Sunday
Apr202014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill A debate!
Apr 20, 2014 Climate: Models Climate: Sceptics Climate: carbon budget The Institute of Art and Ideas recently held a debate which was a bit of a shocker in that it included people who are less than convinced that we are about to fry. Bob Carter needs little introduction of course, but alongside him were atmospheric physicist Michael McIntyre and science writer and climatologist Richard Corfield, none of whom would fall into the eco-catastrophe camp. The debate was chaired by Gabrielle Walker, familiar to readers here as co-author of David King's dodgy book on climate. This is really very good stuff. (The embedding doesn't seem to work for me - direct link here).
Reader Comments (24)
Well, that was dull. Better to have had some extreme views represented.
(The embedding doesn't seem to work for me - direct link here).
Disabling adblock on my browser made things work for me.
At the end, Bob Carter says 2020 is ten years away. Earlier, he is corrected on present CO2 of 400ppm, not as 380ppm. I assume this is a very recent recording.
The alarmed one of the three was McIntyre who got his facts wrong with his - human emissions of CO2 are greater than its natural atmospheric variability.
ssat - While I haven't yet viewed the discussion, why do you say that "human emissions of CO2 are greater than its natural atmospheric variability" is wrong? Annual CO2 emissions (~35 Gt/yr) are equivalent to ~4.5 ppmv, and the annual variation is currently +/-3.5 ppmv or so.
Is there some context I am missing?
Harold W
None of the speakers limited themselves to annual time-scales. Natural variability is in orders of magnitude, not percentages. Viewing will give the context.
HaroldW, daily CO2 can fluctuate by a lot:
Utah: 35ppm - http://co2.utah.edu/index.php?site=1&id=0&img=9
Davos: 250ppm - http://www.picarro.com/sites/default/files/EGU%202013%20-%20Lauvaux%20et%20al%20-%20poster%20v1_0.pdf
I'm always puzzled at the globalised CO2 figures. I mean it must be higher at the back of my SUV where it all starts and lower in the Amazon jungle where it all disappears? No?
Likewise the pH value of "the oceans". I recall seeing figures from Monterey Aquarium where pH reading jumps all over the place hour by hour - looks like a global average is meaningless.
Doesn't CO2 disapear into the Arctic sea water? Not the jungles?. Or going from memory, 3% of the earth surface is forest. 70% of the earths surface is ocean. And cold salt water has a high uptake of CO2.
ssat -
Quite right, they weren't discussing annual variability. But it's also true on the scale of glacial - interglacial cycle; the natural variation is (approx.) 180 ppmv (glacial) to 280 ppmv (interglacial), and the current level is now almost 400 ppmv.
Over the time scale of geological eras, I agree that the natural variability is much larger. But I think only one panelist (Corfield) talked of the Cretaceous. McIntyre limited himself to the last few hundred thousand years.
Bruce -
Yes, local readings show quite large daily variations. And it's well that there are no ill effects directly arising from (say) 1000 ppmv CO2 levels. But as ssat mentions, the discussion concerned global averages and much longer time scales.
HaroldW, , I think that ice core proxies show a much lower value for CO2 and CO2 variability.
Plant stomata CO2 proxies show something different:
"Plant stomata suggest that the pre-industrial CO2 levels were commonly in the 360 to 390ppmv range. "
http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/co2-ice-cores-vs-plant-stomata/
I enjoyed that.
It sounded to me like sane people discussing an interesting subject in an intelligent manner.
(No screaming or points scoring or shouting down - very different to the usual stuff you get on Radio 4, particularly the Today programme).
It was an intelligent conversation.
Bruce:
Yes, but You must remember that the ice-core measurements are from inland in Antarctica where there is zero biological activity for thousands of kilometers around. Antarctica, central Greenland and desolate mountain tops in the middle of a tropical ocean with low biological activity (i e Mauna Loa) are probably about the only places in the World where you can get low and reasonably consistent CO2-values.
Everywhere else you will obtain higher and much more variable concentrations. This includes almost every place where leaves with stomata can grow and fossilize. Remember that stomata don’t wait for exactly the right wind and weather conditions like they do when taking measurements on Mauna Loa. They reflect the average concentration at the site where they grew, at the time when the leaves started growing.
And it isn't considered good form to point out that it is actually the average local concentrations that are the relevant figure for climate modelling.
tty, "low and reasonably consistent" does not mean correct. it just means consistent and low.
Harold W.m Look at the works of Murry Salby and Tom V Segalstad ( http://www.co2web.info/Segalstad_CO2-Science_090805.pdf :)(http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2ROw_cDKwc0). Their work indicates that there is no short term (Annual to decadal) correlation of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentration. Briefly the natural sources and sinks of the CO2 so far outweigh the anthropogenic emissions that the annual variability of their fluxes is not related to ours. I believe that Salby shows the atmospheric content is almost completely explained as an integral of global temperature and soil moisture. If this is the case I do not understand why Dr. McIntyre assumes that eventually our emissions will cause excessive sea level rise. I think the sea level is unaffected by mankind and is likely to retreat if global temperatures fall.
I'm well mixed up.
Truly this is a good news Easter Sunday.
The video is a struggle to get going and to keep running (is there not a better link?).
Also as reported Paul Homewood on his blog, "It seems the Irish Independent is truly independent, unlike its British marxist sister version." a darn good editorial in the Irish Independent.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/never-mind-rwanda-eat-vegetables/
There was reasoned dialog in that 'debate'. The foundationless pontifications of Michael McIntyre however really grated on my nerves.
I watched it via a link at Judith Curry's Climate Etc blog.
Bob Carter comes across the best. The best at getting his thoughts clear, concise and across.
First I've heard of Richard Corden. Makes some good points, but gets a bit lost and prickly in the middle. Seems to be the type of expert who wants his listener to know how clever he is rather than to get the listener to understand.
McIntyre is clearly the academic rather than communicator - in looks as much as anything. He bizaarely uses an electrical circuit analogy to make things 'simpler'. He is not at all clear on why he believes sea levels will rise 10s of metres. His argument seems to be: climate is a complex chaotic system subject to uncertain fluctuations and instability, and so it is bound to happen sometime. He also seems ambiguous about whether we should fear climate change or not.
Overall, a good discussion. But the wooliness of some points means it will have little impact on AGW believers.
OK. Hawaii is a good place to camp if I want to measure CO2 for the next fifty years. Tropical, volcanic, shrubbed and desolate - its got the lot. I'll keep off Antarctica because I'll only get low readings like the ice cores.
Two of three panelists were egging each other on about deaths from massive sea level rise all the while the utter defiance of tide gauge records to any trend influence whatsoever in our modern era singularly falsifies all climate alarm including the idea that heat is now hiding in the oceans that would immediately *show* *up* as thermal expansion. The crucial experiment has been run, a whopping 40% boost in atmospheric carbon dioxide has resulted in *zero* trend change in interglacial sea level rise on the coasts where it counts. Alarm is to any objective person now called off. But all Bob Carter could muster was dragging systematically mismatched satellite data into the debate, rather than call out their pure charlatanism.
Church & White 2011 finally presented a non-“adjusted” simple average of tide gauges that is unwavering in trend:
http://i51.tinypic.com/28tkoix.jpg
From McIntyre's web site, he reveals his mathematician's formal outlook, divorced from empiricism, and states that water vapor is a positive feedback without mentioning cloud cover or increased snowfall in bitter cold but growing blinding white Antarctica, nor does he mention any other negative feedbacks such as rapid plant and algae adaptation to using more carbon dioxide, or greater ocean uptake due to physical changes, or in general *complex* physical air/ocean dynamics that determine when and where water vapor acts either as a greenhouse has or as cooling cloud over or even as an ironic inverter of overall atmosphere humidity versus altitude:
“The main point can be stated very simply. When CO2 is added to the atmosphere, this added CO2 acts like the input signal to an amplifier. Water vapour has no such action. The reason is that water can evaporate and water vapour can condense or freeze, depending on the temperature. The concentration of water vapour is therefore strongly influenced by temperature. This makes it act as a so-called feedback. The feedback is positive. Anything that makes the atmosphere warmer on average tends to make it moister on average, other things being equal, simply because warmer air can hold more water vapour before the vapour condenses. More water vapour means more greenhouse effect, hence still more warming. In other words, water vapour is part of the amplification mechanism.”
http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/co2-factsheet.html
The complex feedback issue was recently supported in two empirical studies as being an AGW canceling *negative* water vapor feedback since higher regions get *drier* as ocean surface air gains humidity:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/03/nature-can-selectively-buffer-human-caused-global-warming-say-israeli-us-scientists/
You've got to be cautious about "discovering" positive feedbacks in the natural world. A simple reason is that it would have gone unstable and blown up long ago.
This event finds the science geeks of the University of Cambridge on fulsome display!
Bob carter was trained there, and since retired from James Cook University in Australia, now appears to be back at Cambridge (according to the introduction). McIntyre is an atmospheric research scientist at Cambridge. And Dr. Corfield trained in palaeontology at Cambridge, but now works in consulting based in the Oxford area.
Richard Corfield is a figure of much interest. Over the last decade, he's done popular science books on the evolution of the planetary system, on the earth's fossil story, and yet another take on Darwin's voyage of the Beagle, managing to deepen both the history and the science of it all.
And for CUP, Corfield co-authored an introductory university level science textbook (one semester length, in American terms) in the "An Introduction to The Earth-Life System," contributing three chapters on subjects like the carbon cycle and the earth's geological history.
For myself, I've ordered two of them and added the textbook to my vast Amazon dot com basket (which might get "purchased" and week now. (I'll save the impressive looking Darwin book for another time.)
Altogether, I think the many comments above have done real justice to the strengths and weaknesses of the 30 minute panel discussion itself - less a debate and more a civil scientific discussion, indeed!
However, McIntyre is clearly in the grip of current AGW/CAGW research system, reflecting both its narrow specializations, and therefore his vulnerability to fad following scientific "knowledge" that the media and IPCC-spouting Orthodoxies impose by poisoning the well of critical scientific discussion.
I think I'll add a LINK of this "debate" to my local (Denver, Colorado, USA) "Skeptic group's" discussion list. It makes a measured and appealing contrast to the profitless (save to expose the Orthodox view as alarmed and fully politicized) of the April debate between NCAR's Kevin Trenberth versus Judith Curry at the annual University of Colorado at Boulder Conference on World Affairs. (Unfortunately, no video or audio of the event has surfaced - only the slides, Judith's own comments and a few by attendees in the small audience, including skeptic blogger Stephen Goddard's.)
The contrast between the two debates is salutary and instructive, since Trenberth's alarmism stands out especially, and few people reading and viewing popular media are ever exposed to the calm and calming doubting Thomas's of climate science. Including self-described "science skeptics."