Judy on Pielke on the mainstream

You don't need to read anything here tonight - read Judith Curry instead.

Comments

[Josh]

And the Greenwire article here

http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/10/25/1

[John Shade]

She has it right here, albeit perhaps too generous and forgiving:
'Think about all the wasted energy fighting the “deniers” when they could have been listening, trying to understand their arguments, and making progress to increase our understanding of the causes of climate variability and change.'

I do not find it credible that 'they' had any interest in increasing 'our understanding of the causes of climate variability and change.'. Their behaviour would have been dramatically different from what we have had to endure for so many years.

[tutu]

curry refers to someone else who refers to someone else who.. anyways this is blogging
they cannot all "use the meat grinder" , like the more fanatic do , i suppose

if the oceans were soaking up heat would we not measure that as unexpected more CO2 molecules in the air? because warm water dissolves less CO2 molecules. the balances cannot go separate ways i think.

[Bruce of Newcastle]

Dr Curry is getting grumpier with certain of her climate science colleagues by the day. Her comments are going above pH 14 in causticity. Cool!

I actually take the excerpts as very encouraging, since underneath the activist exterior most of these people are still scientists. As they incorporate the various aspects (solar magnetic, ocean cycles etc) into the GCM's they'll find derived climate sensitivity getting lower and lower. The rub will be if they do accept this convergence to the empirically measured values of climate sensitivity aroud 0.7 C/doubling (eg L&C 2011, S&B 2010). If they do they will be forced to accept that AGW may be real but being logarithmically self limiting could never be remotely catastrophic.

Please someone tell this to Chris Huhne and Greg Combet before they ruin us all.

[golf charley]

Not a good day for Hengist and ZDB

[diogenes]

Golf |charley

I am sure they have their bridfings from Team central which they will divuloge...probably something to do with Curr's dubious sexual connections or smething equally relevant...or even maybe a big oil angle...

[golf charley]

diogenes

or maybe flooding in Thailand which has never happened before, in the global warming time scale, apart from the times it happened before the global warming time scale

[Don Pablo de la Sierra]

It was an interesting read -- third rate "scientists" pretending to have all the answers and they don't even have the questions straight.

Personally, I am disappointed the JC hasn't figured out that BEST is a sham. Perhaps there is hope that she will. If you read this Judy, go read Matt Briggs' comments about hockey pucks. And I might point out that reading Pat Franks comments are also very insightful. He is a very careful scientist. I respect his work both at SLAC as well as his work on climate. Both are under-appreciated but that will change.

The truly sad fact is that we have wasted perhaps twenty years in the scientific charade and really have only the vaguest of understanding of the Earth's climate. Hopefully, people like Frank will get more involved. We need that sort of rigor.

Still, there is hope. At least I can see that several of these people see that they have made a mistake or two.

[Shub]

Hansen's passage sounds just like the senile professor that is becoming:

It was in no “way affected by the nonsensical statements of contrarians,” Hansen said. “These are fundamental matters that the science has always been focused on. The problem has been the absence of [scientific] observations.”

The 'contrarians' it turns out, have been asking the right questions all along. But they have to be dismissed as 'questions from contrarians', and be re-asked.

What a sham and a bunch of lies 'science' is. Just as it always has been. It is never about the science for famous scientists and always about the credit.

[Jimmy Haigh.]

Oct 27, 2011 at 11:38 PM | golf charley
'Not a good day for Hengist and ZDB'

Crickets......

[Shub]

Anyone can wander over to the Discussion section where BBD, Spence and I and a bunch of others (but mainly BBD and me) have been going over the very same questions these scientists have been asking privatel, in two discussion threads. Questions that BBD wont admit.

[1] How come the models did not predict the cooling?
[2] How come a model of yours 'predicts' cooling after it takes place (like about 10 years afterward)?
[3] How come the models are always running slightly hot?
[4] How come it is bad if skeptics say warming may be due to natural variability, but scientists are allowed to say that 'pauses in warming' are due to natural variability

How funny!

[stan]

Isn't this interesting? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=finance-why-economic-models-are-always-wrong

[Don Pablo de la Sierra]

Stan

Good call. As I was reading it I was mentally doing a global "search and replace" of "economic" with "climate". One or two other changes, and you would have an excellent explanation of the climate modelling fiasco.

[Jiminy Cricket]

After the tour, sitting in his office, his laser in the next room, Barnes laments the boggling complexity of separating all the small forcings on the climate.

The reality is they know naff all...

It's hard to track how much is going into the oceans, because the oceans are soaking up some of the heat. And in a lot of places the measurements just aren't accurate enough. We do have satellites that can measure the energy budget, but there's still assumptions there. There's assumptions about the oceans, because we don't have a whole lot of measurements in the ocean."

So it must be humans... of course the fact that we know little about the majority of the worlds surface, a surface that is mobile and deep, is neither here nor there...

And we haven't even started on the sun yet.

Oh I forgot we have a few tree rings to counter all this... forgive me for my sins.

[HuhneMustGo]

Oct 28, 2011 at 12:06 AM | golf charley

"or maybe flooding in Thailand which has never happened before, "

According to BBC, "worst flooding for 50 years" - must have been a lot more CO2 then ....

[Jack Hughes]

Fact is that "climate science" is not even on the start line. They would be better with a blank sheet of paper than trying to make sense of the scribble done in the field over the last 20 years.

JC is starting to get it. Trouble is she would also have to walk back to the start line and head off in a scientific direction. She would have to 'fess up to 20 years of cargo culting.

[HuhneMustGo]

Shub

"Questions that BBD wont admit" - Surely you know by now that BBD is ALWAYS right?

[geronimo]

I don't have a problem with BBD's position, he's a believer who only takes on board those texts that reinforce his beliefs, while we are sceptics who won't take this texts inboard because they don't reinforce our beliefs. Neither of us know definitively whether we're right, but it seems to me that the skeptics have the high ground in the sense that all previous scare story's have failed to pass, and secondly the AGW scare story is based on models. These models purport to model a non-linear chaotic system and be able to predict future events, the events forecast are 100% doom laden (a clue for any reasonable human being that something is wrong with the ). The same models cannot replicate the past or present climate without adding in the unproven and unobserved existence of aerosols to dampen the temperatures the models are producing for the planet past and present. Yet we are being encouraged to dismantle society as we know it by stopping using fossil fuels, with not the faintest idea as to how we'll fill the gap, which will, if pursued to the ultimate will be the real catastrophe of the global warming scare.

[TheBigYinJames]

"I don't have a problem with BBD's position, he's a believer who only takes on board those texts that reinforce his beliefs, while we are sceptics who won't take this texts inboard because they don't reinforce our beliefs."

I think that's a tad unfair on BBD and everyone else for that matter. Plenty on the 'sceptic' side only take on board evidence which supports doubt in the consensus, and in general people on both sides of an argument relish stuff which confirms their own bias. Part of my fun in reading anti-consensus blogs is to enjoy seeing evidence which goes along roughly with what I personally hold to be true. I am not so silly to assume 'us sceptics' look at both sides equally, and the 'baddies' do not.

For me, as a sceptic-of-centre lukewarmer, the real problem with the science is that it's NOT conclusive - either way. For every paper showing evidence of a warming trend, there's one which shows its absence (let's not throw NUMBERS of papers here, we know the numbers favour warming side but numbers=politics, you only need one paper to prove something in science) For every measured mechanism showing warming, there's a measured mechanism which doesn't.

The reason there's a debate at all (and not just a scientific proof like we have in other uncontested areas) is that the evidence is only what I call INDICATIVE. Some evidence suggests warming, some does not. In totality, we have a mixed picture which leans to a possible mild warming trend (in my opinion) which is in no way intuitively catastrophic.

Unfortunately, when the evidence of either side of a thesis is only indicative, this allows people to choose one side or the other according to their personal prediliction. So some people choose to go along with the no-warming evidence because of a multitude of reasons, not all of them rational. And the same thing goes for the warming side - and since there's more of them (for now) the pool of irrational AGW believers is pretty huge, and they tend to be pretty vocal too. But don't mistake them for the vast majority who have chosen for whatever reason, to side with consensus.

When the data is contradictory or incomplete or contested, people have to choose. And when people choose, they get emotionally invested in their choice. And then bad things tend to happen.

[steveta_uk]

Pual Voosen, the author of the source of these quotes, has added on Judith site:

You also do it a disservice by stripping out the quotes from their proper place in the narrative.

Which I find fascinating, because if you read the full article, the selected quotes appear to me to mean exactly what they appear to mean in the extracts.

So I think Voosen, as a true believer, simply doesn't how significant these quotes are when "in context", but when shown stand-alone he can see exactly how significant they are.

For a giggle, have a look as the eejit Joshua's responses on Judiths page. Squirming or what?

[mat]

Nope don't think that any of what is going on can be called debate ! yes some on both side are extreme in their views but only one group has all the money the media /politicians /N.G.O.s they are the ones blocking F.O.I.s stopping work getting into print calling for the silencing of descent and the suspending of democratic rights , the consensus has power but no legitimacy and it is certainly not a "vast majority" !

[TheBigYinJames]

As I said, when people invest emotionally in an opinion, then bad things start to happen. This includes the whole Team post-normal science gig, where defending the flimsy hypothesis at any cost becomes more important than the proof of it.

[BBD]

Looks like Hansen was right: it's aerosols. From the original article, which anyone commenting here really needs to read, in full, twice, before sharing their views.

Thanks to CALIPSO's global coverage, Vernier saw that his sulfate layer stemmed from a mid-size volcanic eruption at the Soufrière Hills volcano in Montserrat, a tiny British island in the Lesser Antilles.

The satellite found that the eruption's plume floated into the stratosphere, carried upward by an equatorial air current. Digging back into other satellite data, this summer Vernier identified other midsize eruptions that reached the stratosphere: Indonesia and Ecuador in 2002 and Papua New Guinea in 2005.

"They've pretty much shown that it's not really coal burning," Barnes said. "There were three eruptions that were kind of spaced ... and that's really what was making the increase. You'd still think that the coal burning could be part of it. But we really don't have a way to separate out the two tracks."

Vernier's work came to the attention of Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist with NOAA who had been working with Barnes' data to puzzle out if this "background" of stratospheric sulfates had helped cause the stall in temperatures. On a decadelong scale, even a tenth of a degree change would have been significant, she said.

Solomon was surprised to see Vernier's work. She remembered the Soufrière eruption, thinking "that one's never going to make it into the stratosphere." The received wisdom then quickly changed. "You can actually see that all these little eruptions, which we thought didn't matter, were mattering," she said.

Already Solomon had shown that between 2000 and 2009, the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere declined by about 10 percent. This decline, caused either by natural variability -- perhaps related to El Niño -- or as a feedback to climate change, likely countered 25 percent of the warming that would have been caused by rising greenhouse gases. (Some scientists have found that estimate to be high.) Now, another dynamic seemed to be playing out above the clouds.

In a paper published this summer, Solomon, Vernier and others brought these discrete facts to their conclusion, estimating that these aerosols caused a cooling trend of 0.07 degrees Celsius over the past decade. Like the water vapor, it was not a single answer, but it was a small player. These are the type of low-grade influences that future climate models will have to incorporate, Livermore's Santer said.

"Susan's stuff is particularly important," Santer said. "Even if you have the hypothetical perfect model, if you leave out the wrong forcings, you will get the wrong answer."

Good news for those who think it's a near-certainty that geoengineering is going to be necessary later this century. Proof of concept and a true lightbulb moment for the aerosol-umbrella crowd struggling with the engineering problem posed by access to the stratosphere. Use the Hadley cell convection. A veritable stairway to heaven.

Not good news for sceptics. The litmus test, as I said to Shub, is how you deal with this sort of thing.

To the rational and objective observer, this is uncertainty about the various causes of divergence between a projected average warming trend and observations. To the dogmatic contrarian, it is 'proof' that AGW is 'refuted'.

All that this behaviour proves is that the person doing it doesn't understand the science and is rejecting the well-known radiative physics underpinning the greenhouse effect.

When you do that, you step outside the framework of rational debate. There be dragons.

[Jeremy Harvey]

A lot of debate on this article, at Judy Curry's and elsewhere... One nice quote from the original paper is this one:

Temperatures following 1998 stayed relatively flat for 10 years, with the heat in 2008 about equaling temperatures at the decade's start. The warming, as scientists say, went on "hiatus." The hiatus was not unexpected. Variability in the climate can suppress rising temperatures temporarily, though before this decade scientists were uncertain how long such pauses could last. [...] For some scientists, chalking the hiatus up to the planet's natural variability was enough. [...] But for others, this simple answer was a failure. If scientists were going to attribute the stall to natural variability, they faced a burden to explain, in a precise way, how this variation worked."

And that brings you straight back to attribution of the temperature record, a fraught exercise where the risk of coming up with a 'Just So' explanation and then convincing yourself that that explanation is correct is large. I don't read the full article in the way BBD does: I see a number of possible explanations being provided, one of which is the volcanic aerosol. None of them look anywhere near proven to me. I don't feel I'm stepping outside rational debate by noting that...

[Paul Matthews]

"Looks like Hansen was right: it's aerosols. "???
Or, Lean could be right:

According to Lean, the combination of multiple La Niñas and the solar minimum, bottoming out for an unusually extended time in 2008 from its peak in 2001, are all that's needed to cancel out the increased warming from rising greenhouse gases.

Or, Trenberth could be right:

Recently, working with Gerald Meehl and others, Trenberth proposed one answer. In a paper published last month, they put forward a climate model showing that decade-long pauses in temperature rise, and its attendant missing energy, could arise by the heat sinking into the deep, frigid ocean waters, more than 2,000 feet down.

Or, none of them could have a clue what's going on.

[Paul Matthews]

See the latest gem from Josh.

[Eddy]

Paul
The science is settled! It was settled before and now its settled again:)
Actually I'm optimistic about this, it looks as if we are getting into some serious debate about what is actually happening. Maybe the real science is starting to happen.

[Shub]

Never a mendaciously dishonest display as this. The BBD that we knew before, ... has gone where? This BBD conducts 'litmus tests', so coolly says, 'yeah, we knew this all along' without a trace of irony, and constantly draws sanitary cordons around climate entities.

After a prolonged bout of bot-like 'does-RF-from CO2-heat-the-system', I said:

So, yes, your question is a fetishization and a shibboleth. "Does RF from CO2 heat the system" - is a complex question, worded in a few words no doubt, but does it have a straightforward answer? I even doubt that the answer is categorically known. Nor do I believe that this framing is even the right way to think about the issue.

...

When climatic changes from CO2, albedo, orbital inclination (all in the currency of moment-to-moment W/m2, no doubt) occur over years (sometimes in the multidecadal, most of the times in the multicentennial timescales), we are already, less in the realm of 'physics', and more in the realm of a systems science. 'Physics' alone, is not going to give us the answer.

So, the greenhouse effect takes place, yes. What is that going to do "to the system?" I don't know the answer.

To which BBD's reply:

Shub

Under sustained pressure, you did eventually admit to the existence of a greenhouse effect. So you do accept the radiative physics. I'm glad to hear it, because for a while I wasn't sure. This would have been an impediment to reasoned debate.

But you remain agnostic about what will happen if RF from CO2 increases:
...

And now he/she says:

All that this behaviour proves is that the person doing it doesn't understand the science and is rejecting the well-known radiative physics underpinning the greenhouse effect....

If you argue with BBD, he *will* turn you into a greenhouse denier or a 'dragon'.

Just as dishonest are these climate scientists (everyone knows we are not talking about all climate scientists). These guys had the same concerns, the same worries that Marc Morano and Steve Goddard have been plastering on their webpages...but they cannot openly discuss it for the fear of 'giving succour to the deniers'. So they wait for 10 years and then they pull a laser out of their ass and send the heat scurrying to Atlantis. As and when they please, they become 'scientists' where they had these 'questions' all along, and they are just humble servants, labrats and cogs in the great machinery of science. Then they get arrested in front of the White House, laugh at 'deniers', support governements in taxing/banning a fundamental substance of life, and run their tree ring mafia and gatekeeping operations (thanks Eric Steig).

If there are findings that bring doubt on the 'consensus', do you trust that the present lot would immediately publish, and discuss it openly, rather than wait for a UN climate conference to be over? I don't.

One cannot easily guess or intuit the results of the physics', because it is a system we are talking about, and the timescales involved may well make even the 'obvious' answers completely irrelevant. If 100,000 forces pull and push in a hundred different ways, to produce a simple curve, the simplicity of which our minds can grasp, it still does not mean that the simple thing is what is taking place.

The problem as ever, was the 'attributional certainty which climate science suddenly imagined itself to possess', not the minutiae of the 'radiative physics'. The IPCC and the climate science journalism that has taken place over a decade is responsible directly. So are the activists, including the ones in white coats.

[BBD]

Shub

You are a card. I would like to invite one and all to review my exchanges with Shub on Discussion. You can decide for yourselves who is guilty of dishonesty and a general failure to understand the science. See the 'Climate Sensitivity' and 'Andrew Montford' threads (not ZDB's AM thread).

Shub is, as usual, being rather selective in the way he presents past conversations. Context will help.

"Mendaciously dishonest" is tautological by the way.

[steveta_uk]

Sheb said:

we are already, less in the realm of 'physics', and more in the realm of a systems science. 'Physics' alone, is not going to give us the answer.

A regular reader at Lucia's will know that she is always pushing people to explain the physical basis for each and every attempt at explaining the behaviour of the climate.

And I strongly suspect that while of course physics must be able to explain the basic underlying interactions at a trivial level, explaining climate using physics may be as impossible as explaining psychiatry using physics.

[TheBigYinJames]

It's almost as though Chaos Theory never happened.

[HaroldW]

From the article:

...estimating that these aerosols caused a cooling trend of 0.07 degrees Celsius over the past decade. Like the water vapor, it was not a single answer, but it was a small player.

While 0.07 degrees Celsius is a small amount, relative to the warming over a decade, it is not a "small player". As the article indicates, not everyone agrees with Solomon's estimate. To me, this is the prime difficulty in the area: One can measure the atmospheric concentration of various gases quite accurately, and then plug them into radiative equations to compute greenhouse radiative forcing to (say) 3 digits of accuracy. However, the aerosol forcings, both stratospheric and tropospheric, aren't even accurate to 1 digit, but are posited to be of the same order of magnitude. When one combines them, is it any wonder that climate sensitivity estimates are all over the place?

[golf charley]

So those 97% of climate scientists (who expressed a preference) were actually in agreement that their cats preferred Whiskas

[Shub]

For the interested:

The Theory of Everything R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. PNAS January 4, 2000 vol. 97 No.1 28-31

Here

[BBD]

Shub tries (as always) to confuse.

From Hansen & Sato (2011), emphasis added:

Climate models, based on physical laws that describe the structure and dynamics of the atmosphere and ocean, as well as processes on land, have been developed to simulate climate. Models help us understand climate sensitivity, because we can change processes in the model one-by-one and study their interactions. But if models were our only tool, climate sensitivity would always have large uncertainty. Models are imperfect and we will never be sure that they include all important processes. Fortunately, Earth's history provides a remarkably rich record of how our planet responded to climate forcings in the past. Paleoclimate records yield, by far, our most accurate assessment of climate sensitivity and climate feedbacks.

[...]

In contrast to climate models, which can only approximate the physical processes and may exclude important processes, the empirical result includes all processes that exist in the real world – and the physics is exact.

[...]

Regardless of the exact error-bar, this empirically-derived fast-feedback sensitivity has a vitally important characteristic: it incorporates all real-world fast-feedback processes. No climate model can make such a claim.

H&S estimate climate sensitivity to be 3 ± 0.5C for doubled CO2 (3/4 ± 1/8 °C per W/m2).

----------------------------------

Hansen & Sato (2011) Paleoclimate implications for Human-Made Climate Change:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf

[steveta_uk]

Hansen & Sato (via BBD) say:

the empirical result includes all processes that exist in the real world – and the physics is exact.

Laughlin and Pines (via Shub) say:

The fact that the essential role played by higher organizing principles in determining emergent behavior continues to be disavowed by so many physical scientists is a poignant comment on the nature of modern science. To solid-state physicists and chemists ... the existence of these principles is so obvious that it is a cliché not discussed in polite company. However, to other kinds of scientist the idea is considered dangerous and ludicrous, for it is fundamentally at odds with the reductionist beliefs central to much of physics. But the safety that comes from acknowledging only the facts one likes is fundamentally incompatible with science. Sooner or later it must be swept away by the forces of history.

Anyone who thinks that a system as complex as the Earth's climate can be reduced to an exact model is deluded.

[Tim Bromige]

BBD says "All that this behaviour proves is that the person doing it doesn't understand the science and is rejecting the well-known radiative physics underpinning the greenhouse effect."

I know it's been said before, but understanding the radiative physics has no bearing on understanding what happens to the system as a whole when one or more variables change. If the resultant feedbackswere monotonic, this planet would either be an iceball or a lump of hot iron.

[BBD]

steveta_UK

Anyone who thinks that a system as complex as the Earth's climate can be reduced to an exact model is deluded.

In your haste to respond, you have utterly missed the point. Do please read the excerpts from H&S in my comment above. H&S is explicitly critical of the ability of models to incorporate exact and complete physics. That is why the entire paper is about empirical estimates of CS.

Tim Bromige

Like steveta_UK, you appear to have entirely missed the point. Please re-read my comment at Oct 28, 2011 at 5:01 PM. H&S11 too, if you can bring yourself to.

Thanks.

[Martin A]

BBD: All that this behaviour proves is that the person doing it doesn't understand the science and is rejecting the well-known radiative physics underpinning the greenhouse effect.

Is there such a thing as a comprehensible and rigorous explanation of the greenhouse effect?

All the explanations I have seen start of by treating the Earth as a perfectly conducting black body - clearly a gross approximation in many ways.

The discussion then proceeds by hand-waving qualitatitive arguments. Such arguments, at best, lead me to say "that sounds plausible" but essentially unconvinced.

I seem to be in good company. Judith Curry says.

"(...) The IPCC reports never actually explain the physics of the greenhouse gas mechanism. (...)
(...) a gap remains in terms of explaining the actual physical mechanisms. (...)

(...) We need to raise the level of our game in terms of explaining the planetary warming by infrared absorption of CO2 etc. The missing area of understanding seems to be the actual physical mechanism. Lets target an explanation at an audience that has taken 1 year each of undergraduate physics and chemistry, plus calculus. Once we have something that is convincing at this level, we can work on how to communicate this to the interested public (...)"

[BBD]

Along with a growing majority, I am finding JC's pronouncements increasingly baffling. The radiative physics of CO2 and their role in warming the atmosphere are extremely well documented. There is an entire site devoted to explaining (with the relevant textbooks often heavily featured) exactly what all the fuss is about.

Anyone who cares enough to bother to find out can go and read up for themselves. Then you too will ask yourself why JC wrote as she did.

There's a lot of material to get through. Given your comment, I'd strongly suggest starting with Atmospheric radiation and the greenhouse effect.

Its all in there.

[timg56]

BBD,

I'd like to ask the following questions:

1) If Hanson had it right all along, that you have to take into account aerosols, and these aerosols are coming from volcanic eruptions, why is he talking about fossil fuels?

and

2) If even moderate sized volcanic eruptions can produce an effect that overrides that produced from CO2 for a period of a decade or more, why should we be so concerned about CO2?

As a lay person and a tax payer, I would want to know if the person reaching into my pocket is going to use my money to good purpose or has just figured out another justification for reaching into it. If burning of fossil fuels are producing aerosols which causes a cooling effect strong enough to counteract the effect from the CO2 produced, global warming no longer becomes a justification for policies that take more of my money. And if it is aerosols from volcanic eruptions, again where is the need to reduce CO2 when events far beyond our ability to control - i.e. volcanoes - can change the playing field?

[hunter]

BBD,
You don't seem able to understand the problem.
This is not about the radiative effects of CO2.
This is about what those effects do in the atmosphere to the climate, not in the lab.
It is astonishing yet not surprising that AGW believers continue to confuse these two seperate issues.
It is apparent from the quotes, which are not out of ocntext, that the AGW opinion makers get it, but hope you continue to ignore it.
The sad truth is that the climate is not well understood, that the claims of catastrophe have been falsified by reality, and that more is at work than CO2 obsessed people can accept.
You have been had. But your community took a whole of other people's money so we have all been had.

[not banned yet]

BBD

"The end result is that – without feedbacks – the surface will increase in temperature about 1°C to allow the same amount of radiation to space (compared with the case before CO2 was doubled)."

Source: http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/11/01/theory-and-experiment-atmospheric-radiation/

This is based on a TOA averaged model of the earth's energy budget. How do you square this with the result you quote from H&S11?

[Martin A]

BBD There's a lot of material to get through. Given your comment, I'd strongly suggest starting with Atmospheric radiation and the greenhouse effect.

Its all in there.

Thank you. I took a look - someone explaining his understanding of atmospheric absorption and radiation with lots of enthusiasm. But I think Judith Curry's comment remains valid.

[BBD]

Martin A

Someone explaining the last several decades worth of work - often using standard texts - in commendable detail and clarity. What you think about JC's comment is absolutely irrelevant, since you have just passed up the opportunity to find out whether she's correct. In fact you have forfeited the right to any opinion on this or any other deriving from radiative forcing.

Don't you see that?

[BBD]

not banned

This is based on a TOA averaged model of the earth's energy budget. How do you square this with the result you quote from H&S11?

Are you having a laugh?

The quote you provide is for the no-feedbacks forcing!

Tell me this is a wind-up. Please.

[BBD]

timg56

We'd need ever-more aerosols to counter the ever-increasing warming from ever-more CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere. You can only go so far with this idea. Eventually, what Hansen has called the Faustian bargain falls due. What you have put off, but not directly addressed, comes roaring back with redoubled force.

That said, there are people seriously considering doing exactly this. And by mid-century, it might even happen. Now they really will be interesting times.

I wonder how my four year-old son will enjoy living through them? I will of course be dead, but small children do rather focus the mind on the 80-year time-frame. Don't you think?

[Shub]

"- in commendable detail and clarity."

Did you just praise yourself?

*rubs eyes*

[BBD]

hunter

You don't seem able to understand the problem.
This is not about the radiative effects of CO2.
This is about what those effects do in the atmosphere to the climate, not in the lab.

I had grasped the distinction, actually. But then, I occasionally do some reading. Which served to convince me that the so-called experts are, well, experts. You and I are know-nothings. This is not argument from authority, it is a fact.

The difference is that I accept it and seek to narrow the gap, and you apparently do not.

That's how I know that

- the 'greenhouse effect' is keeping the Earth's surface about 33C warmer than it would be if GHGs were removed from the atmosphere.

- climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 to 550ppmv is ~3C

- a 3C rise in GAT would be very, very serious

- this is generally accepted by the most knowledgeable, and some say 3C would open the gates to 4C and beyond because of the clathrates.

Earlier in the thread, I suggested that people should read the original article, twice, in full, before sharing their thoughts. I repeat that advice.

[BBD]

Shub

Did you just praise yourself?

No. As usual, you are deliberately misrepresenting my comments.

I praised SOD. As is obvious from a glance at what I wrote. Did I ever mention that you do yourself no favours?