Global warming (split from Atmosphere Correcting Lamp)

[mistermack]

4 minutes ago, Genady said:

22 hours ago, KrallSpace29 said:

I don't think it's the greenhouse gases alone causing all of the problems.

Why not?

There are lots of other factors involved. There was substantial warming from 1880s to 1950, without significant rise in CO2, so that was not likely to be greenhouse gas-caused. Then there's the Solar output, the orbit, the effect of soot on ice at the poles, especially the north, and there's clouds, their reflectiveness and insulation properties, and volcanoes. (to name a few) 

[Genady]

4 minutes ago, mistermack said:

There was substantial warming from 1880s to 1950, without significant rise in CO2, so that was not likely to be greenhouse gas-caused.

What was the cause of that?

 

5 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Solar output, the orbit

Did that change in the last ~100 years?

 

6 minutes ago, mistermack said:

the effect of soot on ice at the poles, especially the north,

What did cause that?

 

6 minutes ago, mistermack said:

clouds, their reflectiveness and insulation properties, and volcanoes.

Did that change in the last ~100 years?

Overall, how much of effect these factors have compared to the greenhouse gases?

[mistermack]

9 minutes ago, Genady said:

What was the cause of that?

Nobody knows, the the global temperature is always changing, so it's not a surprise. They were talking about receding glaciers back around 1900. 

 

11 minutes ago, Genady said:

Did that change in the last ~100 years?

Those things are in constant flux. You'll have to research it to get an accurate picture. 

 

12 minutes ago, Genady said:

22 minutes ago, mistermack said:

the effect of soot on ice at the poles, especially the north,

What did cause that?

Industry, fires, gas flaring etc. The soot reduces the albedo of the ice. 

 

13 minutes ago, Genady said:

23 minutes ago, mistermack said:

clouds, their reflectiveness and insulation properties, and volcanoes.

Did that change in the last ~100 years?

There is evidence that clouds have changed a lot, due to atmospheric particles, but the work is ongoing on how that affects the climate. 

It might be that clouds are actually reducing the effect of greenhouse gas warming, in the short term.

I was just pointing out that there's a lot more to climate than bare CO2 numbers. 

[Genady]

9 minutes ago, mistermack said:

I was just pointing out that there's a lot more to climate than bare CO2 numbers. 

Right. However, it does not answer my question: what does make one to conclude that greenhouse gases alone don't cause all the problems. As in

 

23 hours ago, KrallSpace29 said:

I don't think it's the greenhouse gases alone causing all of the problems. The more I've been thinking about this the more I began to think it was also something else.

What makes one to think that it is also something else? IOW, that greenhouse gases alone are not enough to cause all the problems.

[mistermack]

Well, firstly, problems are not new. In the current climate, every problem is a CO2 problem. It should follow that prior to 1950, there were no problems. Just a quick glance at history tells otherwise. 

If we get a flood in my home town today, it's nailed, 100% as the result of manmade CO2 levels. But three years before I was born, in 1947, they had horrendous floods in Gloucester. And CO2 was hardly changed from it's long-term average. So when you say "cause all the problems" it should be obvious that they are not all down to CO2.

Same thing with forest fires. You would think that there were no forest fires, till CO2 levels rose, the way that they are reported. But that's not true at all. Forest fires have always been there. And it's likely that it's land management, rather than CO2, that is the main problem today. They've cut down nearly all the old growth, and planted new, very high density forestry, that is just waiting to burn. It's self inflicted problems, caused by greed and a lack of thinking ahead. 

[StringJunky]

53 minutes ago, mistermack said:

It's self inflicted problems, caused by greed and a lack of thinking ahead. 

Which has caused adverse climate change. I don't think scientists are going to wait to see if climate sceptics are right. Because we'll be fkd.

Edited August 6, 2023 by StringJunky

[Genady]

1 hour ago, mistermack said:

In the current climate, every problem is a CO2 problem. ... If we get a flood in my home town today, it's nailed, 100% as the result of manmade CO2 levels.

I didn't notice this.

[Genady]

This is another factor to add to the list. I've never heard of “ship track” clouds. First, we've added them, now we remove them:

Quote

But researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. 

‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unforeseen test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth | Science | AAAS

[Ken Fabian]

On 8/7/2023 at 3:24 AM, mistermack said:

There was substantial warming from 1880s to 1950, without significant rise in CO2

 

Not that substantial - there has been three times as much warming in the 70 year 1950 to 2020 period than during 1880 to 1950, which began with about 3 decades of global cooling. I don't see much room for significant missing natural elements that would support doubt of the attribution of current global temperatures and weather consequences of that to raised GHG's.

The warming trend increasingly stands out above natural variability and adds it's influence to the weather events we experience - and attribution studies are confirming the expectations that were based on shifting the bell curve distributions of extremes.

 

[mistermack]

I don't trust that graph. I wouldn't rely on anything thrown up by NASA/GISS. They don't match what I was looking at just a few years ago, I think they are actively massaging the story with every new version. I put them in the activist bracket, rather than unbiased science bracket. 

What I particularly don't recognise, the the DROP that they claim, from 1880 to 1910. I've never seen that before, in global temperature graphs.  

Since there were no climate satellites in 1880, nor deep ocean measurements etc, the temperatures from that era are obtained from models, and it's dead easy to get the model to say what you want. 

[swansont]

1 minute ago, mistermack said:

I don't trust that graph. I wouldn't rely on anything thrown up by NASA/GISS. They don't match what I was looking at just a few years ago, I think they are actively massaging the story with every new version. I put them in the activist bracket, rather than unbiased science bracket. 

What I particularly don't recognise, the the DROP that they claim, from 1880 to 1910. I've never seen that before, in global temperature graphs.  

!

Moderator Note

Then find the material and link to it. This is unacceptable in a scientific discussion.

 

1 minute ago, mistermack said:

Since there were no climate satellites in 1880, nor deep ocean measurements etc, the temperatures from that era are obtained from models, and it's dead easy to get the model to say what you want. 

!

Moderator Note

This and the first statement are also unacceptable

Rule 2.12

We expect arguments to be made in good faith. Honest discussions, backed up by evidence when necessary. Example of tactics that are not in good faith include misrepresentation, arguments based on distraction, attempts to omit or ignore information, advancing an ideology or agenda at the expense of the science being discussed, general appeals to science being flawed or dogmatic, conspiracies, and trolling.

Specifically, a claim that you can make the models say anything, and that NASA/GISS are manipulating data. You want to believe this things? That's your business. But you don't get to claim that here without having the receipts.

 

 

[Ken Fabian]

All the datasets that go back that far show similar for late 19th century, including the "made by skeptics" Berkeley Earth -

[exchemist]

On 8/7/2023 at 12:40 PM, Genady said:

This is another factor to add to the list. I've never heard of “ship track” clouds. First, we've added them, now we remove them:

‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unforeseen test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth | Science | AAAS

I remember this from my time in Shell. The sulphur in residual fuel oil burnt as bunker fuel used to be as high as 3-4%. A lot of SO2 was ejected with the exhaust, which oxidised to sulphate aerosol, which has an atmospheric cooling effect -  through scattering, I think.   The move to cut down pollution has reduced the S content in marine bunkers significantly. (It actually caused some unforeseen problems with cylinder lubrication in low speed engines, which was a headache for people like me, but that's another story.) 

I remember arguing with engine builders that high S was actually a help to combat climate change, but they said the politics of it would never allow them to make that case in public. How interesting (and not in a good way) that this is now a measurable effect.

[mistermack]

This graph, posted by Swansont 18 months ago, is quite a bit different from the GISS graph. Finding older ones would take time. 

But from this graph from Swansont, you can see a period from about 1910 to about 1945 when temperatures jumped nearly 0.7 degrees in 35 years. Obviously, that's a selected period, from trough to peak, but it happened. (If the graph is right)

So you have right there, a quite dramatic temperature rise that can't be put at the door of raised CO2 levels, as the rise over that 35 year period was negligible. 

 

[Ken Fabian]

15 minutes ago, exchemist said:

I remember arguing with engine builders that high S was actually a help to combat climate change, but they said the politics of it would never allow them to make that case in public. How interesting (and not in a good way) that this is now a measurable effect.

It would take the sulfate aerosols in combination with an absence of CO2 emissions to do so. My understanding is that aerosols from fossil fuels are short lived - a lot less residence time than from volcanic eruptions that send it into the stratosphere - and their cooling effect depends on the ongoing rate of emissions of them and diminishes within days to weeks of cessation. CO2 is long lived and the warming effect depends on the accumulating total, with it diminishing only slowly after emissions cease - centuries to millennia to find a new equilibrium.

Or look at it the other way around - start a whole lot of fossil fuel burning and the near term effect is global cooling, which reaches its maximum within days to weeks and stays there as long as the aerosol source continues. The enhanced greenhouse effect starts at zero and gradually increases over time. At some point the cooling will be equaled by the warming and will be exceeded by it after that. Cease the fossil fuel burning and there is a fast temperature rise equal to the prior cooling effect - back to no cooling - in addition to the full strength enhanced greenhouse effect that persists.

[exchemist]

2 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

It would take the sulfate aerosols in combination with an absence of CO2 emissions to do so. My understanding is that aerosols from fossil fuels are short lived - a lot less residence time than from volcanic eruptions that send it into the stratosphere - and their cooling effect depends on the ongoing rate of emissions of them and diminishes within days to weeks of cessation. CO2 is long lived and the warming effect depends on the accumulating total, with it diminishing only slowly after emissions cease - centuries to millennia to find a new equilibrium.

Or look at it the other way around - start a whole lot of fossil fuel burning and the near term effect is global cooling, which reaches its maximum within days to weeks and stays there as long as the aerosol source continues. The enhanced greenhouse effect starts at zero and gradually increases over time. At some point the cooling will be equaled by the warming and will be exceeded by it after that. Cease the fossil fuel burning and there is a fast temperature rise equal to the prior cooling effect - back to no cooling - in addition to the full strength enhanced greenhouse effect that persists.

Sure. But given that moving ships off RFO is a hard thing to do, I was arguing that high S fuel was actually better than low S, from a climate change viewpoint. Ships eventually need a non carbon fuel but that involves a dramatic shift to something like ammonia, on which the engine builders are doing a lot of work these days, I understand. Meanwhile they burn low S RFO, or distillate MDF, which gives us the worst of all possible worlds, it seems to me.  

But I retired from all that 10 years ago so I may be out of date.

 

[Ken Fabian]

21 minutes ago, mistermack said:

This graph, posted by Swansont 18 months ago, is quite a bit different from the GISS graph. Finding older ones would take time. 

But from this graph from Swansont, you can see a period from about 1910 to about 1945 when temperatures jumped nearly 0.7 degrees in 35 years. Obviously, that's a selected period, from trough to peak, but it happened. (If the graph is right)

So you have right there, a quite dramatic temperature rise that can't be put at the door of raised CO2 levels, as the rise over that 35 year period was negligible. 

 

That implies that when similar combinations of natural conditions occur again the temperature rise will greatly exceed the projections. But 0.7 C looks like an overstatement that is dependent on start and end point choices.

Could it be possible that people studying these things have looked and found early 20th century changes are within expectations given all the known factors and that they have not found room for any significant unaccounted for factors? Could it be that they are both competent and honest?

 

[mistermack]

29 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Could it be that they are both competent and honest?

 

It could be. I didn't say they were dishonest, I'm sure that they are convinced activists, but I've followed climate very closely in the past, and GISS were always on the hottest edge of the spectrum. I ended up expecting it, and they didn't disappoint. 

I just looked at the arctic sea-ice page, as I do regularly, and it's not looking any worse than last year, and it's nowhere near the state that's been constantly predicted over the years. It show the July  state, with the average shown as an pink line. This is two months off the annual minimum :

Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis | Sea ice data updated daily with one-day lag (nsidc.org) 

[Ken Fabian]

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

I didn't say they were dishonest

Good. Followed by -

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

I'm sure that they are convinced activists

Rather than convinced scientists? Not so good; it implies unprofessional bias rather than says it but that suggestion is in there.

 

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

I just looked at the arctic sea-ice page, as I do regularly, and it's not looking any worse than last year, and it's nowhere near the state that's been constantly predicted over the years.

Which predictions? Sure, people have said many things over the years - considering worst possible scenarios from information available at the time as well as the most likely is common practice for addressing risk on one hand, with falsely interpreting the positive swings of sea ice variability as "recovery" on the other. The latter has been shown incorrect by subsequent ice decline.

I don't think a decade or two either way reduces the global climatic significance of an Arctic with ice free summers. I don't see how you can legitimately interpret this as showing a serious and rapid decline isn't happening or is not serious -

Edited August 9, 2023 by Ken Fabian

[exchemist]

9 hours ago, mistermack said:

This graph, posted by Swansont 18 months ago, is quite a bit different from the GISS graph. Finding older ones would take time. 

But from this graph from Swansont, you can see a period from about 1910 to about 1945 when temperatures jumped nearly 0.7 degrees in 35 years. Obviously, that's a selected period, from trough to peak, but it happened. (If the graph is right)

So you have right there, a quite dramatic temperature rise that can't be put at the door of raised CO2 levels, as the rise over that 35 year period was negligible. 

 

I don’t understand your point. Obviously there is a lot of year to year variation due to other factors, as the spiky nature of the graph indicates. So equally obviously, looking at the difference between a trough in one year and a peak 35 years later is going to tell you nothing about any long term trend. All it tells you is there other factors that can obscure the trend in the short term. But we know that just from looking at the graph. So why would anyone do that?

Edited August 9, 2023 by exchemist

[mistermack]

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

I don’t understand your point. Obviously there is a lot of year to year variation due to other factors, as the spiky nature of the graph indicates. So equally obviously, looking at the difference between a trough in one year and a peak 35 years later is going to tell you nothing about any long term trend. All it tells you is there other factors that can obscure the trend in the short term. But we know that just from looking at the graph. So why would anyone do that?

What I'm criticising is the constant portraying to the public of MMGW as starting from the late 19th-early 20th century, when any climate scientist would know that CO2 levels didn't start jumping in any significant way till about 1950, the year I was born. I think quoting global rises from before then is deliberately misleading. In the public mind, one deg celsius isn't a lot, so it's just a way of getting over the one degree mark.

Here's the same graph, with the two major rises arrowed by me. I'm saying that to honestly portray the amount of warming that can be assigned to CO2, you can only use the second rise, the black arrow. And also, how can you ignore the fact that the first rise happened without CO2 being significantly raised? And why should the rise shown in black ALL be attributed to CO2, when something similar already happened previously?   

[Ken Fabian]

I am not impressed with your start/end point choices for the red arrow, which use the extremes of variability to make the "trend" look steeper rather than using any kind of running average (between the troughs and peaks) would. Unlike the black arrow that does seem to start between the ups and downs. Doing it like that makes the red rise greater than it actually was compared to the later black rise. Like the notorious "cooling since 1998" arguments that start from a record hot year with a super el Nino and used the results of ENSO changes after to claim it was the end of global warming.

Some climate scientists do consider modern global warming to have "started" (begun rising above the natural variations) from around 1970. And climate science doesn't claim human influence on climate for late 19th and early 20th century was positive, they have concluded it was negative - quite different from your "incompetent" interpretation. From NASA -

Overall your comments across as bog standard Don't trust climate scientists complete with false or misleading rationales, which feeds into Don't trust "activists" (ie don't trust people who trust climate scientists).

[exchemist]

22 hours ago, mistermack said:

What I'm criticising is the constant portraying to the public of MMGW as starting from the late 19th-early 20th century, when any climate scientist would know that CO2 levels didn't start jumping in any significant way till about 1950, the year I was born. I think quoting global rises from before then is deliberately misleading. In the public mind, one deg celsius isn't a lot, so it's just a way of getting over the one degree mark.

Here's the same graph, with the two major rises arrowed by me. I'm saying that to honestly portray the amount of warming that can be assigned to CO2, you can only use the second rise, the black arrow. And also, how can you ignore the fact that the first rise happened without CO2 being significantly raised? And why should the rise shown in black ALL be attributed to CO2, when something similar already happened previously?   

But this is ad-hoc cherry-picking, rather than a scientific approach to what the data points indicate. Earlier in the thread @Ken Fabian posted a curve showing the effect of LOESS (or LOWESS) smoothing on the data. I looked that up and found this description: https://www.statisticshowto.com/lowess-smoothing/

That, surely, is the statistically correct way to go about looking for underlying trends. It makes sense to include a good data set from before the suspected influence starts to manifest itself, in order to see whether there is any kind of baseline, from which the trend starts to depart. 

 

[studiot]

11 minutes ago, exchemist said:

But this is ad-hoc cherry-picking, rather than a scientific approach to what the data points indicate. Earlier in the thread @Ken Fabian posted a curve showing the effect of LOESS (or LOWESS) smoothing on the data. I looked that up and found this description: https://www.statisticshowto.com/lowess-smoothing/

That, surely, is the statistically correct way to go about looking for underlying trends. It makes sense to include a good data set from before the suspected influence starts to manifest itself, in order to see whether there is any kind of baseline, from which the trend starts to depart. 

 

So far I have refrained from commenting on this thread because it already involves some rather juvenile mud slinging, as all too many global warming threads seem to attract.

So +1 for bringing some SCIENCE to the table.

 

I agree totally that the statistics so far presented are wholly inadequate for the job, especially when the theory of time series analysis goes back to the early 20th century and even a bit beyond.

I don'r think LOWESS analysis is the way to go though, it is very short term.

 

I would suggest a properly thought out moving average analysis , based on my initial guess of using a 10 year average, would definiteley show the relatives sizes of Mistermack's smaller rise to the later possibly accelerarting rise in the posted graphs.

 

I would observe that including error bars on these plots has more to do with the fancy graphics abilities available nowadays at the push of a button, than the statistical purpose of the graphs.
In my opinion such stuff actually obscures the trend lines.

 

If ssomeone has a table of values I would be happy to turn them into a proper time series analysis.

 

[mistermack]

13 minutes ago, exchemist said:

That, surely, is the statistically correct way to go about looking for underlying trends.

You've ignored the points I made. I'll ask directly, is it honest to constantly quote temperatures from the start of the 20th century, when any GW resulting from manmade CO2 can only date from around 1950 ? ( or more likely 1970, there would surely be a delay in temps responding to a CO2 rise) And why do the GW people feel the need to mislead in that way ?

As far as the trends go, I would point out that the red arrow HAPPENED (if the graph is right). If you started measuring in 1910, and kept going to 1945, you would measure that rise of 0.6 deg in 35 years. It's not imaginary, and does resemble the latest rise, that's been attributed to CO2. You can't ignore it, by saying it was followed by a fall, or preceded by a fall. It's still a real rise that happened, and it can't have been due to CO2 levels.

I'm not claiming that it's conclusive of anything. It just weakens the case that CO2 is responsible for ALL of the rise since 1950. You might fairly claim that it's likely, but to claim near 100% certainty, as the IPCC does, is stretching the truth.