Dr. Ricky Rood's Climate Change Blog |
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| Posted by: Dr. Ricky Rood, 7:10 AM GMT on February 21, 2012 | +11 |
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I'm a professor at U Michigan and lead a course on climate change problem solving. These articles include ideas from the course. And no tuition!
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393.65ppm
Atmospheric CO2 for February 2012
For the life of me, Pat, I know that the average third grade student could look at that chart and instantly realize that something is up! (Pardon the pun.) Why is it so difficult for so many "educated" people to not be able to see this? Has their eyesight really become so poor?
No, not necessarily. It will become even colder over the next several years. The ice in the Arctic won't peak for about 2-3 weeks and will probably come close to touching the zero anomaly line. But you are probably right about things changing. The cooling trend will become more profound.
In a couple years I would like to post an I told you so, but it is likely this blog will disappear with the global warming.
The Psychology of Climate Change Denial
Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating. And according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, we’re in denial.
“Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way,” said Norgaard.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2007 that greenhouse gases had reached levels not seen in 650,000 years, and were rising rapidly as a result of people burning fossil fuel. Because these gases trap the sun’s heat, they would — depending on human energy habits — heat Earth by an average of between 1.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by century’s end. Even a midrange rise would likely disrupt the planet’s climate, producing droughts and floods, acidified oceans, altered ecosystems and coastal cities drowned by rising seas.
“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. “This is the defining moment.”
Studies published since then have only strengthened the IPCC’s predictions, or suggested they underestimate future warming. But as world leaders gather in Copenhagen to discuss how to avoid catastrophic climate change, barely half the U.S. public thinks carbon pollution could warm Earth. That’s 20 percent less than in 2007, and lower than at any point in the last 12 years. In a Pew Research Center poll, Americans ranked climate dead last out of 20 top issues, behind immigration and trade policy.
Wired.com talked to Norgaard about the divide between science and public opinion.
Wired.com: Why don’t people seem to care?
Kari Norgaard: On the one hand, there have been extremely well-organized, well-funded climate-skeptic campaigns. Those are backed by Exxon Mobil in particular, and the same PR firms who helped the tobacco industry (.pdf) deny the link between cancer and smoking are involved with magnifying doubt around climate change.
That’s extremely important, but my work has been in a different area. It’s been about people who believe in science, who aren’t out to question whether science has a place in society.
Wired.com: People who are coming at the issue in good faith, you mean. What’s their response?
Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.
For relatively privileged people like myself, we don’t have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that’s not my life. We have a vast capacity for this.
Wired.com: How is this bubble maintained?
Norgaard: In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we’re constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant.
Wired.com: How does this translate into skepticism about climate change?
Norgaard: It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.
If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.
Wired.com: Is that what this comes down to — not wanting to confront our own roles?
Norgaard: I think so. And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.
Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.
Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it’s very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That’s why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.
That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public.
Wired.com: So we don’t want to believe climate change is happening, feel guilty that it is, and don’t know what to do about it? So we pretend it’s not a problem?
Norgaard: Yes, but I don’t want to make it seem crass. Sometimes people who are very empathetic are less likely to help in certain situations, because they’re so disturbed by it. The human capacity of empathy is really profound, and that’s part of our weakness. If we were more callous, then we’d approach it in a more straightforward way. It may be a weakness of our capacity as sentient beings to cope with this problem.
I hope that you are right about the first part and wrong on the second part. I would gladly stand by your side and help celebrate!
Matt Ridley - The Man Who Wants to Northern Rock the Planet
Matt Ridley’s irrational theories remain unchanged by his own disastrous experiment.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 1st June 2010
Brass neck doesn’t begin to describe it. Matt Ridley used to make his living partly by writing state-bashing columns in the Daily Telegraph. The government, he complained, is “a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world … governments do not run countries, they parasitise them.”(1) Taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, intervention of any kind, he argued, are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom.
Then he became chairman of Northern Rock, where he was able to put his free market principles into practice. Under his chairmanship, the bank pursued what the Treasury select committee later described as a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”(2). It was able to do so because the government agency which oversees the banks “systematically failed in its regulatory duty”(3).
On 16th August 2007, Dr Ridley rang an agent of the detested state to explore the possibility of a bail-out. The self-seeking fleas agreed to his request, and in September the government opened a support facility for the floundering bank. The taxpayer eventually bailed out Northern Rock to the tune of £27bn.
When news of the crisis leaked, it caused the first run on a bank in this country since 1878. The parasitic state had to intervene a second time: the run was halted only when the government guaranteed the depositors’ money. Eventually the government was obliged to nationalise the bank. Investors, knowing that their money would now be safe as it was protected by the state, began to return.
While the crisis was made possible by a “substantial failure of regulation”, MPs identified the directors of Northern Rock as “the principal authors of the difficulties that the company has faced”. They singled Ridley out for having failed “to provide against the risks that [Northern Rock] was taking and to act as an effective restraining force on the strategy of the executive members.”(4)
This, you might think, must have been a salutary experience. You would be wrong. Last week Dr Ridley published a new book called The Rational Optimist(5). He uses it as a platform to attack governments which, among other crimes, “bail out big corporations”(6). He lambasts intervention and state regulation, insisting that markets deliver the greatest possible benefits to society when left to their own devices. Has there ever been a clearer case of the triumph of faith over experience?
Free market fundamentalists, apparently unaware of Ridley’s own experiment in market liberation, are currently filling cyberspace and the mainstream media with gasps of enthusiasm about his thesis. Ridley provides what he claims is a scientific justification for unregulated business. He maintains that rising consumption will keep enriching us for “centuries and millennia” to come(7), but only if governments don’t impede innovation. He dismisses or denies the environmental consequences, laments our risk-aversion, and claims that the market system makes self-interest “thoroughly virtuous”(8). All will be well in the best of all possible worlds, as long as the “parasitic bureaucracy” keeps its nose out of our lives(9).
His book is elegantly written and cast in the language of evolution, but it’s the same old cornutopian nonsense we’ve heard one hundred times before (cornutopians are people who envisage a utopia of limitless abundance(10)). In this case, however, it has already been spectacularly disproved by the author’s experience.
The Rational Optimist is riddled with excruciating errors and distortions. Ridley claims, for example, that “every country that tried protectionism” after the Second World War suffered as a result. He cites South Korea and Taiwan as “countries that went the other way”, and experienced miraculous growth(11). In reality, the governments of both nations subsidised key industries, actively promoted exports and used tariffs and laws to shut out competing imports. In both countries the state owned all the major commercial banks, allowing it to make decisions about investment(12,13,14).
He maintains that “Enron funded climate alarmism”(15). The reference he gives demonstrates nothing of the sort, nor can I find evidence for this claim elsewhere(16). He says that “no significant error has come to light” in Bjorn Lomborg’s book The Sceptical Environmentalist(17). In fact it contains so many significant errors that an entire book – The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel – was required to document them(18).
Ridley asserts that average temperature changes over “the last three decades” have been “relatively slow”(19). In reality the rise over this period has been the most rapid since instrumental records began(20). He maintains that “eleven of thirteen populations” of polar bears are “growing or steady”(21). There are in fact 19 populations of polar bears. Of those whose fluctuations have been measured, one is increasing, three are stable and eight are declining(22).
He uses blatant cherry-picking to create the impression that ecosystems are recovering: water snake numbers in Lake Erie, fish populations in the Thames, bird’s eggs in Sweden(23). But as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment shows, of 65 global indicators of human impacts on biodiversity, only one – the extent of temperate forests – is improving. Eighteen are stable, in all the other cases the impacts are increasing(24).
Northern Rock grew rapidly by externalising its costs, pursuing money-making schemes that would eventually be paid for by other people. Ridley encourages us to treat the planet the same way. He either ignores or glosses over the costs of ever-expanding trade and perpetual growth. His timing, as BP fails to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, is unfortunate. Like the collapse of Northern Rock, the Deepwater Horizon disaster was made possible by weak regulation. Ridley would weaken it even further, leaving public protection to the invisible hand of the market.
He might not have been chastened by experience, but it would be wrong to claim that he has learnt nothing. On the contrary, he has developed a fine line in blame-shifting and post-rational justification. He mentions Northern Rock only once in his book, where he blames the crisis on “government housing and monetary policy.”(25) It was the state wot made him do it. He asserts that while he wants to reduce the regulation of markets in goods and services, he has “always supported” the careful regulation of financial markets(26). He provides no evidence for this and I cannot find it in anything he wrote before the crisis.
Other than that, he claims, he can say nothing, due to the terms of his former employment at the bank. I suspect this constraint is overstated: it’s unlikely that it forbids him from accepting his share of the blame.
It is only from the safety of the regulated economy, in which governments pick up the pieces when business screws up, that people like Dr Ridley can pursue their magical thinking. Had the state he despises not bailed out his bank and rescued its depositors’ money, his head would probably be on a pike by now. Instead we see it on our television screens, instructing us to apply his irrational optimism more widely. And no one has yet been rude enough to use the word discredited.
http://www.monbiot.com/2010/06/01/the-man-who-wan ts-to-northern-rock-the-planet/
No need making the loop current any hotter than it is already. These remove the heat from the loop current:
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WUWT snark forthcoming...
-In order for Arctic Sea ice to not peak for 2-3 more weeks, it would have to do so between days 80 and 87. There's only been one year in the last ten during which SIA maximum took place on or after day 80; the mean during that span has been 67. And only four times since 1979 has peak day come on or after day 80, and two of those were in the mid-80s. Too, the trend has been towards an earlier peak. On top of that, forecast anomalies for the Arctic are very high over the news few weeks. All in all, there's a very good chance this year's peak has been reached, or will be within the next day or two. (To reach the "zero" anomaly line would be require an additional 400,000 km2 of ice area to be added after day 67, and that has never happened any year since records have been kept.)
-I'm not sure what "cooling trend" you're talking about; none exists, period. The planet continues to warm at an increasing rate, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Now before you try and back it up with some twisted facts, I will let you know as soon as you do I will post graphs from NOAA, NASA and CRU that will directly refute your claim.
IOW It has not continued to warm and there is no increasing rate. In fact it is basically flat lined or slightly cooled for the last decade, so there can be no increasing rate in fact it would be decreasing. I can back up this statement with actual facts.
That is the peak they will
It's NOT the sun, stupid.
If you read the study you'll see that Solheim has got a little help from David Archibald.
David Archibald. LOL
From SkS
...As we at SkS have previously noted, Archibald has a history of focusing on data from individual surface temperature stations such as Perth, Australia or Bridgeport, Washington. In his 2009 paper, Archibald similarly focused on temperature data from a single temperature station in Hanover, New Hampshire:
"If the month of minimum for the Solar Cycle 23 to 24 transition is July 2009, this would make Solar Cycle 23 over thirteen years long. This in turn would mean that it would be 3.2 years longer than Solar Cycle 22, and imply that the annual average temperature of Hanover, New Hampshire will be 2.2° C cooler during Solar Cycle 24 than it had been on average over Solar Cycle 23."
In this quote, Archibald repeats the myth that solar cycle length determines global temperatures - a quite unphysical argument which is based on correlation rather than causation - and specifically focuses on the temperature data from a single station.
The temperature data for Hanover are available via NASA GISS. The average temperature in Hanover over solar cycle 23, which began in May 1996 and ended in December 2008, was 7.9°C. Thus if Archibald is correct, over solar cycle 24, the temperature in Hanover should cool to 5.7°C. In fact, Archibald's prediction is based on the average temperature over the entire solar cycle, so his prediction is actually that the average temperature in Hanover from approximately 2009 through 2020 will be 5.7°C.
Click for larger image:
GISS temperature record for Hanover, New Hampshire (1895 through 2008, black), GISS Hanover data for solar cycle 24 (2009 through 2011, green), and an example of how Hanover temperatures would have to change for Archibald's prediction to be accurate (blue).
As with John McLean's failed temperature prediction, a simple cursory glance at the data is all that's necessary to conclude that Archibald's prediction has no basis in reality. However, we haven't yet seen the worst of Archibald's predictions...
You are guilty of what I get accused of every time I show data -- cherrypicking. You use one town on the entire earth as an example. Ok, get rid of the magic mushrooms.
"It" has? When?
False? Please provide verifiable evidence.
Aren't you the person who tried to tell me that Earth gets almost all of its energy from the Sun, and that that represented a "gaping hole" in AGW theory? Of course you are!
You'll excuse me if I chuckle at your self-proclaimed authority, won't you?
Actually, it doesn't matter if you'll excuse me or not. I'm LMAO! :)
Thin, sir. Mighty thin.
And it's getting thinner every year.
Thanks for asking. Hope that helps.
Thank you very much for the weather report!
Hint: Climate > "a couple of years"
From the link you provided:
"This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0 ◦C from solar cycle 23 to 24 for the stations and areas analyzed." -bold added
Prior to that statement, it specifies, "meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region."
I humbly suggest that Norway and the North Atlantic region -both fine places- are not the Earth.
Better luck next time.
How do you know it has not warmed in the last decade? And if it didn't warm, what is the significance of that?
No, you really can't. What you can do is back it up with factoids that are irrelevant and are not statistically significant to climate.
Can you back up his claim?
I know the only one you can pick out is water temp from 700 to 2000 meters but that data only goes back to 2005 when measured directly by ARGO.
Here lets just see one graph from CRU
If you can please point out the continued warming and rapid acceleration for the last decade. It would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
No, they didn't.
Then you responded with the wrong answer. Here is the 30-year (the defined length of time necessary to determine the warming signal) warming rate for the past three decades:
It is clear that the climate is warming, and warming at an increasing rate. Your pointing out that weather still occurs is news to no one.
I will ask again can you show this continued and accelerating warming for the last decade?
They had already waited thirty years (more, actually).
NOTE: This graph is incorrect, due to the fact that the WTI index only goes back to 1979...and the fact that I just lazily posted it without checking first. Sorry for the mistake. A correct graph appears in a subsequent post. Thanks for your patience.
You choose to ignore physics and claim that the 90's "skews the trend" --presumably upward. How do you know that the 2000s are not "skewing the trend" downward?
I just did that. When you look at the climate rather than the weather, the warming acceleration is clear. If you want to talk about weather, there are plenty of boards set up for just that purpose. (I heartily recommend Dr. Masters' blog.) If you want to talk about climate, then let's talk about climate.
Here is a nice example
Notice how 1990 matches right up to 1911.
Notice all your trend lines start on the same date except for the 1982 one.
Come on dude I am pretty street smart. nice scam for the morons though
I apologize. I forgot that the WTI only begins in 1979 and didn't look closely at the graph. People do make mistakes. Even me. I have posted a note indicated that the graph is incorrect. Thanks for pointing that out.
Here is the HADCRUT3 for 1951 - 1980 instead.
Clearly it warmed noticeably in the three decades before climatologists began to speak out.
Here are the HADCRUT3 30-year trends for 1962 - 2011.
The graph again shows accelerating warming. I chose HADCRUT because it is the least warm of the surface measurements due to less coverage of polar regions.
Good evening, sir.
I have a question for you. The graphic is not something that I can easily understand. What is that this graphic actually depicts?
I went to the website trying to get a better handle on how to "read" this graphic. Such as, what is the wti? I could not find my answer there, so perhaps you may help me?
This is what I did find there:
"How you can help
I welcome constructive suggestions of new algorithms or datasets I could add, and in particular help from experts if I've got any of the maths badly wrong (which is quite possible).
Mail me at 'paul' at this domain. Flames will be silently extinguished."
This is from this website - Seeing the Wood for Trees
The web site is woodfortrees.org look in the lower right of the page
However, as I said, HADCRUT3 has rather poor polar coverage. The polar regions are where some of the most dramatic warming has taken place. If we look at GISSTEMP, we see a bit more acceleration:
Both satellite series, RSS and UAH agree that the trend is accelerating. They are both in closer agreement to GISSTEMP than HADCRUT3.
No doubt about it. The climate is warming, and the rate of warming is increasing.
"WTI: The WoodForTrees Temperature Index
When playing around with temperature graphs, I always found myself having to choose which of the four global temperature sources - HADCRUT3, GISTEMP, UAH, RSS - to use. Since they all have their differences, particularly around short-term responses to extreme events like the 1998 El Nino, I thought it would be nice to have an average of all four...
Hence I've created the WoodForTrees Temperature Index (WTI). This is created from the mean of HADCRUT3VGL, GISTEMP, RSS and UAH, offset by their baseline differences. It covers only the time period where all four series are valid, so begins in 1979 and will only contain the latest month's values when all four sources are in. It is updated from the master sources at 3am GMT/BST each night."
http://www.woodfortrees.org/notes#wti
Is that what you're after?
If they merely claimed "accelerating" then they are correct.
If they claimed "rapidly accelerating" then they might still be correct, depending upon how "rapidly" is defined.
Yes, that is the website I went to. What I read is that basically Paul is setting up an experiment to test his algorithms and that he is not certain that he has the math correct. How are we suppose to use this when he is looking for new algorithms and data sets and is not certain that he has the math right?
Here is a graph of that signal:
This is a link to the abstract.
The full paper may be downloaded there.
"WTI" is what I was looking for. I had no clue as to what it was an acronym for.
The same way we use models. They, too, are always looking to improve. In the meantime, you use what you have, if it is useful. As you learn more, you change. Would I cite WTI in a scientific paper? No. Is it a poor indicator of global temperature? No. It's certainly no worse than, say UAH, which has had to do some pretty hefty adjusting over the years.
Life is imperfect. :)
AH! I understand. Thanks.
Reading what I read, at the website, I would not trust either side of the debate that was using that as a source.
Very true. I also understand that there are no perfect models. I would be skeptical of any model designer that claimed their model is perfect. ... Still, when he is even unsure of the math he is using, I would have to question its usefulness for anything other than an experiment to test the math being used. But, that is just me.
I used 1979-2008, and 1982 - 2011. It's about all you can do with the satellite data at this point. But they both show accelerated warming. (Caveat: I don't know if it's statistically significant...and I'm not going to try to determine it at 1 AM EST. But I suspect it is not.)
What do you say we go out with Frankie warning Colorado if nothing else he is passionate and I love this guy.
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No, I'm not guilty of cherry picking. It's Archibald who is using data from individual temperature stations in his predictions, not me.
Quote Archibald:
"If the month of minimum for the Solar Cycle 23 to 24 transition is July 2009, this would make Solar Cycle 23 over thirteen years long. This in turn would mean that it would be 3.2 years longer than Solar Cycle 22, and imply that the annual average temperature of Hanover, New Hampshire will be 2.2° C cooler during Solar Cycle 24 than it had been on average over Solar Cycle 23."
That's perfect. The only thing is, on certain major cable news networks that start with the letter 'F', Roger would be given both the first word and the last word, and he'd spend most of his time ridiculing Dr. Jenkins for having a degree--and the host/moderator would tend to mostly side with him.
Realtime plots if interested. Back to work :)
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/index.html
The national average temperature in January was 36.3 degrees F, which is 5.5 degrees F above the long-term average and the warmest since 2006, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center. The other warmer Januarys were in 1990 and 1953.
The data is based on records dating back to 1895.
( Based on a 117 year record!)
Thinner and less volume/massive!
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