Bishop Hill The Economist on climate sensitivity
Mar 27, 2013 Climate: sensitivity The Economist covers the climate sensitivity debate in a must-read article and accompanying leader article.
The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.
The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.
This is an absolute must-read. Wow.
Article here.
Reader Comments (104)
Mr. Entropic Man: I repost what a certain iansview wrote in The Economist comments:
"I love the circular argument of the oceans put forward by the believers to explain away the lack of surface heating. When the global surface temperatures rose it was due to CO2 cos apparently the oceans didn't absorb it then; but when it flat-lines it's because it's stored up in the oceans and will be released in the future, possibly, sometime, undefined. Well if that's the case how do we know that the heating prior to 1998 wasn't due to heat stored up in the oceans in the past and released in a similar delayed fashion and nothing to do with CO2 at all? (...) please let us all in on the secret of what the cycle is that's controlling the storing process and when we can expect the heat to be released.
Someone must know, do satellite weather stations show any warming at all?
Mar 27, 2013 at 10:04 PM | Unregistered CommenterANH
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Yes, ANH.
The two satellite records have been running since the late 1970's. They indicate a warming of about 0.4 degrees, approximately 1.2 degrees per century, shown here at wood-for-trees:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/rss
Anything less than 2 degrees per century is generally considered to be not worth bothering about (in the sense of trying to stop it, as if we could).
To really appreciate the sea change here, you have to go back and review previous Economist pronouncements on AGW. A quick search will bring up representative articles. It is fair to say that they were at the vanguard of alarmism.
It will be interesting to see whether the expected reaction will force them to "recant." This is Maoist science we have here.
GrumpyDenier quotes:
"Carbon dioxide itself absorbs infra-red at a consistent rate. For each doubling of CO₂ levels you get roughly 1°C of warming."
I also believe this is wrong, though it (or something like it) is all you ever see quoted.
My understanding is that the CO2 sensitivity is for the FIRST DOUBLING from pre-industrial levels of CO2. I don't believe the actual science supports a similar rise for a 2nd or 3rd doubling.
You get to saturation for a start, where all of the IR is already being absorbed.
It is certainly a revelation to see this much acknowledgement of problems with received climate science in The Economist, but even still there are a lot of weasel words, and the penultimate paragraph is just plain unscientific!
"As a rule of thumb, global temperatures rise by about 1.5°C for each trillion tonnes of carbon put into the atmosphere. The world has pumped out half a trillion tonnes of carbon since 1750, and temperatures have risen by 0.8°C. At current rates, the next half-trillion tonnes will be emitted by 2045; the one after that before 2080."
What???!! You want to take two data points for CO2 levels and temperature, 260 years apart, draw a line between them (ignoring everything else that has happened), work out the trend and attribute the temperature change 100% to human-caused CO2 change? And then use that to make temperature projections for the future? What happened to "correlation is not causation"?
If things are that simple then we're wasting an awful lot of money on climate research.
I found this article (and the leader, as noted by Don B. above, Apocalypse perhaps a little later) to be a refreshing change from that to which we have become far too accustomed to seeing in MSM articles.
My favourite bit:
Particularly in contrast to the absence of any mention of Mann and (his protégé copy-cats) Gergis and Marcott - and there were no loopy Lewisms either ;-)
The IPCC certainly didn't seem to fare too well. Surely, this is a good thing!
At the very least, these two articles are a welcome change from their circa June 2011 unabashed gushing over the anthropocene:
Yes, it would have been nice if they could have made the distinction between "carbon" and "carbon dioxide" - and between AGW and CAGW; but, as the old saying goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day". It has taken twenty years of unquestioned and unrelenting propaganda to land us in the mess we're in today, in no small measure thanks to the efforts of the IPCC and its ever-faithful circle of "climate hypochondriacs" [h/t Eduardo Zorita].
So I doubt that this will change overnight, but I, for one, find these two articles quite encouraging.
Please, sir, can we have some more?!
I wonder if this has something to do with Matt Ridley's recent pokes at climate change orthodoxy. He was the science editor at the Economist and, perhaps, not so easily ignored as a 'denier.'
It seems that a dam has broken and everyone is talking about natural variability and natural regularities. Not long ago Trenberth denied the very relevance of the same when he called for a reversal of the Null Hypothesis. The breaking of this dam is the end of "the consensus" in what has passed for climate science.
To become a genuine science, climate science must account for natural variability and it must take as it primary goal the description of natural regularities. That description will be in the form of hypotheses, universally quantified general statements, that are well confirmed in experience. Claims about "global warming/climate change" take on significance only when presented against the background of an empirical science that comprehends natural variability.
I agree with Andrew's "Wow", with Jonathan Jones and with Hilary Ostrov, amongst others.
How about this from the Editorial:
The next sentence about a price for carbon ain't so good. But I agree with Chip that Matt Ridley's influence on one of our most respected London titles cannot have been a bad one, given his intellectual journey since his brilliant review of the The Hockey Stick Illusion in another journal in March 2010. And doesn't Nic Lewis as 'independent climate scientist' have a rather nicer feel than 'denier'? That phrase even made me sit up with surprise and new-found respect for the authors and publication in question :)
I agree with most here. Yet another garbage article on climate from this trash rag.
Temperatures "almost 1 degree higher than the first decade of the 20th century" - well 0.8 degree at best so they're only exaggerating by 25% on that one.
Many of the other laughable claims have already been cited, the worst in my book telling their readers that ex post data fitting by the models was some sort of successful prediction. I forgiveable. Could you imagine a subby allowing such a remark about economic models to pass into publication
I think the founders of the paper would reluctantly, but willingly, see The Economist fold if they could see how it has become anathema to what it once stood for and delivered in journalism.
GrumpyDenier quotes:
"Carbon dioxide itself absorbs infra-red at a consistent rate. For each doubling of CO₂ levels you get roughly 1°C of warming."
I think this is right in the sense that this is the level of forcing. If all other things are equal, this is what would happen. They may not be - feedbacks may intervene.
The diminishing effect is reflected in the doubling. If you think about it, it goes from 300ppm to 600ppm. That's 1 degree of forcing. To get the next you have to go to 1200, and then to get to 3 degrees to 2400. It is diminishing returns.
To get much over 600ppm from emissions is just about impossible - there isn't enough fossil fuel to burn fast enough to do it given the half life of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if the whole planet were to set itself to get it over 600ppm in a sort of Great Leap Forward, we probably couldn't do it.
The big debate is what this forcing actually does to to real temps. If there is any sort of damping effect from other parts of the system, climate senstivity could be under 1C.
The articles suffer from the Economist's usual style of authoritatively stating as fact... things that ain't necessarily so. The magazine values the appearance of authority over reliability.
Mar 27, 2013 at 8:08 PM | tonyb
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Tony
An excellent comment.
As I have been saying for years, one of the biggest errors in all of this is the globalisation of climate change and 'global' warming.
On a global scale, one is either in a glacial or interglacial phase. Apart from that, climate is a local/regional phenomena the effects of which are sustained on a local/regional basis. The only reason behind this phoney globalisation of this term is the over used mantra 'we are all in it together'. In reality climate change (whatever its cause) will be beneficial for some countries, neutral for others and problematic for some. Each country requires its own response 9this is why adaption not mitigation should be the way forward). However, if this cat came out of the bag, global power and global redistribution of wealth would be difficult. The Un requires it to be a global event if it is to exercise dominion on a world basis.
As the debate over the MWP shows (where there is a dispute as to whether this was or was not a global event), the fact remains that whatever the world may have been doing as a whole, Greenland must have been many degrees warmer than today and it is only that fact which would be of any relevance to Viking settlers and farmers. The same applies to the UK today. It does not matter whether the globe is warming or whether there is a temperature haitus on some averaged global basis, if the UK is cooling then the government (and citizens) need to deal with problems caused by a cooling climate 9not by some averaged warming in far flung places). We all know that Local Councils were hopelessly unprepared for the last few winters because the Met Office/Government had been telling them that snow was a thing of the past. This caused them to get rid of snow ploughs, gritters etc, and to not stockpile large quantities of grit. However, if the Met Office had been advising them correctly, they would latest by 2006 have noted the downward downward temperature trend between 2000 and 2005 and by 2006/7 Coucils ought to have taken a different view as to how to properly prepare for winter.
The mismanagement of the UK has been largely caused by a failure to look at the UK in isolation and to properly consider what (if any0 climate change is actually taking place in the UK and to address that change rather than dealing with some theoretical globalised average conditon.
Mar 27, 2013 at 10:04 PM | ANH
"...Someone must know, do satellite weather stations show any warming at all?"
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We have about 33 years worth of satellite temperature data. It shows no CO2 induced warming.
The temperature anomalies are almost flat between about 1979 and 1997. They are are almost flat between about 2000 to date.
There is a sudden step change in temperature (of approximately 0.3degC) which coincided with the 1998 super El Nino. As far as I know no one suggests that that super El Nino was caused by CO2 emissions. If one looks at the series as a whole (ie., from the 1979 start to date), one cannot see any first order correlation between CO2 levels and temperature anomalies in the satellite data sets.
The satelitte data suggests that the warming that is seen in the land based data sets (which are repeatedly adjusted) between 1979 and 1997 may be nothing more than an artefact of the adjustments made to those data sets, poor station siting, and station drop outs and the like.
There are of course some issues with the satellite data set, but its resilience to UHI and poor station siting and drop out is amongst them. Regrettably, it does not go back to a period prior to 1979.
I am with Michael Hart on this.
I went past the "be grateful for small mercies" stage a long time ago.
Im from an English Catholic i don't go to Church. But im not an Atheist ( become another fashionable religion ) Our ancient ancestors worshiped trees and the Sun.Today we worship Celebrity and Technology.
If SETI are looking for Alien life on other planets perhaps they should start by understanding how Life is sustained on this planet.
Mother Nature should change her name to Goldi Locks.She don't like it too cold or too hot .And somehow shes got her hand on the Thermostat Switch.Shes was looking after the Dinosaurs till they got hit by a meteorite ,not her fault. Shes been looking after Human and all the other life since.
So if CO2 keeps the heat in CO2 must also be keeping it out.
Or CO2 heats the planet which causes more rain reduces the amount of Water Vapour which is another Green House gas reduction which equalizes the temperature back to where it should be.
Or CO2 is such a tiny tiny percentage of the Atmosphere and the Earth is so vast a few extra Billion tons makes negligible difference.
Or maybe we just dont know.At Least George Bush and Tony Blair had reasons to invade Iraq.maybe the wrong ones. But at least they had some things to go on.Cant say that about the decisions costing billions and keeping millions in poverty about decisions being made about Climate Change.
Lots of extra CO2 But no extra warming or cooling Why?
"My understanding is that the CO2 sensitivity is for the FIRST DOUBLING from pre-industrial levels of CO2. I don't believe the actual science supports a similar rise for a 2nd or 3rd doubling."
It's very confusing, but the relationship is logarithmic, or so we're told, and therefore it takes more and more CO2 to get the 1.2C rise, hence the we get to 2C when CO2 is 1120 ppm in the atmosphere, and 3C when it's 2240 ppm. Which, of course, is too slow to panic about, so they invented "positive" feedbacks, for which there is no empirical data, put them into the models, and hey presto! we have a rise of 3C caused by the rise of 1C in, or around, the middle of the temperature. All you have to do then is say the ice-caps will melt and infer droughts and (believe it or not) more tropical cyclones because you've got more water vapour. This I don't understand because tropical cyclones are the way the Earth balances its energy budget and as the poles will warm more than the tropics the temperature gradient between them will drop and we should have less tropical cyclones.
Still the door is creaking open, more and more people are becoming aware of the suicidal nature of the CCA, and consequently more and more people are looking at the evidence used to commit suicide and finding holes in it. Eventually the politicians will back away from it, but the greens will continue, it's their one big chance to govern us for the foreseeable future without the irksome need to go to the people for permission.
I disagree with those nit-picking about this article.
This article marks a huge change from a journal which has often set the media trend. From now on it will be respectable to question whether the science is settled, whether the dangers are as serious as scientists have previously stated, and whether all recent warming is man-made. The details can be picked over later.
In the next few weeks we will almost certainly see similar articles in other newspapers around the world
@AndyL
Precisely - -"the debate is over" is over. The science is unsettled. The age of deniers and " 'so-called' sceptics" is ended.
It is becoming acceptable to once again ask questions, which is as it should always have been.
The Team will be apopletctic, especially so given that this comes so hot on the heels of their failure to respond in any meaningful way to the devastating criticsims of Marcott.
Now 12 years is not an official trend but it sure is interesting, and the return of the cold has had an enormous impact on our heating bills and on our farming practices. Not 15 miles from the Met Office a farmer on Upland Dartmoor has replaced their traditional Dartmoor stock with hardier Welsh cattle as the native stock have not coped well the last five years.
Mar 27, 2013 at 8:08 PM | tonyb
I thought that some of the cattle I have seen on Dartmoor looked like Welsh Blacks and am glad to learn that I was not mistaken. I have also seen shaggy haired Highland cattle there which are even better suited to cold conditions. There is a web page on the different breeds of cattle on Dartmoor at the link below.
Dartmoor Cattle
http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/cattle_moor.htm
EM - "And Belmesada et al have found a big piece of the puzzle."
ROFL - EM when I get time I'll pick up on the press release you are commenting on back on the other thread.
tonyb +1
john shade +1
michael hart: The Economist appears not to recognise what constitutes physical measurements. +1
SJF +1
richard verney +1
I think the editorial is the more significant item because of this unsupported assertion:
"So is putting a price on carbon and ensuring that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come."
IMO it is a mantra that is slipped in at the end despite all the foregoing which says essentially "At the moment we don't know what the future will bring".
tonyb
Oh dear all that real world data will never do, but thanks for your input anyway.
We are running a model and it tells us we are all going to fry and it is that horrible plant food what is doing it. /sarc off.
I have always been a lukewarmer and believed that CO2 must be adding some warming to the mix, but increasingly I see no evidence that man made CO2 emission are actually discernible at all.
Climate scientists of the AGW bent are splitting into different groups now -
One group will deny (sorry) reality until hell freezes over. These people will use any dodgy cherry-picked paper to try to excuse the total failure of their last "settled" pronouncement e.g. snow will be a thing of the past - oh dear! AGW is causing all this cold weather and snow. A mixture of delusion and straw clutching.
one group is slowly winding back their earlier predictions and hoping nobody notices (and will eventually say they never believed that CAGW stuff really) - this keeps maximum funding going and hopefully takes them through to a well healed pension. Some of these don't even realise this is what they are doing - others...........
A third set are now increasingly sceptical, in others words proper scientists, applying the scientific method. It is hard to make your way with blocked funding, but many are now speaking out through their sacience and through the media. I applaud their bravery.
I often quote Richard Feynman (as those who are bored enough to read my comments will know) -
He said that those who promote a theory should release ALL the data they have that supports that theory - AND they should also release ALL the data they have that does not support the theory.
Can anyone spot where Climate Science fails these two tests, and reveals itself as a activist religion???
Haven't read through all comments, but I'd suggest Oliver Morton wrote it.
I read this article a second time and I am infuruated by it. I don't often write letters to the Editor, but I did this time. Because I don't expect it will be published I needed it to be posted somewhere for my own sanity:
cui bono says:
'Better than usual, even for The Economist. I'm constantly threatening to cancel my near-lifelong subscription over their 'me-too' AGW coverage, but will persevere for now.'
Me too. I have an open email with a 'cancel subscription' message on my desktop computer, and maybe I will persevere for now as well. It is very sad. As far as I remember, The Economist used to be tough-minded about environmental issues, It was not unrealistic or 'anti-science' (whatever that might mean), but it knew how to deal with sanctimonious cant and wishful thinking. I used to use articles from the Economist to help students deal with these issues. I used to recommend that students think about taking out a student-offer subscription to the Economist. This year I haven't bothered.
There was an article from I think the late 1990s, dealing with the neo-Malthusian 'Limits to Growth' bag of arguments, where the author said something like, 'they think that having been wrong before, makes it more likely that they will be right in the future'. As a critique of Malthusian thinking, this is concise and penetrating, which the Economist of course used to be good at. In September 2006, the Economist announced its conversion to fashionable silliness, with a cover picture of desert, sunshine and cacti, and the assertion 'The Heat is On'. I wrote asking them what combination of personnel change, special interest and outside pressure had turned them, but of course got no reply.
The problem is no doubt partly age-related. I have been reading the Economist since I was about twenty five, and that was over thirty five years ago (you do the sums), and journalists and editors at the Economist are probably getting younger every year, just like policemen.
Malcolm Chapman, I appreciate your observations. With ten more years than you, I sense after reading editorials in the New York Times that those are thoughts that only twenty year olds would think practical. But then I remember that our countries are being run by people not a whole lot older.
One of the great beauties of my dotage has been how much smarter I've become. Not having a steady diet of the sorts of insoluble problems which used to appear on my desk has allowed me to select (or invent) my own. i can assure you, I select ones I can solve, or at least fool myself with.
As I suggested earlier, this Economist piece will do a great deal of good in the US. The magazine is required reading at our highest levels as well as by those who would hope to be thought "informed." This article's contribution is notice of legitimate doubt. The news that there is doubt which is legitimate and that there may be problems with the "consensus" assertions may be all that is required for a few of our heavy hitters to request briefings on how else this "threat" might be understood.
In the US, more doubt would be sufficient to inhibit action at the Obama level. He is a great one for giving lip service to a concept which he then does nothing with. Doing nothing on this front depends a bit on doing something on some other issue. He seems to prefer to choose his fights and fewer rather than more, so as long as he can drone on, so to speak, we are probably secure from some program concocted by New York Times twenty year olds.
On the remote chance that any twenty year olds read here, I didn't mean you.
Forgive an addendum to the above, but maybe I should have put it that the Economist article's contribution was not news of legitimate doubt but the establishment of the legitimacy of doubt. I think that even more important, and not so far entertained in our press.
This is the value of the piece. That it also contains some spurious details does not dilute this hopefully persuasive view.
Shorter Economist
'F..k know what's going on!'
"Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before."
Looks to me more like a desperate attempt to find some new scare over CO2 since the current one is clearly falsified. As with the GM scare all you have to do is invoke the precuationary principle that "who knows, there might be some wholly unknown bad effect that we have no evidence & no theoretical basis for but we ought to make sure it is banned anyway, just in case".
Jfurguson:
Exactly right regarding the importance in the US. Now one can question without being immediately branded a lunatic.
James: "Now one can question without being immediately branded a lunatic."
Unless the person you're talking to believes Lewandowsky. ;-)
Time for the Metoffice to reload their Rose fungicide spraygun with their new Eco eradicant.
The article is the biggest walk back in a major media publication to date.
My bet is that if the Economist is not driven into exile for daring to do this, many more major media outlets will follow.
Now is the time to watch for the Gorebots and Romm's etc. to start making a *lot* of noise to drown out the Economist's excellent article.
Re Roddy Campbell's deduction that Oliver Morton probably wrote it-
http://www.economist.com/mediadirectory/oliver-morton
I think its a fair bet too.
Mar 28, 2013 at 11:06 AM | Geckko
Excellent letter!
The article definitely seems to be a step in the right direction.
Mar 28, 2013 at 11:52 AM jferguson
"On the remote chance that any twenty year olds read here"
I've been reading this website almost daily for the last few years. I started reading CA back in 2007 which would have put me in my early 20's at the time and I've been hooked ever since! I have only commented a couple of times as I prefer to learn from older wiser heads than my own.
I have often wondered what the average age of the BH and CA readers would be. My other great wonder is what proportion of readers are engineers. I have always thought that many facets of climate science are really forms of engineering (i.e. data collection and interpretation) and in my experience engineers tend to be very skeptical of climate science conclusions. I have a hunch that many of the comments I am reading are being written by old engineers!
According to the Economist:
"One type of model—general-circulation models, or GCMs—use a bottom-up approach. These divide the Earth and its atmosphere into a grid which generates an enormous number of calculations in order to imitate the climate system and the multiple influences upon it. The advantage of such complex models is that they are extremely detailed. Their disadvantage is that they do not respond to new temperature readings. They simulate the way the climate works over the long run, without taking account of what current observations are. Their sensitivity is based upon how accurately they describe the processes and feedbacks in the climate system."
The Economist's account of models is the most sophisticated that has appeared in popular media but it contains a crucial error.
What the Economist has right is that GCMs imitate the climate system. In other words, a GCM is an attempt to reproduce, in a computer, the workings of the climate. In addition, the Economist is right that the models do not take account of observations.
What the Economist has wrong is that the models describe the processes and feedbacks in the climate system. Models do no such thing. Models imitate the processes and feedbacks but do not describe them. If the models described them then modelers could produce from model code the physical hypotheses that describe the relevant natural processes. Modelers cannot produce those physical hypotheses. Modelers create mathematical equations, not physical hypotheses, which take numbers as inputs and produce numbers as outputs. Modelers then interpret the output numbers as the effects of one or another natural process. However, any such work depends on modelers' intuition and not something that can be shared and tested against reality the way that physical hypotheses can be shared among scientists. The "climate sensitivity" assigned to any model cannot be something different from the modeler's intuitions about the model.
GCMs reproduce reality but do not describe it. Models imitate natural processes but do not describe them. Physical hypotheses describe natural processes but do not imitate or reproduce them. GCMs are not comparable to physical hypotheses. Only physical hypotheses can be confirmed or disconfirmed through experience. These facts are the reason that GCMs do not take account of observations. In principle, GCMs cannot take account of observations. The use of GCMs should be limited to analytic work and they must never be used as substitutes for physical hypotheses.
Roddy Campbell,
"Haven't read through all comments, but I'd suggest Oliver Morton wrote it."
I left a couple of comments on the accompanying editorial (under a very strange username not of my choosing) and got a response from "O.M. - The Economist".
Geckko,
My thoughts exactly.
I'm sure now its Oliver Morton. In the editorial 'O M The Economist' commented on Mar 28th, 11:26 in the thread - and from that it's clear that he supports the Carbon tax, and is naive enough to suppose that other taxes will be lowered in compensation.
http://www.economist.com/comment/1948382#comment-1948382
Much EU strategy/policy going forward to 2030ish is written with assumed values of CO2/tonne. It's going to be a tough call to get that unwritten by the same people who wrote it.
Several commentators seem to be making the assumption that the Economist journalist who wrote the 'A sensitive matter' article is the same person that wrote the 'Apocalypse perhaps a little later' editorial. I'm not aware of any evidence to support that assumption. The editorial might not have been only one person's work in any case.
Nic Lewis
Did you? :-)
Nic Lewis,
The editorial struck me as being written by more than one person.
It lurches in tone.
I last saw such lurches when I spent some time analysing the gospels.
Kilroywashere wrote: "in my experience engineers tend to be very skeptical of climate science conclusions. I have a hunch that many of the comments I am reading are being written by old engineers!"
I suspect you are correct.
In my experience geologists are also very skeptical of CAGW. They take the long view.
And a lot of public skeptics are people who are old enough to no longer have to care about damaging their careers and can now tell the truth.
Or they are old enough to have some actual experience of what the weather has done during their lifetimes.
Kilroy,
It's kind of you to take such a benign approach to my remarks with regard to the worldview of twenty year olds. I might have more accurately expressed my opinion had I said that I found that many of the New York Times editorials called for political actions which could never happen given the distribution of power and interest here in the states and that this unlikelihood seemed to me to make a lot of what was written bleating in the wind.
I do agree that many of the readers at CA, especially at Lucia's, and depending on the post, at Judith's or Anthony's are engineers or practicing scientists, and likely older. It is probably true here as well, but I find the quality of the rhetoric, if that is the right word, at Bishop's more succinct, for the most part, than I would expect from engineering types educated in the US. Without intending slander, that would suggest that UK engineers write better, or the proportion is lower. Your guess.
One other thing associated with all this anthropogenic climate-pokery is the idea of geo-engineering some mitigation scheme - like pouring iron filings in the ocean. I find it implausible that any self respecting engineer would be associated with any such action. Geo-meddling might be more apropos.
jferguson
I do agree with you that the political actions called for by the New York Times editorials are as idealistic as what I would expect from a twenty year old.
You have hit the nail on the head when you mentioned 'engineers and practicing scientists". I have some experience within the world of consulting engineering (we also have professional scientists) and cannot help drawing parallels between the this industry and climate science. We have many of the same temptations to produce technical reports which lean towards outcomes in our clients favour, in the hopes of securing further work from them. However, there are mechanisms in place which prevent engineers and professional scientists from going too far. I have always enjoyed Steve Macs comparisons between standards for mining professionals and standards for climate scientists. I have been thinking of penning a short piece comparing consulting engineering to climate science and posting it in the discussion section.
Geo-engineering is probably the most absurd "solution" to CAGW I have ever heard of. It makes carbon capture storage look like a good idea!
please let us all in on the secret of what the cycle is that's controlling the storing process and when we can expect the heat to be released.
Mar 28, 2013 at 1:35 AM | jorge c.
I would love to, but not yet.
The data in the paper show that the deep ocean heat content has increased, to a degeee consistent with diversion of energy that would have warmed the surface and atmosphere. It helps explain the "missing heat" and the pause in global average temperatures.
What it does not do is explain why the behaviour of the oceans changed in 2000. That will have to await further work.
EM, that paper proposes a previously unsuspected and currently unexplained buffer in the deep ocean which can last an indeterminate time, but based on sparse measurements and modelled 'data' it just happens to match the so-called missing heat which is claimed by one of the papers authors, but which is also a speculative number based on a series of guesses and further modelled 'data'. Further, no convincing mechanism for how it works is proposed. Don't lecture me on the scientific method again while you don't see why this would give us pause to suspect at the very least confirmation bias.
jferguson:
"The Legitimacy of Doubt". An excellent expression.
Sounds like a good title for the sequel to "Audacity of Hope".....