climate change. Can the commission clarify what the commissioner means by this false statement? Given the commission is supposed to "Explain the science of climate change and the impacts on Australia"; will the commission issue a correction to the commissioner's false and misleading statement?

   1. Permalink

      

      Derek Bolton

      Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

      It would appear that Rintoul made his own inferences from Watson's paper, did not check whether Watson agreed, and did not make clear where Watson's views ended and his own began.
      But possibly the clearest evidence of bias in this episode was that on the one hand The Oz published Brady (mishonouring him with the title Climate Scientist) but on the other declined to publish Watson's department's response.

   2. Permalink

      

      Michael J. I. Brown

      (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

      Marc Hendrickx seems to have no problem with Howard Brady being chosen by The Australian to comment on the Watson paper. This is telling.

      1. Permalink

         

         Marc Hendrickx

         (Geologist)

         Once again Michael puts words in the mouths of others. Yes the Oz could have looked for someone better qualified, the main criticism however is the missing response to Brady's comments by the CSIRO. Such deficiencies in reporting are not exclusive to the Australian and I have documented many other similar transgressions by the ABC. The best advice I can offer it to read widely, seek out the original articles and remain sceptical. In the end I don't think Watson would complain about the amount publicity this has generated.

         1. Permalink

            

            Michael J. I. Brown

            (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

            I did not put words in Marc Hendrickx's mouth, since he stated "my only criticism would be that The Australian should have included comments from the CSIRO."

            Clearly Marc Hendrickx has two criticisms The Australian's article, not just the one (now redefined) "main criticism" he previously specified.

   3. Permalink

      

      Mark Matthews

      General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

      @Marc - "My only criticism would be that The Australian should have included comments from the CSIRO."

      That is a pretty big criticism Marc. Let's hope that you rush into the offices of The Oz and express your discontent, as a scientist, that articles like this should definitely consult the CSIRO for comment when the article states "the CSIRO projections of sea level rise were “dead in the water”."

      I would also go as far as to say that asking some old guy who swims at the beach about sea water rise is a little pathetic for a national newspaper.

      1. Permalink

         

         Marc Hendrickx

         (Geologist)

         ABC have thus far failed report on the paper that debunks Steig et al's study of Antarctic temperatures, or on the paper that refutes the Hockey Stick study (see previous comments in this series for relevant links). This a greater sin than the Oz reporting on what the observational data is telling us, whether it's reported by an old man in speedos at the beach, or in the satellite data. In my short time on this planet I have found that it is sometimes worth listening to what the old fellas are saying, and good on the Oz for keeping an ear open!

         In regard to the media's presentation of climate change, what can I say other than what I said above, read widely and keep a scientists sceptic eye on what is being presented.

         1. Permalink

            

            Mark Matthews

            General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

            You're no fool Marc, so you and I both know that the Oz have gone down to some beach, found some old bloke going for a swim and asked

            "So - sea levels rising you reckon?"
            "Nah mate. Been here for 80 years. Not getting warmer either... was a bit chilly on Tue"
            "Yep. Thanks for your time. Mind if we get a picture?"

            And there you have irrefutable proof that the sea levels are not rising. Thank god for the good sense of The Oz for talking to the old fellas and not talking to the CSIRO.

            And BTW - here is the transcript from a radio program on the Steig data from the ABC:
            http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2471659.htm

            Like I said - thank God for the ABC.

            1. Permalink

               

               Mark Matthews

               General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

               Whoops my bad. Wrong link...

               My understanding was that the O'Donnell report confirms that the Antactic is warming, but disagrees with the rate.

               I noticed that the Oz also, did not report on the Donnell paper. Perhaps it is less newsworthy than you think.

               1. Permalink

                  

                  Marc Hendrickx

                  (Geologist)

                  For others, Mark linked to a report on the original paper by Steig et al. ABC have in fact NOT reported on the O'Donnell paper. They leave their audience blissfully unaware of the problems associated with Steig et al. Shame ABC, Shame!

                  1. Permalink

                     

                     Mark Matthews

                     General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                     Wow Marc. Did the ABC do something terrible to you as a small child? Push you over in the sandpit? Steal your marbles? I know they play far too many episodes of Midsummer Murders but you can always watch something else.

                     The O'Donnell report is no smoking gun. It is not even news really, just slightly less warming. I believe that Steig has written some salient comments about possible errors in O'Donnell's methodology also that have not been reported on the ABC.

                     1. Permalink

                        

                        Marc Hendrickx

                        (Geologist)

                        I consider myself to be a great friend to our old auntie. Unlike some of her so called friends I am prepared to tell her she has smelly breath, her teeth are yellow and that her new green cardigan doesn't suit her old red dress. Unfortunately this is often mistaken by some that I do not care for the old girl. The truth is quite the opposite.

                        In regard to O'Donnell et al, the findings are much more than "a little less warming" follow the link to Steve McIntyre's post below.

                        1. Permalink

                           

                           Mark Matthews

                           General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                           Ah - the watermelon line. "New socialism is old socialism wrapped in environmental activism"

                           Seriously... I don't think anyone would allow governments to take over. I am not convinced your fear is well placed. All we want is to not make a total mess of the planet.

                           And the only news in the Donnell/Steig dummy spit is the dummy spit itself. It is a complex statistical argument more likely to confuse than inform. McIntyre is hardly objective - he is a joint author. Doesn't change the fact that Antarctica is losing ice mass. Surely this is a concern to you.

                           1. Permalink

                              

                              Marc Hendrickx

                              (Geologist)

                              If you are worried apparently there are still a few spaces available on the B-Ark. Bon Voyage!

                              1. Permalink

                                 

                                 Mark Matthews

                                 General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                                 You've lost me there.

         2. Permalink

            

            Ian Musgrave

            (Senior lecturer in Pharmacology at University of Adelaide)

            Yes, the O'Donnell report confirms that the Antarctic is warming, and confirms the broad conclusions of Steig et al. Most importantly, O’Donnell et al. confirm the most basic result of all in Steig et al.,: there is statistically significant warming in West Antarctica.

            This is the very opposite of debunking

            http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/02/west-antarctica-still-warming-2/

            1. Permalink

               

               Marc Hendrickx

               (Geologist)

               Why not provide a link to what O'Donnell et al say about their paper, rather than run it through real climate's dodgy filter. Here's what O'Donnell et al co-author, and ABC persona non grata, Steve McIntyre had to say about the implications of the work, from his climate audit site: "Substantively, what is actually left of the signature results about the West Antarctic: nothing. Steig’s West Antarctic warming results from a spreading of warming in the Peninsula to the West Antarctic through choices made in their principal components. Different choices – ones more plausible in the circumstances – lead to opposite results."

               The post is titled "O’Donnell et al 2010 Refutes Steig et al 2009"
               http://climateaudit.org/2010/12/02/odonnell-et-al-2010-refutes-steig-et-al-2009/

               1. Permalink

                  

                  Ian Musgrave

                  (Senior lecturer in Pharmacology at University of Adelaide)

                  Why not read the actual paper, than through the dodgy filter of Climate Audit. Again, O'Donnell report statistically significant warming in west Antartica (Real Climate explains it better and has better diagrams), which agrees with Steig and has been confirmed by two independent studies.

                  1. Permalink

                     

                     Marc Hendrickx

                     (Geologist)

                     Read it, and the abstract appears below. Steig et al's methodology and results appear refuted to me.
                     Steig et al's paper reminds me of that episode from The Games where the 100m track was measured incorrectly. Steig would be Mr Wilson "How long is it Mr Wilson? ... 94m." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teoL6FKEtCY

                     Improved Methods for PCA-Based Reconstructions: Case Study Using the Steig et al. (2009) Antarctic Temperature Reconstruction
                     Abstract
                     A detailed analysis is presented of a recently published…

                     show full comment

                     Read it, and the abstract appears below. Steig et al's methodology and results appear refuted to me.
                     Steig et al's paper reminds me of that episode from The Games where the 100m track was measured incorrectly. Steig would be Mr Wilson "How long is it Mr Wilson? ... 94m." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teoL6FKEtCY

                     Improved Methods for PCA-Based Reconstructions: Case Study Using the Steig et al. (2009) Antarctic Temperature Reconstruction
                     Abstract
                     A detailed analysis is presented of a recently published Antarctic temperature reconstruction that combines satellite and ground information using a regularized expectation–maximization algorithm. Though the general reconstruction concept has merit, it is susceptible to spurious results for both temperature trends and patterns. The deficiencies include the following: (i) improper calibration of satellite data; (ii) improper determination of spatial structure during infilling; and (iii) suboptimal determination of regularization parameters, particularly with respect to satellite principal component retention. This study proposes two methods to resolve these issues. One utilizes temporal relationships between the satellite and ground data; the other combines ground data with only the spatial component of the satellite data. Both improved methods yield similar results that disagree with the previous method in several aspects. Rather than finding warming concentrated in West Antarctica, the authors find warming over the period of 1957–2006 to be concentrated in the peninsula (≈0.35°C decade−1). This study also shows average trends for the continent, East Antarctica, and West Antarctica that are half or less than that found using the unimproved method. Notably, though the authors find warming in West Antarctica to be smaller in magnitude and find that statistically significant warming extends at least as far as Marie Byrd Land. This study also finds differences in the seasonal patterns of temperature change, with winter and fall showing the largest differences and spring and summer showing negligible differences outside of the peninsula.

9. Permalink

   

   Timothy Curtin

   Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

   It is depressing to find The Conversation spreading the disinformation that is such a marked characteristic of Tim Lambert’s “Deltoid” Blog, where, unlike The Australian and The Conversation, as a general rule only sycophantic admirers of Lambert are allowed to post, with dissenters like myself soon consigned to oblivion.

   Be that as it may, let’s look at Lambert’s treatment of the issue of sea level rise. This is what he says above: “The fact that sea levels will rise is one of the certainties…

   show full comment

   It is depressing to find The Conversation spreading the disinformation that is such a marked characteristic of Tim Lambert’s “Deltoid” Blog, where, unlike The Australian and The Conversation, as a general rule only sycophantic admirers of Lambert are allowed to post, with dissenters like myself soon consigned to oblivion.

   Be that as it may, let’s look at Lambert’s treatment of the issue of sea level rise. This is what he says above: “The fact that sea levels will rise is one of the certainties of climate science”.

   The highlighted link there leads one to suppose it will provide the evidence for this claim, or at least a citation or two, but all we get is this:

   • “There is clear evidence for global warming and sea level rise.” (The Conversation, 9 August 2011).

   Seems a touch circular!

   Now the thrust of Lambert’s piece here and at Deltoid is that The Australian misrepresented Phil Watson’s finding of a decelerating trend from the actual readings of sea levels at Fremantle, Fort Denison, Newcastle, and Auckland from as early as 1903. It is true that Watson’s employers wrote to The Australian to complain that it is wrong to extrapolate from past trends to the future, but they did not explain why that is wrong, and instead said merely that “Mr Watson's research looked only at measurements of historical data. It specifically did not consider predicted linkages between sea level rise and global warming predicted by climate models”.

   This comment by the NSW Department of the Environment is wholly disingenuous in the light of the claim cited by Lambert “there is clear evidence for global warming and sealevel rise”, as what Watson’s paper shows is evidence for deceleration of sealevel rise DESPITE the claimed global warming already said to be apparent.

   Let’s take Watson’s data for Newcastle (1925-2009)

   First: 1925-1987, linear trend of y = 0.181x + 6899
   R² = 0.2304
   Next 1925-2000, linear trend of y = 0.161x + 6904.7
   R² = 0.2567
   And 1925-2009, linear trend y = 0.1553x + 6906.6
   R² = 0.291
   That sure looks like deceleration, and confirms Watson’s own finding. Even projecting at the 0.181 mm from 1925 to 1987 would yield only 1.8 cm. from now to 2110 and not the 90 cm. from now to 2100 claimed by the NSW Planning as cited by Lambert (or Tim Flannery's 600 cm)

   What the NSW Dept and CSIRO – and Lambert – fail to attempt is any explanation for (1) why the observed trends are so much smaller than the prediction trends of CSIRO and NSW Planning, and (2) why we should believe the latter, when there has been little apparent change in the 0.5% p.a. increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 since 1958 – here is the linear trend in the changes in annual increases in atmospheric CO2 in ppm since 1958.

   y = 0.0002x + 0.0158
   R² = 2E-05

   Again, CSIRO and Lambert have yet to develop a theory of why such gentle increases in atmospheric CO2 are suddenly going to accelerate from now to deliver Flannery’s terrifying predictions of a 60 metre rise in sea-level, which would certainly swamp his Hawkesbury home.

   Lambert is no doubt a world-renowned computer scientist - but he has forgotten GIGO even from his computer, with his abstention from analysis of real world data in favour of continuous slagging what is in the end only a newspaper, not a peer (or pal) reviewed journal.

   1. Permalink

      

      Bob Beale

      Journalist (logged in via email @beale.org)

      It is more depressing to find Tim Lambert's key point being all but ignored in the comments here.
      Tim says: "There is a scientific consensus on global warming – 97% of active climatologists agree that human activity is causing it. This is not reflected in the opinion pages of The Australian."
      Marc Henrickx "cannot see what the fuss is about", although he concedes that "the Oz could have looked for someone better qualified". Derek Bolton sees clear evidence of bias. Mark Mathews notes that "asking…

      show full comment

      It is more depressing to find Tim Lambert's key point being all but ignored in the comments here.
      Tim says: "There is a scientific consensus on global warming – 97% of active climatologists agree that human activity is causing it. This is not reflected in the opinion pages of The Australian."
      Marc Henrickx "cannot see what the fuss is about", although he concedes that "the Oz could have looked for someone better qualified". Derek Bolton sees clear evidence of bias. Mark Mathews notes that "asking some old guy who swims at the beach about sea water rise is a little pathetic for a national newspaper".
      After that, well, tired forays into disputed interpretations of this or that scientific paper or technical point, tired old let's-bash-Tim-Flannery.
      This series of articles is entitled Media and Democracy. Does The Australian's news coverage serve our democracy well? Does it do so if it gives a loud 15% minority 85% of the voice? Does it do so if it misrepresents amateurs as experts? Does it do so if it refuses to print valid criticism?

      1. Permalink

         

         Mark Matthews

         General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

         And the most depressing is the inevitable conclusion that The Oz seem to fear a well informed, and therefore concerned, public. A public who would almost certainly ask their government what it is they are proposing to do about it.

      2. Permalink

         

         Sherry Mayo

         (logged in via Facebook)

         I wonder though, is the motivation behind the Australian's editorial line really ideological* or does it see itself as serving a market and giving that market what it wants. There is no doubt that controversial climate articles (for instance) generate a lot of hits on the Australian's online site which means eyes on ads. And eye's on ads is the product and the advertisers are the client.

         People who have actually met Murdoch insist he is much less ideological than you'd imagine, but above all passionate…

         show full comment

         I wonder though, is the motivation behind the Australian's editorial line really ideological* or does it see itself as serving a market and giving that market what it wants. There is no doubt that controversial climate articles (for instance) generate a lot of hits on the Australian's online site which means eyes on ads. And eye's on ads is the product and the advertisers are the client.

         People who have actually met Murdoch insist he is much less ideological than you'd imagine, but above all passionate about newspapers - though I've no doubt at all he gets a huge kick out of the power his paper's wield. This is especially true in the UK where Murdoch's imprimatur can make or break a party's election chances. Of course Murdoch's support is solely contingent on what that party will do to help advance News Ltds interests (like weaken cross-media ownership laws). Perhaps he's more a shrewd business man who places his product to best commercial effect.

         * I don't doubt the columnists themselves (eg Bolta) have a strong ideological bent, but that the hidden hand that gives them their platform and directs the editorian line may be driven my more prosaic motivations (eg the bottom line).

   2. Permalink

      

      Michael J. I. Brown

      (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

      Tim Curtin is a contributor to the Institute of Public Affairs' Quadrant magazine.

      I believe his thesis is higher CO2 levels are needed to stimulate food production and anthropogenic water vapour emission is more important to climate change than CO2.

      As can been seen above, he is partial to fitting lines to data but does not know much of the relevant background material. For example, in a previous Conversation discussion I had with Tim Curtin, it became clear he did not know how many tons of water are involved in the natural water cycle.

      1. Permalink

         

         Marc Hendrickx

         (Geologist)

         Michael Brown comments on the internet. In a previous conversation I had with him he claimed to be in receipt of information from beyond the grave. To quote him " The purveyors of non-cosmological redshifts are often non-astronomers, retired or dead."

         Michael Brown is not a credible source of information.

         1. Permalink

            

            Michael J. I. Brown

            (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

            Marc Hendrickx naturally knows this was not the meaning of my words. Rather than remaining on topic and providing factually based arguments, Marc Hendrickx seems to be falling back on misrepresentation, pedantry and attempted witticisms.

10. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Derek said at 7.54 (and also at 1120) the papers "do not say that water vapour is not a GHG”, true, but they also do not say it is, as they simply avoid any mention of it (as in Meinshausen Raper & Wigley, 2011), or else (eg IPCC Solomon et al 2007) restrict all discussion of it to its claimed role as a huge feedback from tiny increases in global mean temperature (just 0.75 oC in total since 1950). Derek however added “It would be astonishing if those models did not incorporate water vapour as a…

    show full comment

    Derek said at 7.54 (and also at 1120) the papers "do not say that water vapour is not a GHG”, true, but they also do not say it is, as they simply avoid any mention of it (as in Meinshausen Raper & Wigley, 2011), or else (eg IPCC Solomon et al 2007) restrict all discussion of it to its claimed role as a huge feedback from tiny increases in global mean temperature (just 0.75 oC in total since 1950). Derek however added “It would be astonishing if those models did not incorporate water vapour as a GHG….” Yes it is astonishing but true. Look, go through Solomon’s AR4 WG1 and show me where it does. I have said again and again here that the MAGICC model which AR4 relied on does NOT include ANY role for water vapour, and AR4 as a whole considers water vapour only as a feedback from its modelled trivial increases in temperature due to just changes in [CO2], but for which we are asked to believe there would be no atmospheric water vapour i.e. [H2O]. Derek is however absolutely right when he says “such a model would have no hope of matching reality”. I agree!

    Derek added “I don't understand what point you are making with your Canberra weather report”. My point confirms the Kiehl-Trenberth 1997 (and ad infinitum) cartoon that the sun has THE major role in producing [H2O] through what they call evapotranspiration, accounting for 78 W/sq.m. from the incoming solar radiation of 342 W/sq.m. Trenberth then and now dismisses [H2O] as a greenhouse gas because any given flux up rains down within 10 days or so, but that does not mean he is right to claim therefore [H2O] = 0, as the average level over a year remains very large despite regular precipitation.

    Finally, Derek says “for a given average global temperature, there is some average absolute humidity.” True, even if Trenberth denies this – but he is wrong when he adds “The feedback is to do with the change in those averages," as the feedback loop is allegedly from rising temperature due to rising [CO2] to rising [H2O] and thence to yet higher temperatures.

    The point about my Canberra data is that it refutes this nonsense. To repeat, it takes a temperature rise during daytime of around 17 oC to generate evaporation of about 3 mm. at this time of year. So you tell me how much [H2O] will have increased since 1950, given that the TOTAL increase in GMT since 1950 has been 0.75 oC, and the projection is a further 1.25 oC but only IF [CO2] doubles to 560 ppm from the pre-industrial era. So has that increase been enough to triple the radiative forcing from the rise in [CO2] alone?

    BTW, as Wiki has spotted, “over the last 50 or so years, pan evaporation has been carefully monitored. For decades, nobody took much notice of the pan evaporation measurements. But in the 1990s scientists spotted something that at the time was considered very strange; the rate of evaporation was falling.” Now how could that be, given the catastrophic global warming we are already suffering from as [CO2] has risen from 280 to 390 ppm? [*]

    ^Roderick, Michael L. and Graham D. Farquhar (2002). "The cause of decreased pan evaporation over the past 50 years". Science 298 (5597): pp. 1410–1411 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/298/5597/1410. doi:10.1126/science.1075390. PMID 12434057.

    1. Permalink

       

       Derek Bolton

       Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       "it takes a temperature rise during daytime of around 17 oC to generate evaporation of about 3 mm."

       Your Canberra (lake, I assume) evaporation observation sheds no light on how atmospheric absolute humidity depends on temperature. At best, it could give you some clue about rate of evaporation, but even then it would depend hugely on layer mixing, relative humidity at the time, etc.
       If the lake had undergone a permanent increase in temperature of 17C I can't image there'd be much left in it after a few years.

       It would be a much better guess to assume that average relative humidity won't change much as temperature changes, then look at the known data on how SVP varies with temperature.

       I remember back in the 1990s someone figuring out that pan evaporation doesn't only depend on temperature; energetic photons help too. Increased aerosols have dimmed sunlight, reducing pan evaporation. (It's maybe like the photoelectric effect.)

11. Permalink

    

    Doug Cotton

    (IT Manager)

    There's a nice up-to-date plot of sea levels posted November 6, 2011 at http://www.real-science.com/sea-level-falling-2-5-mmyear-2007

    The decline ties in well with Trenberth's Trend shown at the top of the Home page http://climate-change-theory.com

12. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Hi Michael, you are right, my post saying this "At up to 4% of the atmosphere, water amounts to up to 85128 GtH2O" has been canned, I found it in my own cache. My source for that statement is Houghton et al TAR WG1 and Houghton's own book (2004) where water accounts for "up to 4% of the atmosphere by volume", so 4% is the upper limit, as I made clear, and if the total atmosphere's volume is 2128205 Gt, give or take a bit, then water's share at 4% by volume equates to around 85128 GtH2O.

    If I was referring to the total weight of [H2O] at the Monckton thread, I was wrong to say what you say I said, and I apologise.

    Meantime you have yet to correct your own incorrect claim Dyson deems [H2O] to be a less important GHG than [C2O], when he actually said "In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor."

    1. Permalink

       

       Derek Bolton

       Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       Gt is surely Gigatonnes, so that's mass, not volume. The molecular mass of H2O is 18, compared with about 29 for dry air. So the mass of H2O should be 2128205*4*18/(96*29+4*18) = 53652Gt.

       Wrt Dyson's statement, it doesn't seem that straightforward to me. I thought a significant point was that CO2 plugs gaps in H2O's spectrum. Is Dyson saying that in humid air (how humid?) the absorption lines of H2O become so broadened that there are no gaps?

       1. Permalink

          

          Michael J. I. Brown

          (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

          Freeman Dyson's two statements are certainly not contradictory. Here are the two statements in question:

          "In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor."

          "One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas."

          The most important differences…

          show full comment

          Freeman Dyson's two statements are certainly not contradictory. Here are the two statements in question:

          "In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor."

          "One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas."

          The most important differences between the statements is one refers to the dominant role of water vapour in humid air while the other refers to the dominant role of CO2 in climate change. Pierrehumbert's Physics Today article has a nice explanation that clarifies the differences:

          "A related saturation fallacy, also popularized by Ångström, is that CO2 could have no influence on radiation balance because water vapor already absorbs all the IR that CO2 would absorb. Earth’s very moist, near-surface tropical atmosphere is nearly saturated in that sense, but the flaw in Ångström’s argument is that radiation in the portion of the spectrum affected by CO2 escapes to space from the cold, dry upper portions of the
          atmosphere, not from the warm, moist lower portions. Also, as displayed in the inset to figure 2, the individual water-vapor and CO2spectral lines interleave but do not totally overlap. That structure limits the competition between CO2 and water vapor."

          Perhaps one of the most important things we can learn from Freeman Dyson is he is extremely civil in his manner of debate. We should try to keep this in mind in the future.

13. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Michael Brown claims I said here that "Regarding cross checks, Tim Curtin has stated above that the atmosphere contains "85128 Gt H2O", but despite my best efforts I cannot locate that "statement".

    Then he says: "It is surprising that Tim Curtin's best estimate of water in the atmosphere has changed by several orders of magnitude, long after he published articles discussing the role of water vapour on climate".

    I am gratified that Brown has added to my publications list, but alas! I have as yet…

    show full comment

    Michael Brown claims I said here that "Regarding cross checks, Tim Curtin has stated above that the atmosphere contains "85128 Gt H2O", but despite my best efforts I cannot locate that "statement".

    Then he says: "It is surprising that Tim Curtin's best estimate of water in the atmosphere has changed by several orders of magnitude, long after he published articles discussing the role of water vapour on climate".

    I am gratified that Brown has added to my publications list, but alas! I have as yet published nothing in any journal discussing the role of water vapour on climate. However, watch this space, as I have indeed submitted a paper on that which awaits acceptance (chances NIL if Brown has his way!).

    Brown's previous post stated: "water vapour is a major greenhouse gas but it is not the principal driver of recent warming (as noted by many, including Freeman Dyson)”. Really? Here is Dyson (in his a brilliant A Many-colored Glass):

    "In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor".

    That is what my own econometric analyses confirm in spades. But Brown like Karoly and all the 8 other authors of the Australian Academy of "Science" report "Climate Change 'Science': Questions and Answers" (2010, funded by the DCCEE so it said exactly what DCCEE wanted to read) cannot do or understand econometrics.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       How interesting. The 85128 figure is still in google's cache of this page this morning (but will surely disappear) so presumably some off topic posts are being deleted. Tim can perhaps provide his current estimate of water in the atmosphere and state whether it is consistent or inconsistent with the value discussed following The Conversation's article on Lord Monckton.

14. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Michael Brown mentions Freeman Dyson again. Here are some very pertinent comments in an email I had from him last October:

    “Thankyou very much for sending me your papers, especially the ‘Climate Change and Food Production’ paper which is full of useful information [but which Michael refuses to read]. Thank you for quoting from my book. I do not claim to be an expert on either agriculture or climate, but I know two simple facts. First, the physical effect of atmospheric CO2 on radiation…

    show full comment

    Michael Brown mentions Freeman Dyson again. Here are some very pertinent comments in an email I had from him last October:

    “Thankyou very much for sending me your papers, especially the ‘Climate Change and Food Production’ paper which is full of useful information [but which Michael refuses to read]. Thank you for quoting from my book. I do not claim to be an expert on either agriculture or climate, but I know two simple facts. First, the physical effect of atmospheric CO2 on radiation transport increases with the logarithm of the CO2 concentration. Second, the fertilizing effect
    of atmospheric CO2 on plants increases with the square-root of the concentration. As a consequence of these two facts, the fertilizing effect will dominate the climate effect as the concentration increases.

    Michael states he has “always acknowledged [but not here AFAIK] that water vapour is a major greenhouse gas but it is not the principal driver of recent warming (as noted by many, including Freeman Dyson)”. Where does Dyson state that? I have five of his books and can find nothing to that effect, whereas my paper quotes him at length on CO2 and food production.

    Then Michael accuses me of “avoiding questions about simple cross checks of estimates of the amount of water and water vapour in the atmosphere”. I have in fact spent many hours doing that, resulting in my regressions showing the critical role of variations in atmospheric water vapour in providing statistically significant explanations of temperature change all over the globe. Has Michael ever used the Atlas of the Global water Cycle by ANU’s Lim & Rodrerick? Has he read the papers by Roderick et al documenting declining pan evaporation over the last 50 years despite alleged rising temperature?

    Cross checking my numbers multiple times via multiple methods is what I do all the time, and the evidence is in my ACE2011 paper, submitted but not yet accepted. For example, I spent this afternoon doing more than a dozen regressions on climatic variables across five different zones of the GBR. They showed again the critical role of atmospheric water vapour [H2O], including that if any body had bothered to use my source they would not have been surprised by the Queensland floods in January,
    NCEP Reanalysis Produced at NOAA/ESRL PSD at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/timeseries/

    [H2O] rose along the GBR dramatically from August to December 2010 (by 30% to 60% more above the previous year), but with no noticeable rise in temperature over the previous year. I predict a dry spell from December 2011 using this year’s data for August. Any bets?
    My source also allows one to see that the temperature trend across the five (roughly 2 oC latitude) zones since 1948 will yield only a total rise below 1 oC in 4/5 zones by 2048.

    Here is typical output from one of my regressions of change in SST at the GBR (northern zone) against changes in MEI (ENSO), CO2 at Mauna Loa, and Precipitable Water (=[H2O]), with only the PW statistically significant (p > 95%):
    Model Unstandardized Coefficients Standardized Coefficients t Sig.
    B Std. Error Beta
    1 (Constant) -.232 .138 -1.679 .100
    dMEI .048 .060 .112 .793 .432
    dCO2Ml .172 .090 .268 1.898 .064
    dGBRPW .094 .039 .358 2.414 .020

    I realise Michael does not do statistical and regression analysis but I can do without his patronising put downs of one who does.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       Regarding cross checks, Tim Curtin has stated above that the atmosphere contains "85128 Gt H2O", while some months ago he was quoting "only 12.93 GIGA TONNES" (http://theconversation.edu.au/monckton-watch-interrogating-the-lords-science-1984).

       It is surprising that Tim Curtin's best estimate of water in the atmosphere has changed by several orders of magnitude, long after he published articles discussing the role of water vapour on climate.

       While Freeman Dyson believes the impact of climate change…

       show full comment

       Regarding cross checks, Tim Curtin has stated above that the atmosphere contains "85128 Gt H2O", while some months ago he was quoting "only 12.93 GIGA TONNES" (http://theconversation.edu.au/monckton-watch-interrogating-the-lords-science-1984).

       It is surprising that Tim Curtin's best estimate of water in the atmosphere has changed by several orders of magnitude, long after he published articles discussing the role of water vapour on climate.

       While Freeman Dyson believes the impact of climate change has been exaggerated, he does state (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html):

       One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.

       Freeman Dyson does believe that plant growth and topsoil can be used to counteract CO2 rise and global warming, even if CO2 emissions continue to rise (although many disagree with him). The email Tim has presented reflects Freeman Dyson's view, but does not endorse Tim's idea of anthropogenic water vapour emissions driving climate change.

15. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Micahel Brown. I envy you having met Dyson. I was not aware that IAS was not part of the University. If you refuse to read my paper on climate change and food production or the one I presented at ACE2011, where I actually note that CO2 is not the only contributor to plant growth (both are at my website www.timcurtin.com), but that it is of course a necessary if not a sufficient condition, I have nothing to add, not least also because you have yet to admit that Wigley's MAGICC does not include water vapour as a forcing. Cheerio!

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       Unlike myself, Tim Curtin feels he has sufficient knowledge to proclaim the thousands of scientists wrong and to expound new theories of climate change via Quadrant, Energy & Environment and other media.

       This is despite the fact Tim Curtin makes a series of rudimentary mistakes (as highlighted by http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/tim_curtin_thread_now_a_live_s.php).

       Some of Tim Curtin's errors are absurdly simple, such as publishing articles on the role of water vapour in climate without…

       show full comment

       Unlike myself, Tim Curtin feels he has sufficient knowledge to proclaim the thousands of scientists wrong and to expound new theories of climate change via Quadrant, Energy & Environment and other media.

       This is despite the fact Tim Curtin makes a series of rudimentary mistakes (as highlighted by http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/tim_curtin_thread_now_a_live_s.php).

       Some of Tim Curtin's errors are absurdly simple, such as publishing articles on the role of water vapour in climate without knowing how many how many tons of water are involved in precipitation each day and how many tons of water (including water varpour) are in the atmosphere.

       Tim Curtin has also claimed climate scientists don't like equations, because they do not reproduce textbook equations in their papers. This demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of how the scientific literature works.

       Some of Tim Curtin's errors take longer to unravel. In part because they require expert knowledge that most contributors to this forum do not have (especially Tim Curtin).

       His misconceptions about the MAGICC/SCENGEN code (http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/wigley/magicc/) are an example of an error that takes a while to unravel.

       MAGICC/SCENGEN is a "scenario generation" code that can be run on a home computer, rather than a complete global climate model that is run on a supercomputer.

       MAGICC/SCENGEN uses the outputs of complete global climate models (e.g., http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php) that include the major forcing and feedback mechanisms (including water vapour). MAGIC/SCENGEN uses the outputs from the complete global climate models to quickly generate climate scenarios, consistent with a set of inputs from the MAGIC/SCENGEN user.

       An introduction to water vapour and climate models is provided at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

       The realclimate article discusses the problem of whether water vapour should be labelled as a forcing or feedback, and why climate scientists normally label it as a feedback. Because it is normally labelled as a feedback, it is largely missing from the table of forcings in the MAGICC manual.

16. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Re Michael Brown's innaccurate Comment:

    1. I have contributed just once to Quadrant, a critique of the Garnaut Review (in January 2009), and once to the Institute of Public Affairs' journal, Policy Review, an article on forestry in Papua New Guinea. The IPA does not publish Quadrant. So he made 2 errors in his 1st sentence.

    2. Michael ended his constructive (?) contribution to the debate, without making any specific reference to my statistical analysis of the decelerating sea level rise at Newcastle…

    show full comment

    Re Michael Brown's innaccurate Comment:

    1. I have contributed just once to Quadrant, a critique of the Garnaut Review (in January 2009), and once to the Institute of Public Affairs' journal, Policy Review, an article on forestry in Papua New Guinea. The IPA does not publish Quadrant. So he made 2 errors in his 1st sentence.

    2. Michael ended his constructive (?) contribution to the debate, without making any specific reference to my statistical analysis of the decelerating sea level rise at Newcastle since 1925 by saying "For example, in a previous Conversation discussion I had with Tim Curtin, it became clear he did not know how many tons of water are involved in the natural water cycle", when ín fact I merely used the direct quote from the NOAA paper that HE gave me. I suggested he write NOAA to correct them, and he never has SFAIK. He is of course right, but he should take more care with the sources he uses - and provides to others.
    
    BTW, in the June thread here that Michael mentions now, he claimed that the IPCC's main models do include atmospheric water vapour as a primary forcing agent, not merely a feedback. He has yet to provide citations.

    Two papers just out confirm what I said, that Wigley’s MAGICC6 (to be the basis of AR5) makes no mention of atmospheric water vapour at all, let alone as a forcing agent. They are Meinshausen, Raper, and Wigley, Parts I and II, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 2011. They do mention the trivial amounts of stratospheric wv due to oxidation of CH4, but ignore the huge amounts of wv in the atmosphere which are neither invariant nor independent of anthropogenic influences.

    Michael Brown needs to check his sources here as well.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       I confused Quadrant with the IPA's journal for some reason. My mistake.

       Tim's Quadrant article does present his unusual hypotheses about plant growth needing additional CO2 and anthropogenic water contributing to climate change. Tim's article is an example of a non-scientist trying to do new science via the "popular" media rather than peer reviewed science journals.

       Anthropogenic emissions of water vapor make little contribution to climate (as discussed in IPCC AR4), as anthropogenic emissions of water vapor are totally dwarfed by evaporation and precipitation (which are on the order of a billion tons each minute).

       1. Permalink

          

          Derek Bolton

          Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

          Furthermore, any extra water vapour we add pretty soon leads to a compensating shift in the natural cycle. It's a feedback, not a forcing. (And I wonder how it compares with reduction in evaporation from loss of rainforest.)

    2. Permalink

       

       Mark Matthews

       General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       Timothy - as Bob Beale has said, this is not a forum on climate change, rather the fact that The Oz's editorial/opinion is so out of step with mainstream science on the issue and how this affects our ability to make informed judgement on the issue.

       As I said before, why does The Oz fear environment activism? Do you have something to offer on that issue?

       1. Permalink

          

          Toby James

          retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

          Mark, the Oz is only out of step with CAGW models and those who are welded on to them. Others, who are interested in the facts of real world physical science (read measurements, data etc.) are not upset by being informed on reality.

          Many of us are tired of projections, scare stories and the rest of it.

          Environmental activism and majorities of scientists who believe in AGW have little or nothing to do with real world science.

          1. Permalink

             

             Mark Matthews

             General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

             Happy with reality Toby, but when you see this reported as news:

             "All this talk about rising sea levels - most of us old-timers haven't seen any change and we've been coming down here for decades. "

             from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/science-is-in-on-climate-change-sea-level-rise-17mm/story-e6frg6nf-1225795202916

             and when one hears individuals describing consensus opinions from the great scientific institutions like the CSIRO, Royal Society, NASA being described as having "little or nothing to do with real world science" because they are "welded" onto CAGW models, one begins to think that there is something wrong.

             1. Permalink

                

                Toby James

                retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

                Mark, you're right - there is something wrong. Science is not "consensus opinions" of anyone, no matter what institution they belong to.

                I wonder how many Oz readers are confused or misled by the story about an old-timer down by the sea shore, and his thoughts on sea level.

                It seems to me to represent a little light relief from the continual menu of doom, gloom and horror served up, or condoned by those "great scientific institutions" whose members live in the parallel universe of Warmistan.

                For the record, I see nothing wrong with the Oz's take on climate - quite the opposite.

                1. Permalink

                   

                   Mark Matthews

                   General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                   I think you might be confusing the term consensus here. It is not opinion, it is the consensus of the peer-reviewed articles published in the relevant field.

                   Furthermore, a little respect for the national academies of science is called for here Toby.

                   The point made about the bloke on the beach was that The Oz took the view of the CSIRO and stated that it was wrong because this guy on the beach said so. That is not good journalism,.

                   Next time you are suffering from a medical illness of some kind, I assume you will go and see a medical expert (Dr), and not just some guy hanging around on the beach in his smalls.

                2. Permalink

                   

                   Bob Beale

                   Journalist (logged in via email @beale.org)

                   And Toby, you are right too. Science is most certainly not about "consensus opinion", but that statement is repeated over and over as though that is the question at issue. It's not.
                   
                   Forgive me capitalizing words like a zealot, but I will do so because it is important to emphasize a key distinction: no one is suggesting that climate SCIENCE is done by consensus opinion, but that there is indeed a genuine consensus of opinion among practising climate SCIENTISTS. That is, there is a general agreement…

                   show full comment

                   And Toby, you are right too. Science is most certainly not about "consensus opinion", but that statement is repeated over and over as though that is the question at issue. It's not.
                   
                   Forgive me capitalizing words like a zealot, but I will do so because it is important to emphasize a key distinction: no one is suggesting that climate SCIENCE is done by consensus opinion, but that there is indeed a genuine consensus of opinion among practising climate SCIENTISTS. That is, there is a general agreement (in this case, not unanimity but an overwhelming majority) of judgement about the totality of research findings and theory underpinning climate science.
                   To suggest otherwise is denial and for any "serious" media to ignore this reality is reprehensible. To me, the examples given here by Tim Lambert and Michael Ashley rang many bells from my reading of the recent "BBC Trust review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science". It noted that a denialist syndrome, with symptoms that proponents of the idea that global warming is a myth share with other denialists:

                   "They, with many others, practise denialism: the use of rhetoric to give the appearance of debate. This is not the same as scepticism, for a sceptic is willing to change his or her mind when provided with evidence. A denialist is not. Many among them see themselves as intellectual martyrs in a war against political correctness and as worthy successors to Galileo. Whatever the claim – AIDS has nothing to do with viruses, the MMR vaccine is unsafe, complex organs could never evolve, or even that the 9/11 disaster was a US government plot – the syndrome has some consistent themes.

                   "The tale is told of a vast conspiracy to hide the truth and of dissent quashed by secret forces. People with strong opinions should be given equal weight with experts. Any evidence that contradicts their ideas must be publicised and the rest ignored, while any statement of doubt about conventional wisdom is trumpeted from the rooftops. Standards of proof should be set so high as to be impossible to attain. Personal attacks (Hitler was against smoking) are acceptable and absolutism is useful (one ninety year old smoker proves that tobacco is harmless). Doubt shades into certainty: a scientist can never be sure that a vaccine is always safe – which means that it never is. Often, the proponents unite into a movement that can, in these electronic days, bombard its enemies and give the impression of being far larger than it really is.

                   "Most important in the context of this Report, any concession by the establishment that it is less than certain of the accuracy of its claims – that there is, in other words, room for discussion – is taken as a statement of surrender. Because so much of science involves uncertainty, it is open to attack from those who have never experienced that sensation. Purity of belief makes it easy for denialists to attract the attention of news organisations but hard for them to balance their ideas against those of the majority. This can lead to undue publicity for views supported by no factual information at all."

                   Sounds painfully familiar.

    3. Permalink

       

       John Nicol

       (logged in via Facebook)

       Timothy Curtin,
       You are quite correct in what you say about the use of water vapour by the IPCC models. In the face of complete and accurate physical arguments showing that water vapour is a primary source of forcing, the models, or at least most models, ONLY ASSUME that the primary forcing is by increased carbon dioxide alone and the "warming" by CO2 causes an increase in H2O which is therefore ONLY a feedback. They always say, when one argues directly that water vapour IS a green house gas, that…

       show full comment

       Timothy Curtin,
       You are quite correct in what you say about the use of water vapour by the IPCC models. In the face of complete and accurate physical arguments showing that water vapour is a primary source of forcing, the models, or at least most models, ONLY ASSUME that the primary forcing is by increased carbon dioxide alone and the "warming" by CO2 causes an increase in H2O which is therefore ONLY a feedback. They always say, when one argues directly that water vapour IS a green house gas, that because any body of water vapour has a finite lifetime before precipitation, of about three to five weeks, it cannot be a greenhouse gas!!

       Pointing out to them that the water vapour which replaces it to provide a reasonably constant humidity, does not seem to get through. There is of course a certain need for this to form the basis of their argument, since if water vapour were to be regarded as a forcing in the lower atmosphere, it would require that clouds provide “negative” feedback in order to avoid the “runaway” warming which appears never to have happened.

       In fact the most serious debate among climatologists at present in determining climate sensitivity, is in regard to what type of feedback clouds provide. Is it positive for certain clouds and negative for others, is it all positive (which of course it cannot be) or is it all negative with CO2 being the main positive forcing.

       What is usually forgotten in all of this is that while carbon dioxide does absorb about 20% of the infra red radiation and warms the atmosphere, in the middle to lower atmosphere, water vapour provides a radiation process through its very broad green house bands which escapes simply because the density of H2O gas in the atmosphere, decays rapidly with height above cloud level. Thus the energy absorbed from IR by CO2 is rapidly transferred through collisional processes to the other molecules as heat, and thence to the water vapour which radiates to cool the air. As the vapour condenses to form clouds it also releases heat which is also radiated by water vapour at lower levels, but nearer the top of the troposphere, there is very little vapour and since the density of carbon dioxide is also much lower than at ground level, this gas radiates to space as seen in satellite images of the radiation spectrum. The radiation from the main feature of the CO2 14.9 micron band is easily distinguished and comes from a height corresponding to a temperature of only 220 K. However, what is not distinguished because of overlap with the radiation bands of other gases, is the radiation from the wings of the carbon dioxide lines which also provides fro significant cooling from lower, warmer levels providing an efficient escape mechanism for heat.

       Thus carbon dioxide does not only contribute to warming, but also to cooling as has been recognised in meteorology for many, many years before this debate even started. Any study which contributes in real terms to this debate, must include an analysis of the whole of the behaviour of the air and its constituents – not just by saying carbon dioxide causes additional warming simply because it absorbs infra red radiation from the earth, which of course it does, and no one denies that. But this is far too simplistic to be of any use at all in solving the problem. It must be recognised that oxygen and nitrogen cannot radiate energy from gases at these comparatively low temperatures of 200 to 350 K. Only water vapour and carbon dioxide can do that and in the upper reaches of the troposphere, the job is left almost entirely to CO2. John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

       1. Permalink

          

          Derek Bolton

          Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

          No-one's saying water vapour is not a GHG. That's a strawman of your making. And no-one is saying that all water vapour condenses out in a few weeks - only the excess. As you say, the relative humidity will tend to stay constant regardless of what we pump into the air. But the absolute humidity therefore rises as the temperature does, and it's the absolute humidity that matters for its GHG potential. That's why it is a feedback, not a forcing.

          But you only pretended not to know that, right?

17. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Michael Brown rabbits on and on: “In Quadrant (and above) Tim Curtin has put the argument that anthropogenic water vapour emissions are larger than carbon dioxide emissions…,”, well they are, “and thus anthropogenic water vapour is a more significant driver of climate change than carbon dioxide”. Well I am in good company, as both Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 would agree with me. Even the ineffable IPCC admits that “aqueous vapour” has greater warming potential or radiative forcing than atmospheric…

    show full comment

    Michael Brown rabbits on and on: “In Quadrant (and above) Tim Curtin has put the argument that anthropogenic water vapour emissions are larger than carbon dioxide emissions…,”, well they are, “and thus anthropogenic water vapour is a more significant driver of climate change than carbon dioxide”. Well I am in good company, as both Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 would agree with me. Even the ineffable IPCC admits that “aqueous vapour” has greater warming potential or radiative forcing than atmospheric H2O. Michael, why not rebut those authorities, you might just become famous!

    Brown then added: “While this initially sounds convincing, it ignores the fact that the water remains in the atmosphere for days (it has a short residence time) while carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for many years.….” That is why you are a hack academic instead of doing real work and earning real money as an accountant at Deloittes.

    Certainly you have no concept of inventory analysis, so don’t even think of applying for a job at Walmart. Sure, evaporation from the oceans rains out over land sea within 10 days or so, but between the evaporation at day 1 which rains out on day 10 there are 9 days of more evaporation which rain out subsequently, such that all the world’s stupid (by Monash standards) met stations record positive relative and specific humidity at ALL times, rather than zero, as claimed by you, Trenberth and Dessler.

    Brown again: “This is why anthropogenic water vapour emissions have a negligible impact on climate (as noted in the IPCC AR4 and elsewhere)” - erroneously. If 32 GtCO2 p.a. will have catastrophic effects, why not the 320 GtH2O with its 4-10 times greater GWP and radiative forcing?

    More Brown: “Tim Curtin may have missed the answer to his question about MAGICC. Climate scientists normally label water vapour as a feedback rather than a forcing, so it does not appear in the tables of forcings (this does not alter the physics of how water vapour behaves in the full global climate models). This issue of semantics is discussed at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

    But it has never been peer reviewed and is rubbish like everything at that site. For example it is not an issue of semantics, but of spectroscopy. Does anybody at Monash do that? Apparently not, as that shows there is water vapour at the applicable wavelengths far in excess of what can be explained by the pitiful temperature rise of 0.0125 since 1950.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       A good sign you are winning an argument is when the your opponent lowers himself to misrepresentation and abuse (both of people and institutions).

       I have never stated that humidity should remain constant when global temperatures rise as a consequence of increasing carbon dioxide (and the IPCC notes changes in humidity and precipitation too).

       I have always acknowledged that water vapour is a major greenhouse gas but it is not the principal driver of recent warming (as noted by many, including Freeman Dyson).

       Tim Curtin also keeps avoiding questions about simple cross checks of estimates of the amount of water and water vapour in the atmosphere. Cross checking your numbers multiple times via multiple methods is natural to a good scientist (and, I would have thought, a good economist too). Surely a good scientist would do such cross checks before publishing articles discussing the topic in question?

       1. Permalink

          

          Nick Kermode

          (logged in via email @hotmail.com)

          Michael, it is obviously a sisyphean task to debate Tim Curtin. I mean, really, (in addition to what you mention)Tims comparison of CO2 to his superannuation, you just cant argue with that! What he believes is sanity and rationale is certainly bizarre, yet to give him credit, he has been totally consistant.......(if you did miss it earlier in the thread, check out comments 33 and 35 here):

          http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/03/tim_curtin_thread.php

18. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Chris O’Neill keeps on referring us to Myhre et al 1998 – but they ignore water vapour except in one aside, and explicitly assume that the atmosphere contains none at all, so for them RH and SH are always zero when they do their spectral analysis of radiative fluxes.

    So much for the real world – but then Myhre and all other climate “scientists” live in a world of their own invention.

    Myhre et al do allow for clouds in their Table 2, which substantially reduce their clear sky radiative forcing…

    show full comment

    Chris O’Neill keeps on referring us to Myhre et al 1998 – but they ignore water vapour except in one aside, and explicitly assume that the atmosphere contains none at all, so for them RH and SH are always zero when they do their spectral analysis of radiative fluxes.

    So much for the real world – but then Myhre and all other climate “scientists” live in a world of their own invention.

    Myhre et al do allow for clouds in their Table 2, which substantially reduce their clear sky radiative forcing in their Table 1, but clouds consist of condensed water vapour, which have an albedo effect, and are not the same as atmospheric water vapour, which does not.

    John Nicol has also frequently mentioned the important role of atmospheric (i.e uncondensed) water vapour, because although it eventually does condense and then precipitate, there is a continuous process of evaporation, even here in Canberra (2-3 mm per day), where on average it only rains about 7-8 days a month, so there always is water vapour in the atmosphere.

19. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Michael Brown is beyond redemption, despite his pretty face, so I have nothing to add, as he failed to address even one of my comments on his last.

    Mark Metthews said "Timothy, are [you] finding it increasingly frustrating that you are not given the scientific credibility you feel you deserve?"

    No, because the truth will come out sooner or later, and I do my best to promote that.

    Here are just a few of the outright fibs of the Australian Academy of "Science", in its Climate Q&A paper last year…

    show full comment

    Michael Brown is beyond redemption, despite his pretty face, so I have nothing to add, as he failed to address even one of my comments on his last.

    Mark Metthews said "Timothy, are [you] finding it increasingly frustrating that you are not given the scientific credibility you feel you deserve?"

    No, because the truth will come out sooner or later, and I do my best to promote that.

    Here are just a few of the outright fibs of the Australian Academy of "Science", in its Climate Q&A paper last year:

    1. The claims by the Australian Academy of Science (AAS, Allison et al. 2010), funded by the DCCEE, that “Global average temperature has increased over the past century”.

    The AAS uses data for global mean temperature between 1850/1880 and 1950 that had no data for more half of the globe’s land areas before 1950, which itself imparts bias, as the missing records are all in tropical areas. Moreover, my regression analysis in my ACE 2011 paper shows the claimed correlation with GHG to be spurious and wholly untrue. It is also untrue in terms of normal statistical significance criteria.

    2. The further claim by the AAS’s The Science of Climate Change - Questions and Answers (Allison et al. 2010) that "the growth in greenhouse gases has accelerated (sic) through the 20th century to the present (see Figure 4.1)" is equally unfounded.

    Direct measurements of the atmospheric concentration of CO2, the main GHG, only began in 1958. In the first decade, 1959-1968, the rate of increase of the increase was 2.97 per cent p.a., in the latest decade 2001-2010 it was just 0.43 per cent p.a. That is hardly acceleration. Moreover, its Fig.4.1 only shows the absolute levels since direct measurements began, not the rate of change thereof, and splicing the direct measurements on to ice core records is not sound practice. The absolute concentration of atmospheric CO2 grew only by 0.42 per cent p.a. between 1959 and 2010. Again it is evident that the AAS authors have no ability to use calculus to derive the rate of change of rates of change.

    3. Then AAS Fellow (joke) Will Steffen (The Critical Decade) claims that while in mainstream climate science it is changes in the level of the atmospheric concentration of CO2, arising from annual net accretions thereto, that determines “climate change”, for Steffen it is instead the cumulative gross emissions of anthropogenic CO2 since around 1750 which is the determinant, because that more than doubles the actual recorded increase in atmospheric CO2.
    
    This is not a trivial error, because it leads Steffen to advise the AAS (sic) and DCCEE that “if we wish to have a 75% chance of observing the 2 °C guardrail, we can emit no more than 1000 Gt (one trillion tonnes) of CO2 in the period from 2000 to 2050… In the first nine years of the period (2000 through 2008), humanity emitted 305 Gt of CO2, over 30% of the total budget in less than 20% of the time period” (2011, p.53). But the “budget” figure of 1000 GtCO2 is net of the 55% of emissions that are taken up the planet’s oceans and biota every year, while the 305 GtCO2 is gross, before such uptakes have been taken into account.

    That is an outright fraudulent statement by Steffen. No doubt he is unaware that the Obama Government has just launched a class action against banks that bundled sub-prime mortgages together and onsold them on the grounds that 10 worthless sub-primes are worth more than one. Believe me, Steffen's time in court will come when there is a change in government here.

    1. Permalink

       

       Mark Matthews

       General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       I just don't buy your arguments here Tim, and here's why.

       1. At the most basic level, the theory of AGW centres around the fact that
       a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas
       b) We are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This would therefore lead us to believe that the temperature should be increasing. The temperature is increasing...
       c) Finally - is it increasing in a way that leads us to believe that it is CO2 that is causing it? ie. is there a CO2 like signature on the warming we are…

       show full comment

       I just don't buy your arguments here Tim, and here's why.

       1. At the most basic level, the theory of AGW centres around the fact that
       a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas
       b) We are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. This would therefore lead us to believe that the temperature should be increasing. The temperature is increasing...
       c) Finally - is it increasing in a way that leads us to believe that it is CO2 that is causing it? ie. is there a CO2 like signature on the warming we are seeing.... Yes there is.
       Now... surely you can see that if you wish to dispute the theory of AGW, then you have to dispute either of the 3 above, Water vapour is just not relevant in that debate. It does not change any of the 3.

       2. Get away from the whole conspiracy theory nonsense... It just doesn't wash when you claim that all of the national academies of science are in on some huge funding drive, call for a world government, under the spell of the communists/environmental activists ... These are highly conservative institutions will never put their considerable reputations behind something unless they are very sure it is proven.

       I have followed this debate since the 90s and there are some bits and pieces that stand out...

       1. Our understanding of AGW has gone in only one direction - forwards. More proof, more data, more evidence. Sure there have been some papers that have disputed bits and pieces here and there, but they have almost always been refuted. There has been no scientifically based "smoking gun".

       2. The denialist movement (for want of a better term) have very strong beliefs on the benefits of economic growth and the role of government. For example, you see this sort of statement all the time: "[the IPCC Reports are used for] propaganda intended to drive a global "sustainability" movement seeking to stall global economic growth through restricting the use of "the engine of modern economies .. fossil fuels" from nzclimatescience.net. Once again though, whether this is true or not, it does not change the theory of AGW. You cannot simply disregard all environmental activism, despite the fact that you have spent your career fighting anti-logging campaigns in PNG, or having to prepare environmental impact statements any time you want to dig something out of the ground. We cannot wreck the place to spite the greenies guys. Your arguments begin to look a lot less objective when you cannot see beyond the fact that you cannot have limitless growth with finite resources… all the time pretending that humans have no impact on the environment.

       1. Permalink

          

          Toby James

          retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

          "The temperature is increasing... "
          What is the evidence in support of this claim?

          "Finally - is it increasing in a way that leads us to believe that it is CO2 that is causing it? ie. is there a CO2 like signature on the warming we are seeing.... Yes there is. " What does this mean? Tell us about the CO2 like signature?

          1. Permalink

             

             Chris O'Neill

             Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

             "Tell us about the CO2 like signature?"

             One of them:

             The surface is warming and the Stratosphere is cooling.

             1. Permalink

                

                Toby James

                retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

                No it isn't - that is not a CO2 signature.

                1. Permalink

                   

                   Chris O'Neill

                   Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

                   OK, so which GHGs is it the signature of? And tell us which ones we are not ultimately responsible for increasing?

             2. Permalink

                

                John Nicol

                (logged in via Facebook)

                Yeah, Chris, the signature nominated by the modelers and the IPCC has always been that the upper tropics would show increased warming. This is because the highest surface temperatures are naturally in the tropics, the green house gases are involved in radiation trapping, which essentially means that the because the non-GHGs cannot radiate, the frewuencies involved in the collisional transfer of energy between kinetic and excitation, is between heat of all of the gases and the excited states of the…

                show full comment

                Yeah, Chris, the signature nominated by the modelers and the IPCC has always been that the upper tropics would show increased warming. This is because the highest surface temperatures are naturally in the tropics, the green house gases are involved in radiation trapping, which essentially means that the because the non-GHGs cannot radiate, the frewuencies involved in the collisional transfer of energy between kinetic and excitation, is between heat of all of the gases and the excited states of the GHGs. This means that a sample of air is heated and retains its energy, in the lower levels of high concentrations, which is then transported up with convection. Moisture then condnses and the region at greater heights only have CO2 as a significant green house gas which then in fact as as a radiator of heat, a process whic it alone can do in the basence of water vapour, because O2 and N2 cannot radiate at these lower temperatures because the energy levels of their lowest states are unreachable except through much higher temperatures. The claim was that both the heat released by the condensing water vapour and that in the air molecules would remain locked up by CO2. Measurements for about 25 years by several groups, including an Australian group in CSIRO have been unable to find these which is a conclusion which disappointed many who have since struggled to find other "signatures". Can you explain the process involved in establishing the heating of the lower atmosphere and the cooling of the stratosphere which you and others have mentioned as another "signature" of a GHG - not limited to CO2, I agree, but at the moment everyone is concentrating on CO2 for very good reasons. In all of htese discussions of course, everyone needs to remeber, that establishing that CO2 is a green house gas and helps to warm the air is very simple. Showing that increases in CO2 over and above what we now have will significantly increase that temperature in what is called the "Enhanced GHE" is quite another matter. It is difficult to show that the stratosphere is effected in any significant way by the present gas concentrations. To show that an increase will change it is even more difficult. But if you could give us an outline of how that process works. I would appreciate that.
                John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                1. Permalink

                   

                   Chris O'Neill

                   Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

                   "Yeah, Chris, the signature nominated by the modelers and the IPCC has always been that the upper tropics would show increased warming."

                   No, that's not what I said and a different issue from what I said. What you're talking about is an expected consequence of ANY cause of surface warming, GHG caused or otherwise, so it's not a signature of GHG warming.

                   Also, why do you keep ignoring: Myhre, G., E.J. Highwood, K.P. Shine, and F. Stordal 1998. “New estimates of radiative forcing due to well mixed greenhouse gases.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2715-2718?

                   And why do you ignore atmospheric radiative transfer codes as cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_radiative_transfer_codes ?

                   1. Permalink

                      

                      John Nicol

                      (logged in via Facebook)

                      Dear Chris,
                      Yes, I am not suggesting you had sad what I stated as quote above in your comment. That was a new comment by me on the matter of the so-called signatures of anthropogenic global warming, or if you like, the enhanced green house effect induced by man made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. My point was and remains that this characteristic warming had been held up confidently for many years as a criterion which would be found to be met and would provide a definitive confirmation…

                      show full comment

                      Dear Chris,
                      Yes, I am not suggesting you had sad what I stated as quote above in your comment. That was a new comment by me on the matter of the so-called signatures of anthropogenic global warming, or if you like, the enhanced green house effect induced by man made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. My point was and remains that this characteristic warming had been held up confidently for many years as a criterion which would be found to be met and would provide a definitive confirmation that the warming from 1979 to 1998 was because of carbon dioxide. The search for this began in the late 80s with every confidence it would be found. But none of the several teams around the world, including one from CSIRO under Dr David Evans, were able to detect it despite using the most sensitive instrumentation available and persisting in many different locations around the tropics. However, in spite of this failure, no comment has been made by the IPCC or CSIRO to explain why their model prediction which formed a large part of the expected global warming behaviour, was never found. They just say "We believe that most of the increase in global warming during the second half of the 20th century was very likely due to increase in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. And NO, ths was the defined "signature" of the enhanced green house effect, not just any old warming and if you like I can give you contact to David Evans so you can ask him yourself. You may well see reference it on Skeptical Science and perhaps RealClimate in the terms you describe as for ANY warming but that is incorrect. When I spoke to John Cooke recently (the SK Sc owner) he claimed something different again about water vapour. But say what they like, the search was abandoned about 2006 and since then some people have tried to explain it away as being there but masked some other "unexpected" issues but I don't think any serious climatologist has tried to cover it up in that way, but prefer to ignore it. Of course, you may well be right, it could be a consequence of ANY surface warming. But if so, can you explain why it was not found to occur in the later periods of the project when, as everyone accepts, there was surface warming?
                      
                      And yes, I have read, Myhre et al. but do not find it has anything new at all in it. They simply make use of standard spectral band data sets from HITRAN and another which actually are not in fact the most useful since they do not contain very accurate information about the behaviour of the critical line broadening features which are so critical to any assessment of the Enhanced GHE. With this data they then compared results for, again three different but standard approaches, to the use of the bands, taking slightly different approximate forms of the spectra, all of which leads to a modification of results through prescription but with absolutely no new approach to the physics. (Of course the use of these different data sets is only necessary to convince people that they are using the right stuff but as you will see in their tables, the forcings obtained are only different in the second decimal, and the differences are in fact about the same as the errors, even though the spectral approximations are quite different. (Almost the same RELATIVE results [which is what they are chasing] would be obtained if they used a single Lorenzian line shape since all of the chracteristics of importance are common to all of the lines in the band - certainly to within the accuracy of most of the HITRAN data. The absolute values are then obtainable simply from the current value of the total absorption.)

                      So no, I don’t think I will be quoting Myhre et al., and in any case much more recent papers playing with the parameters in much the same manner, provide values between about 2.23 and 2.3 which straddle that of Myhre et al.. For the moment I also ignore the radiation transfer codes such as those given in Wikipaedia for the same reason that I find the work of Myhre et al. less than satisfactory. Any physicist worth his/her salt will ALWAYS want to go to the most fundamental starting point in any problem and work his/her way through it to obtain a result which he/she understands from top to bottom. That, as you would have gathered by now, is my most serious criticism of everything the IPCC and most climatologists present - they start with a few assumptions and apply themselves to someone else's data, much of which they only vaguely understand as indicated in the papers, and present an analysis often using someone else's model, fiddle with a few of the parameters and present a new finding. Perhaps I exaggerate, but you get my drift. You only have to read Trenberth's papers starting from the most original to see that the basic method of deriving a value for the forcing, begins with an assumption that such a forcing exists to increase global temperatures. For carbon dioxide, All of its characteristics and behaviour in the atmosphere which contribute essentially to that forcing, from the finer points of the variations in the spectral line shape, the values of absorption and emission coefficients and the effect of collisions of the second kind on the radiation characteristics of a GHG, are totally ignored. Yet these are just the crucial physical parameters which will in the end determine what the forcing will be, if there is one. No consideration appears to be given to the MOST critical effects of upper atmosphere radiation which is where 99% of the energy is lost. The height in the atmosphere where the energy is actually absorbed is also ignored or at least never verbalised. The earth will cool or warm depending on its ability to radiate the heat received from the sun and on the rate at which heat can be raised by convection (mainly) and some small amount by radiative transfer - very little indeed below cloud height - to determine the lapse rate. In all of this the fine, very high resolution spectral characteristics of CO2 are to my mind carelessly ignored by most if not all who contribute to the idea that CO2 is a problem, and certainy in the Myhre paper.
                      John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.

                      1. Permalink

                         

                         Chris O'Neill

                         Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

                         My comment was truncated. I'll try again.

                         "if you like I can give you contact to David Evans so you can ask him yourself"

                         You'll have to do better than that for a citation. David Evans is hardly an unbiassed source.

                         "the forcings obtained are only different in the second decimal, and the differences are in fact about the same as the errors, even though the spectral approximations are quite different."

                         So your objection is that it's not very accurate.

                         "Any physicist worth his/her salt will ALWAYS…

                         show full comment

                         My comment was truncated. I'll try again.

                         "if you like I can give you contact to David Evans so you can ask him yourself"

                         You'll have to do better than that for a citation. David Evans is hardly an unbiassed source.

                         "the forcings obtained are only different in the second decimal, and the differences are in fact about the same as the errors, even though the spectral approximations are quite different."

                         So your objection is that it's not very accurate.

                         "Any physicist worth his/her salt will ALWAYS want to go to the most fundamental starting point in any problem and work his/her way through it to obtain a result which he/she understands from top to bottom."

                         So how do you know Myhre et al don't understand the solution to the radiative transfer equation from top to bottom? What has this got to do with it not being accurate enough with you? Are you saying Gilbert Plass didn't understand the problem from top to bottom? AFAIK, the understanding of the physics hasn't changed since Plass. The only thing that has changed is more accurate numerical solution of the radiation transfer equation.

                         "the basic method of deriving a value for the forcing, begins with an assumption that such a forcing exists to increase global temperatures"

                         What does that mean?

                         "carbon dioxide, All of its characteristics and behaviour in the atmosphere which contribute essentially to that forcing, from the finer points of the variations in the spectral line shape, the values of absorption and emission coefficients and the effect of collisions of the second kind on the radiation characteristics of a GHG, are totally ignored."

                         "absorption and emission coefficients .. are totally ignored"

                         One wonders what is actually in HITRAN and GEISA.

                         "The height in the atmosphere where the energy is actually absorbed is also ignored or at least never verbalised."

                         Perhaps you're unaware that the solution of the radiation transfer equation is not just done spectral line by spectral line but also layer by layer of the atmosphere.

                         "In all of this the fine, very high resolution spectral characteristics of CO2 are to my mind carelessly ignored by most if not all who contribute to the idea that CO2 is a problem"

                         I'll have to go back and check that Plass and his reviewers carelessly ignored the very high resolution spectral characteristics of CO2 as obviously you have already discovered this.

                      2. Permalink

                         

                         Chris O'Neill

                         Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

                         "My point was and remains that this characteristic warming had been held up confidently for many years as a criterion which would be found to be met and would provide a definitive confirmation that the warming from 1979 to 1998 was because of carbon dioxide."

                         No it wasn't. Greater Tropopause warming in the tropics is simply a consequence of the lower saturated adiabatic lapse rate as the Troposphere gets warmer: the warmer air is, the lower is its saturated adiabatic lapse rate.

                         "I can give you…

                         show full comment

                         "My point was and remains that this characteristic warming had been held up confidently for many years as a criterion which would be found to be met and would provide a definitive confirmation that the warming from 1979 to 1998 was because of carbon dioxide."

                         No it wasn't. Greater Tropopause warming in the tropics is simply a consequence of the lower saturated adiabatic lapse rate as the Troposphere gets warmer: the warmer air is, the lower is its saturated adiabatic lapse rate.

                         "I can give you contact to David Evans so you can ask him yourself"

                         You'll have to do better than that for a citation.

                         "But if so, can you explain why it was not found to occur in the later periods of the project when, as everyone accepts, there was surface warming?"

                         No, but I'm not any kind of atmospheric scientist.

                         "the forcings obtained are only different in the second decimal, and the differences are in fact about the same as the errors"

                         So your problem is that the results are not accurate enough.

                         "Any physicist worth his/her salt will ALWAYS want to go to the most fundamental starting point in any problem and work his/her way through it to obtain a result which he/she understands from top to bottom."

                         What has this got to do with the accuracy of the results? You sound like you're saying if the results are not accurate then the scientists cannot understand it from top to bottom. This hardly sounds logical.

                         "everything the IPCC and most climatologists present - they start with a few assumptions and apply themselves to someone else's data, much of which they only vaguely understand"

                         So you're saying that Gilbert Plass and the people who studied his work only had a vague understanding of at least part of what he was doing. Hmmm.

                         "For carbon dioxide, All of its characteristics and behaviour in the atmosphere which contribute essentially to that forcing, from the finer points of the variations in the spectral line shape, the values of absorption and emission coefficients and the effect of collisions of the second kind on the radiation characteristics of a GHG, are totally ignored."

                         "absorption and emission coefficients totally ignored"

                         So they're totally ignored by HITRAN and GEISA? One wonders what HITRAN and GEISA actually contain if they don't have absorption and emission coefficients.

                         "the basic method of deriving a value for the forcing, begins with an assumption that such a forcing exists to increase global temperatures"

                         What does that mean?

                         "The height in the atmosphere where the energy is actually absorbed is also ignored or at least never verbalised."

                         Perhaps you're not aware that the forcing calculations are not just spectral line-by-spectral line but also layer-by-layer in the atmosphere.

                         " In all of this the fine, very high resolution spectral characteristics of CO2 are to my mind carelessly ignored by most if not all who contribute to the idea that CO2 is a problem"

                         I'll have to go back and check that Gilbert Plass and his reviewers were careless as obviously you have already done so.

          2. Permalink

             

             Mark Matthews

             General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

             Wow - I haven't heard the "It's not warming" for a while now. Here's what NASA has to say...

             "All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. 5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years."

             from http://climate.nasa.gov

             This site is also useful which explains how we can use more than the temperature record to observer…

             show full comment

             Wow - I haven't heard the "It's not warming" for a while now. Here's what NASA has to say...

             "All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. 5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years."

             from http://climate.nasa.gov

             This site is also useful which explains how we can use more than the temperature record to observer the warming: http://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm

             As far as the carbon dioxide fingerprint, a good summary is presented here:
             http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm

             I cannot help but notice how many retired physicists object to the theory of AGW. Interestingly, much of the denialist movement (again - I hate this term, but cannot think of a better one) began with "retired" physicists. People like Fred Singer and Eric Seitz for example who seem to see environmental activism as nothing by socialism in disguise - a threat to our way of life, a threat to western civilisation itself.

             1. Permalink

                

                John Nicol

                (logged in via Facebook)

                Another more likely explanation is that physicists have a better understanding of thspectroscpy, radiation tenasfer, hydrology and atmospheric physics generally than do geopgraphers. This is not do denigrate geographers who have amuch better grip of ewconomics, population dynamics and perhapos some environmental matters than so physicists. It is just that "each to his own" and the matter unde debate is not by hopw much or where the world has warmed, nor is there any argument that it did warm from…

                show full comment

                Another more likely explanation is that physicists have a better understanding of thspectroscpy, radiation tenasfer, hydrology and atmospheric physics generally than do geopgraphers. This is not do denigrate geographers who have amuch better grip of ewconomics, population dynamics and perhapos some environmental matters than so physicists. It is just that "each to his own" and the matter unde debate is not by hopw much or where the world has warmed, nor is there any argument that it did warm from 1979 to 1998 and also from 1860 to 1880 and from 1920 to 1940. The real scientific argument is whether or not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can behave as proposed by Arrhenius, the one person who is always quoted by the IPCC. The answer from most physicists is no it can't. Following the treatment of several academics from the "hard" sciences who opposed the idea of global warming, most physicists not retired, choose to be more careful and keep their heads down below the parapet until they retire.
                John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                1. Permalink

                   

                   Mark Matthews

                   General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                   John - no doubt physicists have a better understanding of those fields of science than geographers, however, climate scientists are not geographers are they.

                   Let's take a look at a few
                   James Hansen - an atmospheric physicist
                   David Karoly - Professor of Meteorology with a bachelor in applied mathematics

                   Most physicists - well... not the ones in the American Institute of Physics: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm

                   The Australian Institute of Physics:
                   " The AIP supports a reduction of the…

                   show full comment

                   John - no doubt physicists have a better understanding of those fields of science than geographers, however, climate scientists are not geographers are they.

                   Let's take a look at a few
                   James Hansen - an atmospheric physicist
                   David Karoly - Professor of Meteorology with a bachelor in applied mathematics

                   Most physicists - well... not the ones in the American Institute of Physics: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm

                   The Australian Institute of Physics:
                   " The AIP supports a reduction of the green house gas emissions that are leading to increased global temperatures, and encourages research that works towards this goal."

                   European Physical Society:
                   "The emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, among which carbon dioxide is the main contributor, has amplified the natural greenhouse effect and led to global warming. The main contribution stems from burning fossil fuels. A further increase will have decisive effects on life on earth. An energy cycle with the lowest possible CO2 emission is called for wherever possible to combat climate change."

                   I don't buy the whole "Most physicists do not believe in AGW, but choose to stay quiet for fear of shattering their reputation". In science, the truth doesn't stay hidden for long and the theory of AGW has been around for a long time.
                   

                   1. Permalink

                      

                      John Nicol

                      (logged in via Facebook)

                      Mark, there are of course a range of different people who have defined themselves as climatologists, which used to be used exclusively in my earlier days by physical geographers. In those days they were largely intersted in regional climate and its effect on the development of industry, population growth, environment etc as geographers do. Certainly if you look at the basic qualifications of most of the people in the esearch units in Australia I believe you will find a significant proportion are…

                      show full comment

                      Mark, there are of course a range of different people who have defined themselves as climatologists, which used to be used exclusively in my earlier days by physical geographers. In those days they were largely intersted in regional climate and its effect on the development of industry, population growth, environment etc as geographers do. Certainly if you look at the basic qualifications of most of the people in the esearch units in Australia I believe you will find a significant proportion are geographers. Andy Pitman and Matthew England who jointly I think head the UNSW quite large climate unit are both Geographers. They do of course fill a need in studying as they continue to do the possible environmental and ecological changes that might occur in various regions as the climate changes, and in recent years have concentrated on the effects of global warming. The Climate Unit at Adelaide is essentially a biological/environmental unit and Barry Brookes is an environmental biologist although I think he is also often referred to as a climatologist. When he first arrived I wrote to him asling him for advice on matters related to the physical effects of carbon dioxide and he wrote back saying he did not understand this side of things and was an environmental biologist. He then kindly referred me to the Physics Department at Adelaide. I have no problem with that and if he wishes to badge himself as a climatoplogist then that is fine.

                      The problem, I think, arises often in the press and elsewhere, where statements are made about the melting of ice or changes in a portion of a continent and someone adds a bit about carbon dioxide causing a larger effect than we thought and is likely to produce continuing drought conditions forever" It is then added that the person is a climatologist which makes it sound as if he has a handle on the green hoiuse effect. Similarly in the IPCC, as I have complained before, the 10,000 references given are nearly all of the "geographic/environmental" type as are the 500 scientific authors, whereas all the real concern should be about whether it is worthwhile even thinking of reducing our carbon dioxide output and in my view, this topic is not sufficiently considered or discussed by anyone in the IPCC or the surrounding climate units. The papers by Hansen and Kiehl & Trenberth and many others, are really very general in nature and keep referring back to the details of the models which are far too cumbersome to and have far too many uncertain parameters, as set out clearly in the AR4 2007 report, to really show what carbon dioxide might be doing. In Physics experiments in atomic physics, there are thousands of experiments still being conducted on hydrogen and helium and sometimes on sodium and the other alkalis simply because the complexity of heavier atoms probids one from obtaining any usefully accurate results of fundamental importance. Once the accurate measurements have been made, analysi of the more complex systems can be done by very serious modelling which uses the fundamental results to define spin behaviour, wavefunctions etc. In my view, the analysis of the climate has been done by since Arrhenius, by looking at the whole globe, without sufficient detail of the "hydrogen and helium" of the system being studied and when such studies are done it has been by someone outside the climatologiy fraternity and no one will take any notice. Jack Barrett and many others, as I said before, have been presenting data of the fundamental type sinc at least 1985 and he might as well have not bothered.
                      John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                      1. Permalink

                         

                         Chris O'Neill

                         Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

                         "all the real concern should be about whether it is worthwhile even thinking of reducing our carbon dioxide output and in my view, this topic is not sufficiently considered or discussed by anyone in the IPCC or the surrounding climate units"

                         So why do you keep ignoring Myhre et al and earlier papers beginning with Gilbert Plass? You don't yet appear to have realized the deficiency in your research. The reason CO2 forcing (as opposed to feedback) is no longer discussed by the IPCC is because it is "settled science". CO2 forcing is a solution to the radiative transfer equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_transfer_equation

                      2. Permalink

                         

                         Mark Matthews

                         General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                         Hello again John.

                         "He then kindly referred me to the Physics Department at Adelaide."

                         And what did they have to say on the matter? I'll give you a clue: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/in-depth/changing-climate/story-e6frebvu-1226029991940

                         Now, you could say that this is a formal statement made by a Uni preserving it's reputation, or you could say that this is the consensus scientific opinion, as demonstrated by the fact that there are virtually no scientific institutions that claim that the greenhouse effect does not exist...
                         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climate_change

                         1. Permalink

                            

                            John Nicol

                            (logged in via Facebook)

                            Mark,
                            Yes thanks for the clue, but I already knew that. I thought I was giving Barry some credit for his honesty, but did not add that I did not contact the physics department at Adelaide as I was already familiar with their work for many years and knew lot of the staff.

                            You keep writing as if one doesn't accept that the Green House effect exists. As I have said before everyone acknowledges that CO2 and others are green house gases, that they help to heat the atmosphere along with evaporation…

                            show full comment

                            Mark,
                            Yes thanks for the clue, but I already knew that. I thought I was giving Barry some credit for his honesty, but did not add that I did not contact the physics department at Adelaide as I was already familiar with their work for many years and knew lot of the staff.

                            You keep writing as if one doesn't accept that the Green House effect exists. As I have said before everyone acknowledges that CO2 and others are green house gases, that they help to heat the atmosphere along with evaporation and conduction at the surface and that they are the only gases which can also radiate and cool the atmosphere at higher levels. What is contentious, is the "enhanced" green house effect (EGHE), which is completely acknowledged as the issue, for increased CO2, given that the centres of the main greenhouse bands are already "saturated" and have been since CO2 concentrations were about 1/5th of what they are now. The EGHE arises from the much more refined analysis of the spectral line shapes and how these shapes will 1. change with collision rates in the lower densities at higher altitudes 2. Increase the absorption in the wings of the lines 3. change the radiation rates at the top of the atmosphere where CO2 is the only significant gas which can radiate and cool the earth, since water vapour, which does provide most of the radiation, condnses out of the air much lower down at the cloud level.(Note: Oxygen and Nitrogen do NOT have the characteristics which allow them to radiate and cool the earth)
                            If you could answer these three questions Mark I would appreciate it or show me a reference from the IPCC report where they are discussed in detail. I don't think Jack Barrett's publications are cited in that report.
                            John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                            1. Permalink

                               

                               Derek Bolton

                               Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                               John - two things.

                               You refer to CO2 at high altitude cooling the earth, as though that were its net effect. I would have thought that the only reason it got hot in the first place was by absorption, so its reradiation - in all direction - cannot be a net cooling.

                               Wrt saturation, it's important to include convection in the model. If convection were somehow suppressed, the earth's surface would be a lot hotter than it is. The ALR is effectively a limit on how fast temperature can drop as altitude…

                               show full comment

                               John - two things.

                               You refer to CO2 at high altitude cooling the earth, as though that were its net effect. I would have thought that the only reason it got hot in the first place was by absorption, so its reradiation - in all direction - cannot be a net cooling.

                               Wrt saturation, it's important to include convection in the model. If convection were somehow suppressed, the earth's surface would be a lot hotter than it is. The ALR is effectively a limit on how fast temperature can drop as altitude increases.
                               As a result, a model for heat transport in the atmosphere falls naturally into two parts: the (largely) convective domain and the purely radiative domain.
                               The impact of raised GHG levels is of most significance in the higher domain. More heat trapped at the domain boundary raises the temperature there, allowing a more-or-less equal temperature rise at ground level. (It also raises the boundary point.)

                               This suggests to me that the system is not effectively saturated until it is saturated above that boundary. Is there reason to believe it is?

                               1. Permalink

                                  

                                  John Nicol

                                  (logged in via Facebook)

                                  Derek,
                                  You are quite right about he importance of convection, since at low levels radiation within the main absorption bands effectively and literally trap radiation in a small region where it is absorbed very clode to the ground. As the bundle of air rises, emitted radiation in the centre of the absorption/emission bands is quickly reabsorbed and follows a "drunken man's walk" around the sample some going a bit further out, some moving into the middle, but essentially the energy is simply cycling…

                                  show full comment

                                  Derek,
                                  You are quite right about he importance of convection, since at low levels radiation within the main absorption bands effectively and literally trap radiation in a small region where it is absorbed very clode to the ground. As the bundle of air rises, emitted radiation in the centre of the absorption/emission bands is quickly reabsorbed and follows a "drunken man's walk" around the sample some going a bit further out, some moving into the middle, but essentially the energy is simply cycling between kinetic and excitation energy. However, in the wings of the line the situation is different where a lower level of absorption takes place together with subsequent reemision, although at lowe levels the collision rate is so high at about 1o^9 Hz compared to the spontaneous emission rate, about 19^5, there are about 100 times more pieces of excitation energy lost to kinetic energy than escape as photons. So essentially, the radiation over a wide band is essentially trapped, a phenomenon which can be easily observed in the case of visible radiation in the laboratory and also measured at lower levels in marginal circumstances where the radiation eventually gets out but leaving a dip in the centre of a spectral line or band. In the upper atmosphere the density of the absorbers goes downby a factor of 10 towards the tropopause and the collisionrate also drops by a slightly higher proportion because at cooler temperatures, the velocity of molecules is also reduced, contributing to a lowering of the collision rate. These two things provide the opportunity for radiation to be emitted in all directions, but because the density of the gases increase as you go down, the downwards radiation is re-absorbed very quickly again in that direction, but in the upwards direction the number density falls, so the absorption coeffcient also falls and there is a much clearer pathe for he upwards half of the re-emission than for that in the downwards direction. What does go down to be absorbed, is picked up and raised again by convection to start the radiation process over again. The stuff going upwards has a clearer view of the cold sky so gets away and cools the upper atmosphere. In the absence of CO2, the cooling process stops above the cloud level where water vapour is reduced to almost though not entirely, inconsequential levels. These processes can be observed from the satellite spectral measurements, which unfortunately, though probably necessarily, are taken with very low resolution spectrometers which don't show the line structure of the radiation.

                                  With regard to saturation above the boundary, this is of course, difficult to define, since while in the centre of the band, the absorption may increase because of an increased number density, the radiation at the same level may actually increase in the wings compensating for this. It is this type of very precise spectroscopic analysis which needs to be studied instead of just feeding an assumption into a computer model. The model can follow once the physics is understood but at present it is not. As I have said before, if you remove all carbon dioxide and just have water vapour, above the cloud level, there is still heat from the condensation of the water vapour, which up to that point has acted also as a radiator. But without CO2 there is nothing to get rid of that heat and again from satellite measurements it is fairly clear, though not absolutely established, that CO2, even in the middle of the bands, radiates a significant amout of energy to space at about 220 K or at a height fairly close to the tropopause.
                                  These are my interpretations of the data presented and it would be intersting to have other comments on this.
                                  John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com.

                            2. Permalink

                               

                               Mark Matthews

                               General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                               John.. Just so that I understand this correctly, are you saying that, since CO2 concentrations where at a concentration of about ~60ppm (1/5th of what they are now), CO2 has had no affect on the temperature?

                               Some disagree ...

                               "An enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 has been confirmed by multiple lines of empirical evidence. Satellite measurements of infrared spectra over the past 40 years observe less energy escaping to space at the wavelengths associated with CO2. Surface measurements find more downward infrared radiation warming the planet's surface. This provides a direct, empirical causal link between CO2 and global warming"

                               from http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm

                               1. Permalink

                                  

                                  John Nicol

                                  (logged in via Facebook)

                                  Mark,
                                  No, I am saying that at about 60 ppmv, the centre of the main band of CO2 at 14.9 microns absorbs most of the radiation within that 5 micron wide band in a distance of about (400 m) four hundred metres, from the ground. At present (380 ppmv) that distance is probably about 150 metres, but the difference to the heat collected by the atmosphere is practically zero. That is, as far as preventing IR in that wavelength band from escaping directly to space, nothing changes in the main band by…

                                  show full comment

                                  Mark,
                                  No, I am saying that at about 60 ppmv, the centre of the main band of CO2 at 14.9 microns absorbs most of the radiation within that 5 micron wide band in a distance of about (400 m) four hundred metres, from the ground. At present (380 ppmv) that distance is probably about 150 metres, but the difference to the heat collected by the atmosphere is practically zero. That is, as far as preventing IR in that wavelength band from escaping directly to space, nothing changes in the main band by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. The energy is than simply redistributed as heat in the surrounding air, just as evaporation over the sea transfers about 80% of all the energy received from the sun to the air and contact betweween land and air, transfers another 20% leaving about 20% to be lost by radiation. The determination of an enhanced green hiouse effect for smaller percentage increases or even for doubling form here i.e. to 760 ppmv, the calculation is much more subtel and changes will depend on effects in the far wings of the many thousands of spectral lines making up the band. This has also to be considered, in fact mainly considered, not at ground level, but in the upper atmosphere where CO2 contributes within the band and in its wings to radiation to outer space. This determines whether CO2 causes further warming or further cooling of the region near the tropopause.

                                  If I were trying to establish what might even be a reasonable case for AGW, the last port of call, for me at least, would be Skeptical Science. The original measurements mostly discussed at the reference you give are actually 27 years apart. You will notice that:
                                  1. The only evidence for the enhanced green house effect is to quote the old statement about CO2 absorbing IR which heats the atmosphere, and to quote authors as far back as Tyndall. Everyone accepts that.

                                  2. The subtlty begins in the possible cause of a significant enhanced green house effect. Note: “significant" and "enhanced"

                                  3. The measurements which were actually 27 years apart have been thoroughly discussed in the literature and there is of course again significant disagreement on their validity as there is for the more recent measurements of 2003-05 where again the subtleties of making acurate measurements from a satellite sufficient to demonstrate unambiguously differences in the separate measurements where expected changes are going to be much less than the errors. The suggestion that you could make, even in a carefully controlled laboratory, a successful and accurate measurement to distinguish between the strength of two sources to the accuracy claimed, twentyseven years apart in the first case, using totally different equipment, is pushing credibility to its limits. The instruments being compared even had different apertures which had to be “corrected” for, very difficult exercise in allowing for at least two angular effects with different characteristics. For smaller time scales the expected changes to be measured are commensurately smaller and hence are similar, relative to the errors. The conclusions, I believe, are drawn by individuals, not by NASA or those who actually made the measurements.
                                  The second issue is that even if the differences are found to be correct, this does not directly place any more credence on the hypothesis of a significant Enhanced Green House Effect.
                                  John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                               2. Permalink

                                  

                                  Mark Matthews

                                  General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                                  Whoops - replace "where" with "were". Sorry about that

                                  "Just so that I understand this correctly, are you saying that, since CO2 concentrations were at a concentration of about ~60ppm (1/5th of what they are now), CO2 has had no affect on the temperature"

                   2. Permalink

                      

                      John Nicol

                      (logged in via Facebook)

                      While I respect that James Hansen is an atmospheric physicist anf that David Karoly is a meteorologist, their experience and understanding of the physics of carbon dioxide which Barrett and Hug and many others discuss, would not be expected to be part of their course or expertise. Statements made by both of these very good climatologists, meteorologists and mathematicians, including Ian Enting, also from Melbourne, shows quite clearly that they have not made any study of the necessary aspects of…

                      show full comment

                      While I respect that James Hansen is an atmospheric physicist anf that David Karoly is a meteorologist, their experience and understanding of the physics of carbon dioxide which Barrett and Hug and many others discuss, would not be expected to be part of their course or expertise. Statements made by both of these very good climatologists, meteorologists and mathematicians, including Ian Enting, also from Melbourne, shows quite clearly that they have not made any study of the necessary aspects of carbon dioxide's role. I am not even saying they should. But what I would say is that they should at least listen to people such as Jack Barrett, who have made exhaustive studies in the laboratory and have a very comprehensive understanding of these things. But as in 1985, these things are just dismissed and replaced with the generalities you find in the IPOCC and its many references. I asked a question once of Will Steffen , head of ANU climate and he sent me a paper which he claimed was conclusive. It was the monthly society magazine for some science group in the US and had several quite wrong statements in it. It was certainly not the sort of journal one would expect to receive in answer to a difficult scientific question. Other popular articles are sent out of Scientific American as sources of understanding. But no, by all measures the science of CO2 is not properly considered, and saying that environmental changes in various parts of the world are consistent with the Enhanced Green House Effect, that ice melting and other happenings are also proof of the hypothesis is very hard to accept, particularly when the understanding of the underlying processes involving atmospheric CO2 are so worfully ignored.
                      John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                      1. Permalink

                         

                         Mark Matthews

                         General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                         John.
                         Before my usual diatribe, I have to say this has been a fascinating discussion and in no way am I showing any disrespect to you here.

                         Obviously, I am not buying into the whole "There is scientific evidence that AGW is bunkum, but everyone is too scared to do anything about it"

                         You claim - "most physicist", but a quick search reveals that the major institutes of physics disagree. This does not strengthen your position.
                         You claim - Climatologists are geographers and are therefore not qualified…

                         show full comment

                         John.
                         Before my usual diatribe, I have to say this has been a fascinating discussion and in no way am I showing any disrespect to you here.

                         Obviously, I am not buying into the whole "There is scientific evidence that AGW is bunkum, but everyone is too scared to do anything about it"

                         You claim - "most physicist", but a quick search reveals that the major institutes of physics disagree. This does not strengthen your position.
                         You claim - Climatologists are geographers and are therefore not qualified. Not true. I might add geologists are also not physicists, or practicing climate scientists either but so many have so much to say in this debate.
                         You claim - James Hansen may be a physicist, but the physics of CO2 was probably not part of his course material. Not believable either. He also has the formidable resources of NASA at his disposal.
                         You claim - One must obtain permission from the VC to speak out against the IPCC. Well I should think so. This is not your run of the mill debate here and universities must be deeply sensitive to their reputations. The last thing they need is: "Uni of Melb presents the Honourable Member of the House of Lords" above a swastika and a gentleman being rather insulting to a respected economist.

                         I want to believe that you are right about CO2, but, given that it is a scientific debate, and given that I have complete faith in the scientific method providing the only objective way of pursuing this kind of knowledge, I will not believe this until I see it published via the peer-review process in a respected scientific journal. Until then, it is just another theory in the blogosphere or just another article in the Murdoch press.

                         Finally, I find it impossible to believe that one could not obtain funding for research in this area. I can think of a number of cashed up corporations who are busting to disprove AGW.

                         1. Permalink

                            

                            John Nicol

                            (logged in via Facebook)

                            Thanks Mark,
                            I too have enjoyed this discussion with you and others such as Chris O'Neill. It is very stimulating to receive some substantial criticisms which I will be looking at and thinking about - always, of course, with a view to demolishing them if possible, but I accept that it may not be possible, in which case one has learnt something of value. Unfortunately because of time considerations though, I will now have to consider making much fewer comments on this site - which may be interpreted…

                            show full comment

                            Thanks Mark,
                            I too have enjoyed this discussion with you and others such as Chris O'Neill. It is very stimulating to receive some substantial criticisms which I will be looking at and thinking about - always, of course, with a view to demolishing them if possible, but I accept that it may not be possible, in which case one has learnt something of value. Unfortunately because of time considerations though, I will now have to consider making much fewer comments on this site - which may be interpreted as my retiring hurt, but so be it. Perhaps I have to spend some time re-evaluating my arguments, and at the same time, I would hope that some of my comments may have helped others to re-evaluate theirs, if just a little.

                            Regarding speakers at Uni forums, in my days at University, the philosophy was that all ideas could be handled in an informal, non-threatening manner and should be considered. In regard to my specific comments, none of them referred to Chris Monckton but to Australians all of whom have been working, or are working, in a university, so I don't think it has been a matter of vetting the quality of the speaker per se, simply the disallowing of the topic which to my mind at least, is not what our publicly funded universities are expected to do. I don't think that dismissing an adjunct professor is a very acceptable way to behave either and does smack of the actions in a less than full democratic society where free speech was once a benchmark of freedom.

                            You mention that geologists are not climatologists and that is true. But there is more than one way to skin a cat, and the geological records of climate and the understanding of prehistoric climates has been studied since long before global warming was even thought of and there is a huge amount of consistent information which matches the current understanding of the influences on climate and probably most importantly that the concentrations of carbon dioxide have been much higher and much lower in the past than at present but show no correlation whatsoever with temperatures of the earth, the temperature of which has also been much higher than now. We ignore history at our peril in more than one field of enquiry.

                            I have known a lot of physical geographers among whom some have worked in areas close to geology, but I have not yet met anyone amongst them who could discuss spectroscopy and radiation transfer with Jack Barrett and Heinze Hug.

                            With regard to James Hansen being a physicist, that is also true but is not the issue. He is as I understand it, an atmospheric physicist which would most definitely not have included necessarily a course in atomic or molecular physics at any significant level, just as my own physics course did not include the techniques for solving the Navier-Stokes equation or Euler's equations for large scale fluid dynamics or the Lagranian for small scale. While there is no reason that Hansen and other meterorologists of note in this debate, could not have got themselves up to speed in the area of radiation transfer and molecular physics, there is certainly no evidence of it in any of their publications, as far as I am aware - but I am willing to be convinced if appropriate. The same comments apply to David Karoly and certainly to Penny Whetton (meteorologist) in CSIRO with whom I have corresponded for a very long time. I guess one of my main concerns is the fact that when presented with a question on the fundamentals of the green house effect, the reference is always back to Arrhenius whose hypothesis was plausible at the time (1896) and his attempts to analyse its effects on the atmosphere were laudible, but to put his work in context it was some 30 years minimum before quantum theory was established to a level capable of dealing with the problem and some 80 years before spectroscopic instrumentation was available for the precision measurements necessary to establish whether or not increases in CO2 will actually cause warming. The simplistic explanations offered, in speaking as between scientists, is that carbon dioxide absorbs radiation and this is converted to heat which means that if you increase carbon dioxide then the atmosphere will warm. This, together with the emphatic dismissal of any attempt to explain the details as to why this may not be so, also appears to me to indicate a lack of proper connection with the science. It is a bit like employing an electrical engineer to design a bridge, after all, engineers do design bridges.

                            Yes, I am sure if one went looking for it one could find funding for research but given my earlier remarks and the effective dismissal of Jack Barrett from Imperial College, I doubt that there would be much enthusiasm among working scientists to put their hand up for it and retired people such as myself are not in a position to undertake a project costing money, so spend their time amongst the equations.

                            I also have faith in the scientific method, as I realise you do. However, I guess my contention is that basing one’s science on the most simplistic theory of global warming as it appears to be used, putting the assumed forcing from this into a computer programme, ignoring any model, as described by the IPCC AR4 2997, which does not show some warming and is thus regarded as “implausible”, since the object is only to determine how much warming there is, not whether co2 causes warming which is taken as a given, does not represent “the scientific method”. To present the results of this as almost complete evidence that CO2 is to blame, without discussing the Milanvich cycles, past ice ages and holocenes or the work of many spectroscopists who have indicated that CO2 is not a potential earth-warmer; to use the warming period from 1979 to 1998 as ipsi facto proof that warming is caused by carbon dioxide since “that is the only thing that is increasing, what else could it be?” (Andy Pitman, 2009) but to ignore discussion on the previous (slightly faster warming from 1860 to 1880 and the slightly slower warming from 1920 to 1940, is quite bizarre in scientific terms. To completely ignore te work of solar physicists such as Svensmark, whose careful studies indicate a much larger role played by solar influences than the simple changes in insolation, displays an unscientific arrogance beyond my simple belief. To manipulate the publication of papers as demonstrated beyond question, in the CRU emails that “this will not see the light of day in the IPCC report, even if we have to change the definition of peer review” – a “joke” perhaps, but a very serious revelation of thought processes for the head of the CRU wich everyone used once to look up to. To oversee the sacking and “resignation” respectively, within two years, of the Editor of one of the major publishing houses on climate change, both being because of the publication of critical papers which other authors believed should not be published because they were critical of their own work and which obviously, though never stated, were likely to have been difficult to refute.

                            These things do not, to my simple mind at least, constitute the use of the scientific method in any respectable form, but are consistently supported without question by the “thousands” of “publishing climatologists” who support the inputs to the IPCC. Complaints by John Wilkie, Richard Lindzen and others who are unquestionably among the worlds most notable and experienced climate scientists, along similar lines to the above, and about the words written into the IPCC reports for which they had themselves been authors, tells me something is not quite right with “consensus” science. Kind regards and thanks for the opportunity you have given me to discuss these important problems.
                            John Nicol
                            Jonicol18@bigpond.com

                   3. Permalink

                      

                      John Nicol

                      (logged in via Facebook)

                      Dear Mark,
                      Thanks for your comments and the link. This actually took me to Spencer Weart's page who is a historian for the AIP, not the AIP site itself. Actually at the bottom there is a disclaimer which dissociates the AIP from the page itself I believe, although I am not sure exactly what the AIP say now on climate change. I do know however, that a lot of eminent physicists wrote in to the society and/or the APS complaining about the statements in their documentation and a couple even resigned…

                      show full comment

                      Dear Mark,
                      Thanks for your comments and the link. This actually took me to Spencer Weart's page who is a historian for the AIP, not the AIP site itself. Actually at the bottom there is a disclaimer which dissociates the AIP from the page itself I believe, although I am not sure exactly what the AIP say now on climate change. I do know however, that a lot of eminent physicists wrote in to the society and/or the APS complaining about the statements in their documentation and a couple even resigned which was a bit over the top actually. I have had some quite interesting discussions with Spencer who has often been quoted to me by people like Karoly and Pitman, but who has emphasised to me that he is not a practicing physicist but a science historian. His article on the green house effect is fairly comprehensive in a historical setting and in some ways interesting, but it does not discuss the real physics even though along the way it points you to sections which have headings as if they should discuss the physics. It was on being asked for the details which matched the headings that Spencer told me was not a practicing physicist and could not help.
                      I didn't say the physicists I know of did not want to "shatter their reputation" as physicists, but in the universities being a skeptic is often not helpful. You may not be aware, but in any university in Australia or New Zealand, anyone wanting to speak against the IPCC position at a seminar or public talk, has now to obtain express permission form the VC and several have not been allowed to do so, sometimes to the great embarassment of the inviting department. An adjunct professor at an Australian university wrote an article in The Australian about two years ago criticising the publicity being given to the assumption that CO2 was the main cause of global warming. A week or so later he received a letter from the Registrar admonishing him for doing it and a month later a letter from the VC dismissing him from his position. Fortunately he was retired and the position was not paid of course, but included the usual offerings around the campus and the library, so he wasn't too disadvantaged. Some of us suggested we would write to the VC and complain but he cautioned against it because "it might reflect back on his colleagues in the lab". In the same open atmosphere of Light, Liberty and Learning, Prof Jack Barrett, of Imperial College, a senior member of staff at Imperial College, London, gave a paper at a European Environmental Conference in 1985, on the spectroscopy of carbon dioxide again criticising the assumptions that CO2 increases could cause global warming. From various directions of pressure on his department, he was told he could not publish papers under the address of Imperial and could not obtain research money - needless to say he left, effectively drummed out of his job. I have been told by many of the people I know in various universities, that in order to ensure that research dollars will not dry up, one keeps a low profile. Probably not as dramatic as I stated it earlier, but some people feel that they could be in a very uncomfortable and threatend positions if they make too much noise about their views. The Australian AIP position is pretty blandly
                      stated and as in all these institutions, it is realised that some statement to that effect is necessary in order to maintain some necessary contacts without penalising your self. I note that they recommend some research in the area, although I accept it is saying in the area of reducing green house emissions.
                      jonicol18@bigpond.com

             2. Permalink

                

                Toby James

                retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

                "Wow - I haven't heard the "It's not warming" for a while now. " Mark, you should get out more.

                A signature is not a fingerprint - there are warmistani fingerprints all over the place.

                As for the signature - CO2/AGW - Prof. Phil Jones in a BBC TV interview Feb 2010 gave the following answer to the question

                Q - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

                A - So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

                Mark, if there were a CO2 signature it should have been detected in the statistics - and it isn't. The one point you got right is that global CO2 continues to rise, and if its concentration were high enough and if climate were sensitive enough to CO2 then it should show up - but it doesn't.

    2. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       If I am beyond redemption, what is the flaw in the cross checks I suggested? Bluster and abuse are a poor substitute for robust calculations and accurate reporting of the science.

       In Quadrant (and above) Tim Curtin has put the argument that anthropogenic water vapour emissions are larger than carbon dioxide emissions, and thus anthropogenic water vapour is a more significant driver of climate change than carbon dioxide.

       While this initially sounds convincing, it ignores the fact that the water…

       show full comment

       If I am beyond redemption, what is the flaw in the cross checks I suggested? Bluster and abuse are a poor substitute for robust calculations and accurate reporting of the science.

       In Quadrant (and above) Tim Curtin has put the argument that anthropogenic water vapour emissions are larger than carbon dioxide emissions, and thus anthropogenic water vapour is a more significant driver of climate change than carbon dioxide.

       While this initially sounds convincing, it ignores the fact that the water remains in the atmosphere for days (it has a short residence time) while carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for many years. This is why anthropogenic water vapour emissions have a negligible impact on climate (as noted in the IPCC AR4 and elsewhere).

       Tim Curtin may have missed the answer to his question about MAGICC. Climate scientists normally label water vapour as a feedback rather than a forcing, so it does not appear in the tables of forcings (this does not alter the physics of how water vapour behaves in the full global climate models). This issue of semantics is discussed at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

20. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Truly Michael Brown’s insights are astounding and constitute a brave new Science when he says “This drop [in sea level] as reported by UC Boulder and NASA] is due to the change from El Nino to La Nina”. Only NASA and astrophysicists like MB are unaware that the ENSO which gives rise to El Nino/La Nina is an oscillation as its full name suggests, so that its NET effect on SLR has to be nil.
    Michael’s link to NASA’s chart shows how it confirms my post here, that global SLR is far slower, at 3 mm p…

    show full comment

    Truly Michael Brown’s insights are astounding and constitute a brave new Science when he says “This drop [in sea level] as reported by UC Boulder and NASA] is due to the change from El Nino to La Nina”. Only NASA and astrophysicists like MB are unaware that the ENSO which gives rise to El Nino/La Nina is an oscillation as its full name suggests, so that its NET effect on SLR has to be nil.
    Michael’s link to NASA’s chart shows how it confirms my post here, that global SLR is far slower, at 3 mm p.a., 30 mm per decade, and only 30 cm per century, than the self-serving but bogus projections of IPCC and CSIRO of 90 cm by 2100.
    David Brown is right, that claim about 97% of climatologists is drawn from a carefully selected sample that excluded Lindzen, Singer, Spencer, et many al in USA, and certainly Carter, Kininmonth, Salby, de Freitas, Plimer, Paltridge, Nicol, and Quirk and many more from the antipodes.
    Mark Matthews says “as Bob Beale has said, this is not a forum on climate change, rather the fact that The Oz's editorial/opinion is so out of step with mainstream science on the issue and how this affects our ability to make informed judgment on the issue…”. There is a difference between Mainstream Science and climate “science”, the latter is bogus, a fiction dreamt up mostly by 2nd rate academics who are either not up to real science or see more money in toy science. I do not know a real scientist at ANU who believes in AGW.
    Matthew added: “As I said before, why does The Oz fear environment activism? Do you have something to offer on that issue?” Thanks, yes I do. The shonky government we have, check its ability to read its own legislation, plans a serious attack on the viability of the Australian economy on the basis of the mickey mouse “science” of people like Will Steffen, David Karoly et co-authors of the travesty of the AAS Q&A 2010, devoid as they are of capacity to do statistical analysis, econometrics, and even calculus. The Australian provides a valuable forum for exposing their manifest deficiencies.

    1. Permalink

       

       Derek Bolton

       Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       Not sure what your logic is here. Are you arguing that if it's wetter here then it must be drier there? Even if so, that does not mean that the total rainfall is constant, nor that the retention of water on land is the same everywhere.
       The NASA researchers said:
       ''This year the continents got an extra dose of rain, so much so that global sea levels actually fell over most of the last year,''

       What makes that so unreasonable?

    2. Permalink

       

       Mark Matthews

       General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       But Timothy both the coalition and the ALP have policies on climate science, so surely you must extend your disappointment to governments in general for accepting the mainstream science here. I suspect you no doubt have concerns about the economic viability of direct action... Where will all that money come from?

       Secondly, the 97% figure comes from scientists who actively publish in peer-review journals in the field of climate science and are therefore considered the world's leading experts in the field. That is how the sample is carefully selected. You cannot just take the opinion of any scientist.

       Dare I say, perhaps you are getting your information on climate science from the opinion pages of The Oz.

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          John Nicol

          (logged in via Facebook)

          While I believe the magic figure of 97% is a myth, designed to build false confidence in the consensus, most of the papers in the Climate journals deal with environmental issues which nothing at all to say about the cause of global warming. Their main purpose is to determine what is likely to happen to a particular ecosystem such as the GBR IF the lobe warms, NOT to try to tell us why the world warms. Most if not all of the papers on carbon dioxide, atmospheric physics, chemistry, spectroscopy…

          show full comment

          While I believe the magic figure of 97% is a myth, designed to build false confidence in the consensus, most of the papers in the Climate journals deal with environmental issues which nothing at all to say about the cause of global warming. Their main purpose is to determine what is likely to happen to a particular ecosystem such as the GBR IF the lobe warms, NOT to try to tell us why the world warms. Most if not all of the papers on carbon dioxide, atmospheric physics, chemistry, spectroscopy of CO2, geological measurements of past climates,... are published in the relevant journals of physics, chemistry, meteorology, fluids, radiation physics etc and so do not go into the climate journals per se. Most of the papers quoted by the IPCC and CSIRO in their major publications, are similarly devoid of any reference to the cause of global warming from a fundamental physics point of view and analysis. The warming is based on an assumption and a belief. If anyone doubts this, please write to Dr P. Whetton, head of CSIRO Climate Research Group in Melbourne which does significant modelling for the IPCC and the Australian Weather Bureau. Similarly, if you write to David Karoly in Mebourne and any other of the University Climate Units in Australia, you will receive the same response. Much of the basic science can be explained in words, as I have done briefly on several aoccasions on this site. Yet NO ONE has ever risen to the occasion and entered into a discussion with me which is most disappointing. I have done this in a very small way above in my response to Tim Curtain, with whom I agree, about three comments above here. I always leave my email address in the hope that someone might pick me up on issues and be prepared to enter into an interesting debate on the science.

          John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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             Mark Matthews

             General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

             Here's the thing John. In Australia we have some eminent climate scientists. People like David Karoly for example.

             None of these guys spend their days commenting on blogs and articles like this. I guess they are out there doing scientific work, rather than spending hours and hours on extensive and verbose blog comments full of facts, evidence, figures, etc. You and I both know that is not the forum for science.

             I just don't get it.

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                John Nicol

                (logged in via Facebook)

                Mark,
                Further to my response to you above, I did not address your comment that this is not a very convenient place to be discussing the science of anything, let alone, I suppose, the complexities of the Green house effect. Yes, I agree with that and that one would not expect anyone with a day job to be using this forum, which is why one would be amazed if someone such as David Karoly or Matthew England were to appear here. However, Barry Brooks from Adelaide has his own blog site and is very active…

                show full comment

                Mark,
                Further to my response to you above, I did not address your comment that this is not a very convenient place to be discussing the science of anything, let alone, I suppose, the complexities of the Green house effect. Yes, I agree with that and that one would not expect anyone with a day job to be using this forum, which is why one would be amazed if someone such as David Karoly or Matthew England were to appear here. However, Barry Brooks from Adelaide has his own blog site and is very active on it himself, Brave New Climate or BNC and other climatologists do subscribe to RealClimate I believe. Barry of course is an ecological Environmentalist, I think he says, not a climatologist as such. However, I do find a little bit of frustration in trying to discuss the physics of the green house and global warming effect with David, Andy and Will as well as Penny Whetton from CSIRO, since they decline to discuss anything which is not at the level of a popular article and have frequently sent me "papers" which turn out to be something of a very general nature in a society monthly. None has ever given me a reference to an article they believe demonstrates the case for carbon dioxide's assumed role and frequently refer to the the output from models as projecting droughts and rains in some areas where it has happened but are unable to account for cases where the model results do not stack up. In the end, Penny Whetton referred me to the statement in their 2007 publication, Climate Change in Australia, which with regard to any role fior carbon dioxide simply and only says "We believe that most of the increase in global temperatures during the second half of the twentieth century was very likely due to increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide." I don't know how you find this, but to me it doesn't seem to exactly establish the case for an Enhanced Green House Effect to the point where Australia should lead the world by attempting to reduce the global temperature in 2100 by 0.001 C and where from the IPCC's worst case scenario, we could prevent an increase then of 0.02 C if we shut down all of our fossil fuel usage tomorrow!
                John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

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                John Nicol

                (logged in via Facebook)

                I accept that Mark.
                However, there are some sites I believe where a very few of those do activly engage. I am retired and part of my interest in retirement has been studying climate science for the last five years and in particular looking at the possible influence of carbon dioxide. No, I am not a climatologist. I do egage in brief discussions with people like Andy Pitman, Wil Steffen, David Karoly and Penny Whetton as well as other climate scientists. However, my main interest is in the spectroscopy…

                show full comment

                I accept that Mark.
                However, there are some sites I believe where a very few of those do activly engage. I am retired and part of my interest in retirement has been studying climate science for the last five years and in particular looking at the possible influence of carbon dioxide. No, I am not a climatologist. I do egage in brief discussions with people like Andy Pitman, Wil Steffen, David Karoly and Penny Whetton as well as other climate scientists. However, my main interest is in the spectroscopy of carbon dioxide and the effects it can have in the atmosphere because of its absorptive properties and its transfer rates through collisions, reabsorption and radiation. There is also a lot of interesting physics in the circulation generated by convection which plays a very large part in raising energy to a level where it can be radiated to space. These are the very fundamental aspects of the Green House Effect which go far beyond the very simplistic case made out by the IPCC and its adherents, which is to take the Arrhenius hypothesis at face value and effectively states that because carbon dioxide can absorb Infra Red radiation from the earth and because this energy is transferred to the other molecules causing heating, this will lead to global warming as the amount of carbon dioxide increases. This was first tackled at a basic level by Prof Jack Barrett, who still persists as I do in studying these processes. He was Prof of Chemistry at Imperial College London, and presented a paper to a conference on Global Warming in Europe in 1985, presenting high resolution measurements of the CO2 spectrum which showed that the increases in absorption claimed by Arrhenius and others such as Callendar, could not be correct because of the spectral characteristics. This work, as now was totally ignored and not even considered by people contributing to the IPCC. Arrhenius' put forward his suggestion in good faith, but long before proper (quantum) theory or very high resolution spectroscopy had been developed - in fact some 30 to 60 years before, depending on what particular aspect you wish to study. Barrett's work has been reproduced by others, including Heinze Hug, from Germany some times in even more detail, and the results are similar and the interpretation exactly the same as Barrett's. David Karoly is a very well respected meteorologist, but has no interest or expertise in the fundamental basis of the Green House Effect. Sure, there is a slight warming effect from the absorption as indicated in my earlier post, but increases in carbon dioxide will not change that effect which is virtually complete at very much lower concentrations than we have at present. One of the key processes upon which the current theory of global warming depends is the increase in back radiation resulting from increases in CO2. There is also the Kiehl Trenberth diagram of this huge flux of downwards back-radiation of 333 W/m2 at present, but which cannot be present and which very simple experiments demonstrate is not present. (This is an average for the whole earth day and night) But if you look at the diagram in IPCC AR4 2007, there it is beaming down on us with comments about its increase which will cause global warming. Sure there is radiation returning to the earth from the air which at the surface provides the necessary thermodynamic equilibrium with the ground surface at whatever tempeature it happens to be at. But if you calculate the additional radiation from the air at various heights, any increase in energy at a particular height giving rise to an initial field of increased radiation, this increase is totally accounted for by increases absorption on the way down so the surface does not receive any increase in energy. Again, this type of very fundamental analysis has never been discussed by any of the early or more recent theoretical calculations of the GHE. Moreover, the main signature of the effect, predicted long ago by modelers, has never been found. The recent divergence from contiued warming projected by the models for the increase in CO2, is not happening. None of the citations in the 5,000 or so quoted by the IPCC in its recent report show any evidence beyond modeling, that an assumed forcing from CO2 will cause warming. As you will probably be aware, 99.99% of the references are on environmental and ecological matters, or on detailed descriptions of adjusments and tweaking of computer models. The analyses quoted, from Arrhenius to Kiehl and Trenberth do not make any comment on the fundamental processes I have just mentioned nor of the spectroscopy demonstrated so carefullly by Barrett and others. It is no use discussing these effects, which is where David Karoly places the emphasis in all his analysis, making arttributions of drought, flood and fire to the effects of global warming but still saying nothing which throws any light on the cause of such warming.
                John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

    3. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       Tim Curtin is an example of a non-scientist "commentator" on climate change who genuinely believes he knows far more than legions of far more qualified scientists.

       In this particular case, Tim Curtin believes he understands the data far better than the NASA scientists who designed, built and operated the relevant spacecraft. Other examples can be found in Conversation discussion forums.

       As noted previously, the reason ENSO causes temporary dips in sea level rise is discussed at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-262. Similar dips can be seen in the historical record, including when other La Nina events occurred.

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          John Nicol

          (logged in via Facebook)

          Michael,
          While I believe in a forum such as this, each is entitled to express an opinion without consideration of their own or others qualifications and therefore "right" to make those comments. There are a lot of non-scientists who have been studying the data and the arguments for many years and can aslo read a well presented graph such as the one discussed here. Most climate scientists who are now well respected have learned on the job – they didn’t come out of universities with most of the…

          show full comment

          Michael,
          While I believe in a forum such as this, each is entitled to express an opinion without consideration of their own or others qualifications and therefore "right" to make those comments. There are a lot of non-scientists who have been studying the data and the arguments for many years and can aslo read a well presented graph such as the one discussed here. Most climate scientists who are now well respected have learned on the job – they didn’t come out of universities with most of the “climate” skills they now have. If you wish to stand by your comment on Tim, could you also explain what a “futurist” has studied? What Tim is saying is essentially correct, in that the oscillation per se does not cause the average level to rise or fall, as has been implied in some places, though perhaps not here. The suggestion that the rainfall on the land is sufficient to cause a measurable change in the sea level, particularly when there is only in fact a comparatively small percentage increase in the water held on land, is still up for debate. The quick response by NASA to pinpoint the reason seems to be drawing a fairly long bow and I believe the explanation may well be found subsequently to be wrong.
          If one looks at the graph of La Nina (SOI) and Eastern Australian rain fall at
          http://www.amos.org.au/news/id/111
          where the magnitude of the event in 2011 is being discussed, one sees that neither the level of rainfall nor the magnitude of the SOI are particularly extraordinary, since both are as high in about 1917 within the errors I suspect, while rainfall was higher in about 1973-76 but the SOI was not particularly so.
          jonicol18@bigpond.com.

          1. Permalink

             

             Michael J. I. Brown

             (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

             People are absolutely entitled to express their opinions of forums like these. People with rudimentary knowledge can also claim the experts are wrong, but they should expect others to highlight their lack of expertise.

             With regards to ENSO and sea level rise, the GRACE satellite has directly measured the changes in the water over the continents, as highlighted by the sidebar at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-262

21. Permalink

    

    Gregory Bradley

    (logged in via Facebook)

    In August 2007, Helen Mosby showed The Courier Mail the dramatic impact of sea level change on Masig Island, where the ‘ocean has eaten up the road’. Ms Mosby stated: `it is a big change, and it seems to be getting worse in the past two years or so’. More than 60 metres of land has been consumed on another island, Poruma, since 2000.

    Of course, that was back when the Murdoch press was permitted to write news stories and actually investigated rather than interview the nearest "expert" at Bondi wearing speedos.

22. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    re Mark Matthews who just commented:
    "Guys, this is not the forum for science (it states this very clearly at the top of the article). This article makes the very salient point that the opinion pages of a important national newspaper have become infected with pseudoscience and 'obfuscation of the facts' [sic] and this is doing nothing but distorting the debate".

    Actually the focus of the Lambert offering was The Australian's reporting of Phil Watson's finding from long term tidal gauge records at…

    show full comment

    re Mark Matthews who just commented:
    "Guys, this is not the forum for science (it states this very clearly at the top of the article). This article makes the very salient point that the opinion pages of a important national newspaper have become infected with pseudoscience and 'obfuscation of the facts' [sic] and this is doing nothing but distorting the debate".

    Actually the focus of the Lambert offering was The Australian's reporting of Phil Watson's finding from long term tidal gauge records at 4 locations in this part of the world that so far from sea level rising at an alarming increasing rate, it's rate of rise was actually decelerating.

    The thrust of Lambert's complaint was that The Australian ignored Watson's employers' claim that observed deceleration was irrelevant if the IPCC and CSIRO models projected a rapid increase reaching 90 cm, nearly a metre, by 2100.

    Lambert CSIRO and the NSW Environment mob have never heard of Karl Popper's Black Swan, unlike as it seems The Australian's reporters. For if the hypothesis is that the sea will rise here by 90 cm by 2100 having managed only 15.53 cm since 1925 at Newcastle, one of Watson's 4, and similar at the others, in the absence of any compelling reason to expect major acceleration to reverse the current deceleration - none was offered by Lambert or CSIRO - it is reasonable to expect a continuation of the current down trend, which has just been confirmed by NASA for the whole world.

    But there will be decades of some increase, and others of decrease: here is the full decadal record at Newcastle since 1925:

    1925-34 y = -0.6351x + 6962.9
    R² = 0.1032
    1935-44 y = 1.1193x + 6833.8
    R² = 0.2587
    1945-54 y = 0.894x + 6885.2
    R² = 0.1413
    1955-64 y = -0.0132x + 7012.8
    R² = 5E-05
    1965-74 y = 0.381x + 6977.6
    R² = 0.0471
    1975-84 y = -0.7547x + 7053.6
    R² = 0.1222
    1985-94 y = -0.3157x + 7043.8
    R² = 0.0362
    1995-2004 y = 0.2802x + 7023.2
    R² = 0.0223
    2005-2009 y = 0.2321x + 7041.7
    R² = 0.0041

    It sems to me that The Australian's reporting of Watson's actual observations far surpassed the stupid letters and comments of NSW, CSIRO, and Lambert relying as they did on very dubious models rather than Watson's black swans.

23. Permalink

    

    Toby James

    retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

    The following is an example of how disruptive media irresponsibility can be with respect of climate models, science or doctrine.

    Roy Spencer and William Braswell's paper published a month ago in the journal Remote Sensing showed that far less global warming will occur down the track than the AGW community predicts.

    The paper caused a furore in Warmistan and today the Editor of the journal resigned. The media made far too much of the paper in support of its two authors. Its opponents claimed the…

    show full comment

    The following is an example of how disruptive media irresponsibility can be with respect of climate models, science or doctrine.

    Roy Spencer and William Braswell's paper published a month ago in the journal Remote Sensing showed that far less global warming will occur down the track than the AGW community predicts.

    The paper caused a furore in Warmistan and today the Editor of the journal resigned. The media made far too much of the paper in support of its two authors. Its opponents claimed the paper was scientifically fatally flawed and should not have been published.

    The Editor of the Journal and the three hand-picked referees are all experts in the field of remote sensing, the subject of the paper, but all failed to find anything that fatally flawed the paper before its publication. They accepted and published it.

    The Warmistani reaction was hysterical; so much so that now the Editor agrees that it is fatally flawed and that he and the three referees were all wrong to accept it.

    No one so far suggests that the paper should be withdrawn - but Peter Gleick at Forbes was most emphatic, papers on global warming "MUST FIT THE MODELS", in addition to satisfying observations and agree with physical theory.

    All this wouldn't have happened if the media had stuck to the official Warmistani line, instead of giving room to critics of the doctrine.

    1. Permalink

       

       John Nicol

       (logged in via Facebook)

       Toby,
       As you will be aware, the loud calls for the head of a publisher is a sign that something worthwhile has been published, which is going to be difficult to refute. If this Spencer and Braswell paper is indeed so "bad", it should be a shoe in for all these clever authors to boost their publication records with an easy rebuttal or three, and they would really love it!

       The same thing happened a couple of years ago when a paper by John McLean upset about six dedicated persons including Michael…

       show full comment

       Toby,
       As you will be aware, the loud calls for the head of a publisher is a sign that something worthwhile has been published, which is going to be difficult to refute. If this Spencer and Braswell paper is indeed so "bad", it should be a shoe in for all these clever authors to boost their publication records with an easy rebuttal or three, and they would really love it!

       The same thing happened a couple of years ago when a paper by John McLean upset about six dedicated persons including Michael Man and a group from CRU. The only attempt at rebuttal was published after the Editor at JGR was pushed aside on the complaints of Phil Jones and others who authored this unsuccessful "rebuttal". It did not succeed because they were obviously in such a hurry to get it into print that they managed to totally misinterpret the results shown in McLean's main diagram. This appears to have occurred because the original diagram which was sent to the publishers was the wrong and Foster, Mann Jones et al. criticised this wrong diagram rather than the one which was actually sent to the referees after McLean realised the mistake, indicating a few more shonky happenings, I believe. The paper was also subject to comments in the CRU emails between Mann and Jones - two of the rebuttal authors.
       John Nicol also a retired (atomic and optical) physicist jonicol18@bigpond.com

       1. Permalink

          

          Michael J. I. Brown

          (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

          Rather than relying on commentators to decipher Wolfgang Wagner's reasons for resigning as editor of Remote Sensing, one can read his letter of resignation at http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002/

          It does not read like the resignation letter of someone grudgingly pushed out by community pressure.

          Instead it reads like an editor resigning on principle, because of a failure of the peer review process, the actions of the authors, and the behaviour of some in the media. An illustrative paragraph…

          show full comment

          Rather than relying on commentators to decipher Wolfgang Wagner's reasons for resigning as editor of Remote Sensing, one can read his letter of resignation at http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002/

          It does not read like the resignation letter of someone grudgingly pushed out by community pressure.

          Instead it reads like an editor resigning on principle, because of a failure of the peer review process, the actions of the authors, and the behaviour of some in the media. An illustrative paragraph from the resignation letter follows;

          With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main author’s personal homepage [3], the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism” published by Forbes [4], and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News [5], to name just a few. Unfortunately, their campaign apparently was very successful as witnessed by the over 56,000 downloads of the full paper within only one month after its publication. But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible. Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.

          1. Permalink

             

             Toby James

             retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

             I have read the resignation letter and several pieces of attendant commentary and I think its bizarre that an Editor resigns for publishing a paper that went through peer review in a perfectly normal manner.

             How else should the Editorial process have worked? Who would like to be the next Editor of that Journal?

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                Michael J. I. Brown

                (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

                The peer review process of Remote Sensing failed to reject a paper with a myriad of flaws (as noted in the resignation letter), so the editor of the journal clearly felt it necessary to fall on his sword.

                For example, the editor notes "The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature (cf. [7]), a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers."

                If the peer review had functioned in a "perfectly normal manner", the paper would have been rejected.

                1. Permalink

                   

                   John Nicol

                   (logged in via Facebook)

                   Yes, I guess that may be so, but open discussion - probaly conference material is not always widelyb available except to participants, and it is not uncommon to allow some parallel paers to be published if they refer to different data or provide a new angle. It would be interwsting to see reence [7]. BTW, I am not being rude but would be interested to know what an ARC Future Fellowship refers to and also would be interested to know your background but I do understand if you do not wish to give these details.
                   John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                   1. Permalink

                      

                      Michael J. I. Brown

                      (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

                      Nothing wrong to utilising a particular set of data, models and theories to reach a set of conclusions. However, when doing so one should provide an appropriate overview of the literature, and discuss where and why your results disagree with the literature. Ignoring the prior literature is failing the standards to peer reviewed science journals, as highlighted in Wolfgang Wagner's resignation letter.

                      Details of my career and research can be found on my Conversation profile.

                      1. Permalink

                         

                         John Nicol

                         (logged in via Facebook)

                         Thanks for your details Michael. You obviously paint on a very large canvas and have certainly done very well. I have not done a lot of astronomy per se so can't appreciate it all that much. I have had some interest in the spectroscopy of stars and had a friend who was working in astrophysics - mainly on stellar abundances many years ago. This is a long way from Global Warming but perhaps your astronomy takes you down the spectroscopic road so that you would be able to appreciate what Jack Barrett…

                         show full comment

                         Thanks for your details Michael. You obviously paint on a very large canvas and have certainly done very well. I have not done a lot of astronomy per se so can't appreciate it all that much. I have had some interest in the spectroscopy of stars and had a friend who was working in astrophysics - mainly on stellar abundances many years ago. This is a long way from Global Warming but perhaps your astronomy takes you down the spectroscopic road so that you would be able to appreciate what Jack Barrett and others are saying about the spectroscopic measurements of CO2 and the effects of line broadening which does not seem to be considered at all by those who have laid the foundations for the IPCC to look only at carbon dioxide as the warming agent. Line broadening and collision rates as well as the actual effects on radiation transfer of increasing in number densities of GHGs is of course critical to the discussion. I find it difficult to understand why these issues are so casually bipassed by people like Kiehl and Trenberth and many others who simply take at face value, the satement that "carbon dioxide is a green house gas and an increase in the concentration of a green house gas must cause additional warming". This is an assumption and a wrong one at that, as has been pointed out many times. Again, you will probably tell me I am wrong to make the statement that this most important aspect of CO2 has been ignored, and I would find it hard to believe also had I not spent about five years trying to develop some common ground discussion with the heads and others from the Climate units around Australia and in particular with the CSIRO group under Penny Whetton. I started out enthusiastically wanting to study the spectroscopy and behaviour in carbon dioxide but believed these people ought to have a wealth of literature which would be readily available. I received only one paper which even touched on this area this area which went through a similar calculation to my own, except that the author used HITRAN spectral lines and mean Lorernz line widths, whereas I had simply used an approximate spectral construction but with calculated line widths depending on temperature and pressure at various heights for nonresonant broadening. The paper, "Calculation of solar and thermal radiation absorption in the atmosphere, based on the HITRAN data", Zastawny A., Met Atmos Phys 92, 153-159 (2006). His estimate of the forcing with the included consideration of scattering was 2.3 W/m2 which is somewhat less according to the author, than the 4 W/m2 quoted by the IPCC,
                         John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

          2. Permalink

             

             John Nicol

             (logged in via Facebook)

             Having read quickly through the papers by Spencer and Braswell, and by Trenberth et al (refernce [7]), as well as comparing their two lists of references, it is difficult to see that Wagner's comments regarding previous publications covering the material or techniques presented in Sp&Br's paper is in any way justified. I will go thorugh these and perhaps other papers more carefully, but my initial reaction would have to be that he (Wagner) "was not encouraged to hang around".
             John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

             1. Permalink

                

                Michael J. I. Brown

                (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

                Another part of the resignation letter further highlights the problems with the Spencer paper, how Spencer publicised it and how it was used by the media. These are very relevant to Wagner's resignation...

                But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible. Aside from ignoring all the other observational data sets (such as the rapidly shrinking sea ice extent and changes in the flora and fauna) and contrasting theoretical studies, such a simple conclusion simply cannot be drawn considering the complexity of the involved models and satellite measurements.

                As I have noted previously, it is worthwhile reading the resignation letter in full as different commentators are clearly interpreting its contents differently (http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002/).

                1. Permalink

                   

                   John Nicol

                   (logged in via Facebook)

                   Michael,
                   It is true that in studying the entire globe, all areas of the surface which change their radiation characteristics, (emissivity) need to be considered in estimating the radiation balance, I don't think this has been the sublect of either of the papers quoted here, i.e. Spenser and Braswell (2011) or Trenberth et al. (2009) although there may be an inference through the references.
                   However, all of the feedback depends first of all on some initial warming process without which there is no…

                   show full comment

                   Michael,
                   It is true that in studying the entire globe, all areas of the surface which change their radiation characteristics, (emissivity) need to be considered in estimating the radiation balance, I don't think this has been the sublect of either of the papers quoted here, i.e. Spenser and Braswell (2011) or Trenberth et al. (2009) although there may be an inference through the references.
                   However, all of the feedback depends first of all on some initial warming process without which there is no warming. We all know that something changes the earth's temperature from ice age to excessively warm periods - we don't fully understand why, but certainly the ice age/holocene changes are clearly planetary phenomena being very tightly related to the Milankovitch cycles which provide the time series amplitude by combining effective Fourier components - not perfectly sinusoidal- representing the perodic changes in the relative positions and distances of the major planets, the precession of the earth's orbital eccentricity and its axis of rotation etc. If the feedbacks do turn out to be very strong, small perturbations in the solar constant - (allowed for by Spencer and Braswell) - may well be amplified to provide the changes in the observed global temperatures, particularly if combined with smaller influences from the features in the structure of the Milanovich cycles which are not of sufficient import to bring on an ice age. So there a large number of unknowns, not just the feedbacks in all of this debate. Focussing on one target, CO2, making the assumption that it is responsible for warming, without fully appreciating or accepting the results of spectroscopic analysis, is actually quite bizarre, to say the least, from a scientific point of view. Say what you like, the claims for CO2 are only assumptions, in terms of its physics, as is freely admitted, as I have mentioned elsewhere, by all of the of the major climate science units in Australia. The basis for their assumptions are simply
                   1. the hypothesis of Arrhenius and very similar analyses by more recent authors such as Kiehl and Trenberth
                   2. The inclusion of a forcing, assumed to come from CO2 during the period 1979 to 1998, when their models provided some warming but never actually matched very closel the measured temperature increases in global temperatures and as late as 2007, the 23 models which were selected by the IPOCC provided only a wide range of temperature values for a doubling of CO2 between +1 and +4.5 C - not exacrly a stunning success rate - particularly since the "implausible" results, those showing a cooling had already been arbitrarliy eliminated

                   3. As early as 1985 Chemical spectroscopists were showing that the spectrum of carbon dioxide would not provide the assumed changes in the heat gathering powers of CO2 which was being claimed - these were ignored and the chemists pillaried.

                   4. No paper quoted in the IPCC AR4 2007 report, tackles the issue of carbon dioxide's role from a detailed spectroscopic point of view but arm waving arguments in papers such as that by Arrhenius and later ones by Callendar and Kiehl, are given credits, even though the number of such papers is countable on one hand. The concentration of papers is on the ecological effects of warming, environmental issues
                   such as the GBR, Arctic and Glacier ice melts, the characteeristics and output of models and a good few on feedbacks.

                   5. The only issue of significance is whether carbon dioxide is responsible for all this and not a word of modern physics and spectroscopy to determine the behaviour of an absorber in a field of other gases is even mentioned.

                   6. Can anyone help this poor simple soul to understand why there is this omission from the thousands of papers, the thousands of pages which make up IPCC AR4 2007?
                   John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

                   1. Permalink

                      

                      Chris O'Neill

                      Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

                      "No paper quoted in the IPCC AR4 2007 report, tackles the issue of carbon dioxide's role from a detailed spectroscopic point of view"

                      Why do you ignore: Myhre, G., E.J. Highwood, K.P. Shine, and F. Stordal 1998. “New estimates of radiative forcing due to well mixed greenhouse gases.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2715-2718.

                      Also, why do you ignore atmospheric radiative transfer codes as cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_radiative_transfer_codes ?

                      "We all know that something changes the…

                      show full comment

                      "No paper quoted in the IPCC AR4 2007 report, tackles the issue of carbon dioxide's role from a detailed spectroscopic point of view"

                      Why do you ignore: Myhre, G., E.J. Highwood, K.P. Shine, and F. Stordal 1998. “New estimates of radiative forcing due to well mixed greenhouse gases.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 25, 2715-2718.

                      Also, why do you ignore atmospheric radiative transfer codes as cited in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_radiative_transfer_codes ?

                      "We all know that something changes the earth's temperature from ice age to excessively warm periods - we don't fully understand why, but certainly the ice age/holocene changes are clearly planetary phenomena being very tightly related to the Milankovitch cycles which provide the time series amplitude by combining effective Fourier components - not perfectly sinusoidal"

                      To an electronics engineer, it is blindingly obvious that the earth's climate system is acting like a bistable multivibrator that generates a truncated triangular waveform: slow to cool down and then cool for a long time, then fast to warm up followed by a relatively short warm period. The fact that the ends of ice-ages occur relatively quickly is proof that feedback is very high during those periods and is only limited in speed by how fast the large ice-sheets can melt.

       2. Permalink

          

          Chris O'Neill

          Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

          "If this Spencer and Braswell paper is indeed so "bad", it should be a shoe in for all these clever authors to boost their publication records with an easy rebuttal"

          Done.

       3. Permalink

          

          Chris O'Neill

          Telecommunications Engineer (logged in via email @optusnet.com.au)

          Done. i.e.:

          http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Staff/Fasullo/refs/Trenberth2010etalGRL.pdf

          1. Permalink

             

             John Nicol

             (logged in via Facebook)

             Chris, The reference you have given is a 2009/2010 paper while Spencer and Braswell's appeared this year. A "rebuttal" is generally written after the original paper.
             john Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com

             1. Permalink

                

                Michael J. I. Brown

                (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

                Chris is clearly providing a link to an example of a rebuttal paper rather than a rebuttal of the Spencer paper.

                1. Permalink

                   

                   John Nicol

                   (logged in via Facebook)

                   Perhaps, but it doesn't do that either as the analysis and what it provides is quite different from S&B, which is to be expected since they had not been able to read S&B to comment on their data or techniques. I guess we will have to wait and see what comes out in the next couple of months. Certainly in the case of John McLean's paper on the role of ENSO, there was a great flurry which included a paper by Foster et al.(six authors) which went in to JGR inside of about three weeks, but in their…

                   show full comment

                   Perhaps, but it doesn't do that either as the analysis and what it provides is quite different from S&B, which is to be expected since they had not been able to read S&B to comment on their data or techniques. I guess we will have to wait and see what comes out in the next couple of months. Certainly in the case of John McLean's paper on the role of ENSO, there was a great flurry which included a paper by Foster et al.(six authors) which went in to JGR inside of about three weeks, but in their haste they applied their criticism by incorrectly interpreting the main diagam and as far as I am aware there has not been a single criticism since then. The saga didn't end there as John had been asked to write a reply traditionally offered to authors where a publication appears as a rebuttal. However, the new Chief Editor, who was appointed in that short time after John McLean's paper was printed, because of pressure from Phil Jones and others, disallowed McLean that opportunity, in spite of the very obvious error in the attempted "rebuttal". John Nicol jonicol18@bigpond.com
                   John Nicol

24. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Replying to Mark Matthews and your “at the most basic level, the theory of AGW centres around the fact that a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas…” Well, fancy that!
    
    “b) We are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere”…Not by very much, only 0.41% p.a., my family super fund manages about 4% p.a.!

    “This would therefore lead us to believe that the temperature should be increasing.” Why? my super fund has no such effect, luckily. Lots of things increase all the time, eg sales of mobile phones…

    show full comment

    Replying to Mark Matthews and your “at the most basic level, the theory of AGW centres around the fact that a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas…” Well, fancy that!
    
    “b) We are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere”…Not by very much, only 0.41% p.a., my family super fund manages about 4% p.a.!

    “This would therefore lead us to believe that the temperature should be increasing.” Why? my super fund has no such effect, luckily. Lots of things increase all the time, eg sales of mobile phones, without affecting the temperature.

    “The temperature is increasing..” Yes, but not by very much, only 0.75 oC in total since 1950 or 0.0125 oC p.a., so not really noticeable!

    “c) Finally - is it increasing in a way that leads us to believe that it is CO2 that is causing it?” NO.

    “ie. is there a CO2 like signature on the warming we are seeing.... Yes there is”. NO, there is NOT. The IPCC has never been able to produce econometric analysis showing that the coefficient on increasing CO2 has any statistically significant role in explaining observed temperature changes anywhere, either globally or locally. See my ACE2011 paper “Econometrics and the Science of Climate Change” at my website (www.timcurtin.com) or that of ACE2011 (www.ace2011.org.au). Unlike the few climate scientists that have ever done anything similar, I take care to check for spurious regressions (like that which implies mobile phone sales could well explain temperature change since 1990) – there are tests for that, most notably Durbin-Watson, unbeknown to the IPCC, Australian Academy of Science and the Climate Change Institute at ANU. The apparent correlation of total atmospheric CO2 with Global Mean temperature is spurious, and when one uses CHANGES in CO2 and temperatures, the D-W test is OK, but the correlation vanishes into very thin air.

    1. Permalink

       

       Mark Matthews

       General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       LOL. Interesting that you think 0.41% is not very much. Tell that to the cop who pulls you over for having a 0.05 blood alcohol reading.

       CO2 is a *trace* gas. Yep... only 300ppm and yet... plants can live. Amazing.

25. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Derek Bolton, you are of course correct, and I was aware of that but I did not have the precise numbers to hand, they make a bigger difference than I imagined, sorry about that.

    Michael Brown. Good quotes from Dyson, but how to combine them in models?

    Your link "An introduction to water vapour and climate models is provided at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/"

    only took me to comments #100 and on.
    
    You said "The realclimate article discusses…

    show full comment

    Derek Bolton, you are of course correct, and I was aware of that but I did not have the precise numbers to hand, they make a bigger difference than I imagined, sorry about that.

    Michael Brown. Good quotes from Dyson, but how to combine them in models?

    Your link "An introduction to water vapour and climate models is provided at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/"

    only took me to comments #100 and on.
    
    You said "The realclimate article discusses the problem of whether water vapour should be labelled as a forcing or feedback, and why climate scientists normally label it as a feedback. Because it is normally labelled as a feedback, it is largely [sic] missing from the table of forcings in the MAGICC manual."

    I cannot find any mention of it as either forcing or feedback; the MAGICC/Scengen Manual and the latest papers by Meinshausen Raper and Wigley both refer only to carbon cycle feedbacks. Water vapour is missing. That is because their focus is exclusively on GHG emission and concentration pathways, and not on aggregate forcings whether upfront or from hydrological "feedbacks". The effect is that AR4 and probably AR5 as well ignore [H2O] because for them only the concentration of "long-lived" GHGs is relevant, and [H2O] is ruled out be definition as "shortlived", even though its average value is huge - and it is far from invariant.

    Moreover because of ENSO, [H2O] provides an excellent fit with temperature along the GBR since 1948, whereas [CO2] is statistically insignificant (=irrelevant), as regressions show clearly (which is I suppose why IPCC and CSIRO and Tim Lambert along with Uncle Tom Cobley et all don't do them).

26. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Further to my last, I want to stress the absurdity of mainstream climate science's stress on increases in the concentration of "long-lived" GHGs as being "catastrophic", by claiming that increases in short-lived atmospheric water vapour [H2O] due to anthropogenic contributions are of no consequence, at the same time as claiming that increases in [H2O] allegedly due to rising temperature due to increases in [CO2] (at 0.0125 oC p.a. since 1950) are enough to increase GMT from the 1 oC attributable to just 2X [CO2] to 4-6 0C.

    Again, I note that ALL the models embodied in MAGICC6 TOTALLY ignore changes in [H2O] from ANY source. NOAA daily reports changes in [H2O] that bear no relationship at all to the stupid claims of Hansen's GISS and the ever more fatuous Jones at UEA-CRU.

27. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Michael Brown did not address the main issue in my last, which is the quaint attribution of an apparent decline in sea-level to El Nino/La Nina, blissfully unaware like all climate “scientists” that warm temperatures and therefore higher SL at one side of the Pacific are offset by lower at the cooler other, for no NET change pace NAS and Brown. I will never attach any credence to any climate “scientist” least of all at Michael’s NASA until he/she can show unlike Michael some understanding of ENSO…

    show full comment

    Michael Brown did not address the main issue in my last, which is the quaint attribution of an apparent decline in sea-level to El Nino/La Nina, blissfully unaware like all climate “scientists” that warm temperatures and therefore higher SL at one side of the Pacific are offset by lower at the cooler other, for no NET change pace NAS and Brown. I will never attach any credence to any climate “scientist” least of all at Michael’s NASA until he/she can show unlike Michael some understanding of ENSO – and to spell it out, the O in ENSO stands for Oscillation. Geddit? Perhaps Derek Bolton can oblige to explain to the guys at NASA and to Michael what “oscillation” means.
    However I am grateful to Michael for what I hope will be his nomination of me for a Nobel for having discovered that “plant growth needs additional CO2”. Actually as my peer reviewed paper “Climate Change and Food Production” confesses, I am NOT the first, see its extensive bibliography (paper is at my website www.timcurtin.com).
    Brown has probably never heard of Freeman Dyson, but I both cite him on that and also won his full support by email from his admittedly dubious university Princeton (relative to Brown’s stellar Monash)

    My paper actually did rather sophisticate econometric analysis which showed how rising atmospheric CO2 did as much as the improved varieties of the “Green Revolution” to explain the incredible increase in world food production since 1960. But perhaps Michael has some other explanation for how it was possible for world cereals production to increase by 166% from 1960 to 2007 without the 244% increase in terrestrial uptakes of CO emissions by 244% (cereals are not the only users of photosynthesis, how about savannahs and pastures?).
    Here is the equation suppressed by all climate “scientists” and himself:
    2CO2 + 2 H2O + photons → 2CH2O + 2O2
    So Michael’s view is that more of the CO2 and H2O on the LHS of that equation does not produce more of CH2O on the RHS? No wonder I never got a job at Monash (I was offered one at Melbourne!)
    I know the above is OT, but Michael started it.
    Back to Thread: Mark Matthews commented: “I suspect you no doubt have concerns about the economic viability of direct action... Where will all that money come from?”
    No I do not. Simply encouraging rather than preventing further expansion of Australian agriculture in the MDB and elsewhere along with ending current prevention of forestry in Tasmania and the Kimberley is enough, the farmers and foresters will do the rest by absorbing huge amounts of CO2 every year, commercial forestry generates close to permanent carbon storage of 70% of the carbon in trees in timber products (check your own home, decks, furniture, and books), and ending the huge sums paid to many farmers NOT to farm (I can name some and the amounts around just the ACT and Bungendore, my mates there get c.$200,000 p.a. not to farm), will do the trick.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       Tim Curtin's vitriol aimed at scientists is always quite entertaining if very misguided.

       Lets take "Brown has probably never heard of Freeman Dyson, but I both cite him on that and also won his full support by email from his admittedly dubious university Princeton (relative to Brown’s stellar Monash)".

       Tim Curtin is unaware that I have cited Freeman Dyson and I met Freeman Dyson, when I was a research fellow based at Princeton University. I returned to Australia as I prefer living in Australia…

       show full comment

       Tim Curtin's vitriol aimed at scientists is always quite entertaining if very misguided.

       Lets take "Brown has probably never heard of Freeman Dyson, but I both cite him on that and also won his full support by email from his admittedly dubious university Princeton (relative to Brown’s stellar Monash)".

       Tim Curtin is unaware that I have cited Freeman Dyson and I met Freeman Dyson, when I was a research fellow based at Princeton University. I returned to Australia as I prefer living in Australia than the US.

       Freeman Dyson has made major contributions to science, but most of these were decades ago (he is approaching 90 years old). Also, Freeman Dyson is not at Princeton University, but is based at the Institute of Advanced Studies, which is in the town of Princeton.

       It is also worth noting that while Freeman Dyson has many "heretical thoughts" on climate change, he does state "one of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas".

       I would not dare compare my career with that of Freeman Dyson, who has made huge contributions to theoretical physics. That said, I do publish in the highly regarded peer reviewed journals in my chosen discipline of astrophysics. Tim "me for a Nobel" Curtin's attempted contributions to science are in Quadrant and "Energy & Environment", a journal with one of the worst reputations in academia.

       As for CO2 and food production, you can grow more food by using more land for food production. Also, CO2 isn't always the primary factor limiting plant growth. Nutrients and water supply play a huge role, and this was discussed on the ABC's Science Show just last week.

       As for ENSO, has Tim Curtin considered the possibility that rainfall summed over all the continents does not remain precisely constant throughout the cycle? Only if this is the case would you expect ENSO to have absolutely no impact on sea levels. I would like to reiterate that one can see ENSO in the historical record of sea level rise, including the switch from El Nino to La Nina in 1998.

       1. Permalink

          

          Nick Kermode

          (logged in via email @hotmail.com)

          Great comment Michael.

    2. Permalink

       

       Mark Matthews

       General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       I take that back. I now realise you do not get your scientific opinions from The Oz.

       To be honest, I am not entirely sure where...

       For those of you who actually wish to continue this discussion with Tim, perhaps I might suggest here:
       http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/03/tim_curtin_thread.php
       where there is a blog set up specifically for this purpose.

       1. Permalink

          

          Nick Kermode

          (logged in via email @hotmail.com)

          Yes Mark some absolute classics in that blog. Everyone should read #33 and Tims response @ #35. Have never been able to take anything he says seriously after that. It would be funny if it wasn't so scary

28. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Wilma said; "The above article like previous discussions of the Australian's opinion pieces and reporting on climate change clearly demonstrates the lengths reporters and denialist columnists will go to in order to discredit climate science and anyone who supports the mainstream climate science".

    Actually, no, the so-called climate "scientists" (none of whom can be shown to be capable of producing trends and R2s or any form of regression analysis from the actual raw data of climate change and its putative causative factors).

    Show me where you have done done so.

    Getting back to the original Lambert claims here, he objects to The Australian's reporting of Watson's demonstration that in our Antipodes, sea level rise is actually decelerating.

    It is up to you Wilma (and Lambert - but he is not up to it) to show that Watson - and therefore The Australian - is wrong.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       Tim Curtin seems to have missed a few salient facts from the previous articles and discussions. Issues with the Australian's reporting of the Watson include:

       Claiming Howard Brady is a "climate change researcher at Macquarie University" when he is holds an adjunct in biological sciences (http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/1125_hughes.pdf).

       Not contacting CSIRO for comment when the article made bold (and erroneous) claims about sea level rise projections.

       Misinterpreting the results of…

       show full comment

       Tim Curtin seems to have missed a few salient facts from the previous articles and discussions. Issues with the Australian's reporting of the Watson include:

       Claiming Howard Brady is a "climate change researcher at Macquarie University" when he is holds an adjunct in biological sciences (http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/1125_hughes.pdf).

       Not contacting CSIRO for comment when the article made bold (and erroneous) claims about sea level rise projections.

       Misinterpreting the results of the Watson paper, at least in the opinion of Watson himself and the department he works for (http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/media/DecMedia11072205.htm).

       Finally, it should be noted that the Watson paper used measurements from a total of four tidal gauges. Given the issues with tidal gauge measurements (discussed by pundits on both sides of the debate, and Watson himself), it is remarkable that measurements from just four of these instruments should be used to make sweeping statements by The Australian (and others) about global sea level rise.

       Finally, the Watson paper itself is available for download (from http://www.jcronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-10-00141.1).

29. Permalink

    

    Timothy Curtin

    Economic adviser (logged in via email @bigblue.net.au)

    Michael Brown is keeping up with his personal attacks on me, but is himself all too often tendentious. I would prefer not to reply, but in self defence I feel I should. “About two monhs ago”, at the Monckton thread Interrogating the lord’s science, Brown said: “While the gigatons mentioned by Tim Curtin sound impressive, they are small relative to the total quantities of water involved in the water cycle (http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle.html). A cubic kilometre of water weighs in at a gigaton…

    show full comment

    Michael Brown is keeping up with his personal attacks on me, but is himself all too often tendentious. I would prefer not to reply, but in self defence I feel I should. “About two monhs ago”, at the Monckton thread Interrogating the lord’s science, Brown said: “While the gigatons mentioned by Tim Curtin sound impressive, they are small relative to the total quantities of water involved in the water cycle (http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycle.html). A cubic kilometre of water weighs in at a gigaton, so even 100 gigatons is a metaphorical drop in the world's oceans.” I followed his helpful link to USGS, and found this direct quote by USGS from NOAA:

    “NOAA found that dry air has a density of about 1.007 kilograms/cubic meter (kg/m3) and the density of the actual cloud droplets is about 1.003 kg/m3. In the final calculations, the 1 km3 cumulus cloud weighs a whopping 2.211 billion pounds (1.003 billion kilograms)!” A billion kg is only 1 mega (=million) tonne.

    However either NOAA was misquoted or was in error, and really did mean giga tonnes but here (not elsewhere) I used Brown’s source. However note there is a difference between a cubic km of water and a cubic km of cumulus cloud, the latter is not 100% water, which Brown ignores, and that explains why NOAA is not wrong.

    My point about anthropogenic emissions of water vapour in the course of the generation of thermal power (whether fired by coal, gas, or nuclear), amounting to around 300 GtH2O p.a. is that this is hardly trivial relative to the associated emissions of 32 GtCO2 in terms of their respective radiative forcing.

    Nor is 300 GtH2O small relative to the total water content of the atmosphere, which according to Brown’s linked USGS source, is only 12,900 cubic km, citing Gleick in Schneider 1996, which works out at only 13,287 tonnes, but that really does seem to be a mistake and a bad one at that. At up to 4% of the atmosphere, water amounts to up to 85128 GtH2O. The gross anthropogenic increase in that is certainly small in absolute terms, at 300 GtH2O p.a. and so is TOTAL atmospheric CO2, at 830 GtCO2 and the total annual increase therein of up to 40 GtCO2. But if the latter is scary, according to Brown, Hansen, and the IPCC, because of its radiative forcing, so also should be water vapour: “Water vapor is also the most potent greenhouse gas owing to the presence of the hydroxyl bond which strongly absorbs in the infra-red region of the light spectrum” (www.physicalgeography.net.).

    BTW, Pierrehumbert et al 2007 have noted that Clausius-Clapeyron does NOT explain increases in atmospheric water vapour, as it concerns only the water holding capacity of the atmosphere relative to temperature, and that has not changed sufficiently globally to have had an impact (check the formula, it’s in my ACE 2011 paper).

    Finally, Brown constantly derides that I have only published 3 papers on climate economics, but he has published none on any aspect, and I have published some 30 peer reviewed papers on a wide range of subjects, not to mention quite a few sole or co-authored books (the latest is just out and can be ordered via www.timcurtin.com).

    1. Permalink

       

       Mark Matthews

       General Manager (logged in via email @gmail.com)

       Timothy, are finding it increasingly frustrating that you are not given the scientific credibility you feel you deserve?

       I will give you a hint as to why that might be the case. If you see a walnut and decide you want to open it, perhaps try not to use a sledgehammer. In one fell swoop you have managed to compare pretty much all mainstream climate scientists to school children, and ... frankly, that is just not believable. I just cannot believe that institutions like the Royal Society and NASA…

       show full comment

       Timothy, are finding it increasingly frustrating that you are not given the scientific credibility you feel you deserve?

       I will give you a hint as to why that might be the case. If you see a walnut and decide you want to open it, perhaps try not to use a sledgehammer. In one fell swoop you have managed to compare pretty much all mainstream climate scientists to school children, and ... frankly, that is just not believable. I just cannot believe that institutions like the Royal Society and NASA would stake their reputations on a theory that is simple enough to dispute as you seem to think. For that reason, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that you feel that the theory is AGW is wrong for reasons that are not just scientific.

       Here's my two cents on the actual issue presented by the above the article, and I am interested to hear what you think about this. I think The Oz has an ideological agenda here. I think they believe that environmental activism is nothing but an attack on western civilisation, free markets and neo-liberalism itself. The problem is that the solution to AGW will involve more government regulation, a price on carbon emissions, a decrease in consumption, more regulation on markets... that kind of thing and, despite the science, must be crushed as it just couldn't be right.

       What are your thoughts on this?

    2. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       The reason Tim Curtin's "science" is worthy of scorn is he publishes in a field where he has rudimentary knowledge and he is incapable of the cross checks that are essential for good science. However, his efforts are of a sufficient quality for Quadrant and Energy & Environment.

       In the above argument he has confused the equivalent liquid water in the atmosphere (12,900 cubic kilometres) with the volume of clouds. Liquid water has a density of one ton per cubic metre while clouds are closer to one kilogram per cubic metre.

       There are a number of cross checks I suggested in the original discussion, which Tim has not attempted. The simplest is to imagine there are just 12,900 cubic kilometres of cloud. Even if clouds were a metre thick, they would cover a tiny percentage of the Earth's surface, which is inconsistent with what is actually observed.

       1. Permalink

          

          Michael J. I. Brown

          (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

          I forgot to mention a cross check from the USGS website itself "If all of the water in the atmosphere rained down at once, it would only cover the ground to a depth of 2.5 centimeters, about 1 inch". It is trivial to use this to calculate the equivalent volume of liquid water contained in the atmosphere and how much this would weigh in tons.

30. Permalink

    

    Toby James

    retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

    "The fact that sea levels will rise is one of the certainties of climate science. " To be a little more specific, "the fact" relates to climate models, rather than real world climate science..

    One of the facts about sea level rise is that according to the University of Colorado at Boulder, who are experts in the field of actually measuring sea levels, is that Global Mean Sea Level is falling, not rising. Recent measurements show levels down to those of 2008.

    1. Permalink

       

       Michael J. I. Brown

       (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

       This drop is due to the change from El Nino to La Nina. Details are online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-262

       1. Permalink

          

          Toby James

          retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

          JPL (NASA) don't actually claim a causal relation between falling sea levels and the change from El Nino to La Nina, rather they are more measured - "the recent drop . . . IS ATTRIBUTABLE TO the switch from El Niño to La Niña."

          It is drawing a long bow to claim: "This drop is due to the change from El Nino to La Nina. " Its these warmist nuances that tend to convey a wrong impression about what is actually known about the underlying causes of observed climate facts.

          Again, the facts drawn from the satellite records, which began in 1993, show an overall trend of sea level rise of 3.2 mm/yr, which extrapolates to 285 mm rise between now and 2100 - more that three times the expectations of the NSW government of 900 mm.

          1. Permalink

             

             Nick Kermode

             (logged in via email @hotmail.com)

             Toby, have you never heard of design factor and factor of safety (FoS)? We use them every day for all our other planning, design and engineering. That is take the worst scenario, multiply it a certain degree then proceed on that basis. Why wouldn't we in this situation?

          2. Permalink

             

             Derek Bolton

             Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

             Concise Oxford English Dictionary © 2008 Oxford University Press:
             attribute
             ▶verb /əˈtrɪbjuːt/ (attribute something to) regard something as belonging to or being caused by.

          3. Permalink

             

             Michael J. I. Brown

             (ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Monash University)

             One may want to look at the Technical Note provided at http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/climatechange/sealevel.htm.

             90 cm is a benchmark used for planning rather than an estimate without uncertainties. The sea level rise models have a broad uncertainty range.

             Furthermore, historical data (Figure 3) and projections (Figure 4) show that you cannot always extrapolate the current rate of sea level rise to determine what sea level rise will be almost a century from now.

             1. Permalink

                

                Toby James

                retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

                Is there any wonder that the Oz writers have opinions that conflict with the wasmist line. Tim Lambert's statement: "Watson’s department also wrote a letter to The Australian stating Rintoul’s story had misrepresented the research and that there was strong scientific evidence to support NSW’s planning number of a 90cm rise by 2100." Is there any such 'scientific evidence'?

                That doesn't looks to me like a planning benchmark. Media organisations and many educated members of the public fall for this kind of 'misinterpretation', whether its honest or not, and come away with distorted ideas of what climate models are able to offer, and more importantly what they are not.

                Note to Derek. I used the meaning. Attribute, to suppose, assume (something) to be the cause of an effect. Silly me!

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                   Sherry Mayo

                   (logged in via Facebook)

                   90cm by 2100 is the planning benchmark for NSW and I believe Victoria too. It is based on the high-end of the sea level rise projection range because presumably they are taking a precautionary approach to planning. The best estimate is about 40cm in 2100, 90cm is a worst case scenario.

                   Here is the relevant planning guideline:
                   http://www.planning.nsw.gov.au/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=dNVHHKRFiho%3D&tabid=177

                   Here is the projection on which it is based:
                   http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_proj_21st.html

                   And for interests sake here is the latest sea level rise up to present (showing both tide gauges and satellite altimetry:
                   http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/ (bottom of the page)

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                   Derek Bolton

                   Retired s/w engineer (logged in via email @gmail.com)

                   Toby, it's one thing to misuse a word, we all do that from time to time. But if you're going to accuse others of distorting statements it's a good idea to check it's not just a gap in your own understanding. The meaning you ascribed to "attribute" is not an alternative, it's wrong. You owe Michael an apology.

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                      Toby James

                      retired physicist (logged in via email @yahoo.com)

                      Derek, no apologies are owed at all. The Universal Dictionary of the English Language is quite unambiguous on the point. "Attribute, vb. trans. 2. To suppose, assume (something) to be the result of a given cause, to ascribe, put down to: to attribute one's success to hard work; attribute one's good health to total abstinence." I rest my case.

                      As for distorting statements - this quote from my previous comment on a statement made by Tim Lambert is misleading and fails to distinguish physical models from physical reality: "STRONG SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE to support NSW’s planning number of a 90cm rise by 2100."