You are right that the satellite orbits have to be tracked closely and the geoid is not smooth. All that said, I am confident that the increases we are seeing are factual increases. The results match well with the thermal load the oceans are carrying.

… and it is true that the paleoclimate indicates that there have been large changes in climate with and without human intervention. This is well accepted and understood, and the natural causes of all those changes are sought out to see if there is any explicative power in them for the current situation. Mostly what we see is events that unfold much more slowly than what we have been doing to the CO2. It is rising 50 times faster than at any time we know of and is now higher than it has been in 3 million years. The only comparable events in terms of rate of CO2 release would be the Deccan traps or a major meteor impact. Basically extinction events.

The younger Dryas is thought to be from the shutdown of the thermohaline current. If this is true it was not a global event of the sort of scale we are concerning ourselves with here. It certainly was abrupt, but if it was driven by a shutdown of the current, it would have had to be abrupt… but not global. Perhaps even as depicted in that outstandingly stupid movie whose name I don’t want to remember

Which gives us another long-shot possible outcome. We are destabilizing a complex system.

=========

What is uncertain is whether the “power of the CO2 forcing” is overwhelming on short time scales. I have always regarded it as a rather gentle but constant thing, always moving the base in one direction but not overwhelming all the other forcings all the time. It makes the lows higher and the highs higher over a long period of time. To call it overwhelming one has to look at long periods.

The tide doesn’t seem like much compared with the wave-height. It raises the peaks and the troughs of the the waves imperceptibly over time and yet if one is careless in placing the beach-towel at low tide, the need to move it will be apparent within a few hours.

Time frames are exceptionally important, and humans are notoriously bad at comparing the effects of things at vastly different timescales.

I think the Levitus data is pretty convincing – that there is substantial heat content being continually stored in the oceans. It certainly appears to be less in the 2006-2008 region and Pielke isn’t happy with that characterization but insists that the differences are statistically indistinguishable from noise in that time frame. Yet the time frame is so short in the data set that it would be difficult for the differences to be anything but noise.

The question of the direction of the feedbacks is one that can be examined simply. If the sign is wrong (as Spencer et.al. sometimes assert) then the current greenhouse would not stand at the roughly 33 degrees it does, and the paleoclimate would not show the temperatures it shows for the last time we had this much CO2. I may be incorrect to use such a blunt instrument on this issue, but it is the one I have access to, and it avoids bringing yet more references to the scientific papers into the discussion.

All the data indicate that there was a decline in the rate of temperature increase in 2007-2008, with a very deep solar cycle and a la-nina coinciding. This does not look to be a continuing condition in 2009. GISS, Hadcrut and NOAA all indicate a strong rebound of temperatures and the el-nino is returning as well.

If the forcing of CO2 were not in play, it would have been even colder… but CO2 doesn’t overwhelm the short term changes, it simply lifts the mean around which they oscillate. In the long term, it is larger. Not on short time scales.

I didn’t mean for this to be so long. I rather wished to leave it but well reasoned questions are always compelling.

I can be wrong (though I don’t think I am) and you can be correct. The weight of evidence seems (IMHO) to favor AGW, but there is still plenty to be learned, particularly about the sort of internal decadal variation that Swanson et.al. was discussing.

We disagree and I think we leave it at that. I don’t think that the deceased equine will respond to additional physical abuse.

respectfully
BJ

Nor in the real world is a geoid surface constant in time – like everything else on this planet of ours it changes with time, sometimes quite quickly e.g a major earthquake will bring about local changes.

Satellite measurements are fraught too – although they are fairly good, as I recall a revision had to be made at one point to take into account orbital decay which had been neglected in the original calculations. What is needed here is an independent method of assessment to establish the veracity of the methodology.

Surely you must know all this and likewise if you are looking at paleo climates also know that climate change has always been occurring – long before there were people. And arguments about time scale don’t cut it either. Consider the Younger Dryas, a period of climate collapse that developed over a period of decades and lasted 500 years or so, a far more threatening scenario than the marginal amount of warming that has allegedly taken place in our times.

If CO2 is truly forcing with the power claimed then planet heat storage must increase monotonically subject only to natural variability of other forcings. Surface temperature should be subject only to local heat distribution changes. In my view it is clear unknown factors override this on multi-decadal timeframes.

I have never expressed scepticism about human contributions to rising CO2. My scepticism is that the present climate model feedbacks are correct even in direction let alone magnitude.

As you seem to be confirming in a muddled way, the paleoclimate record is of no assistance to resolving these matters.

“Theory predicts and fact obliges.”
It certainly does when the AGW High Priests are in charge of measuring temperature.

How long did the temperature go up ~ 5000-6000 years.

When did the CO2 go up ~ 800 years after the temperature STARTED to go up.

The most you can say is that the CO2 did not cause the first 800 years worth of warming. After that you simply do not know, and the science asserts that it is a feedback AND a forcing at the end of an glacial period.

But of course this is NOT the end of a glacial period and neither was the last time 3 million years ago, when the CO2 was this high. We have indications that the temperature was then 3 degrees higher and more definite evidence that the ocean was 25 meters deeper. All in accordance with the established CO2 sensitivity… to the extent that anything is actually known about 3 million years ago.

So the CO2 is going up because of us… the isotopes prove that even if you remain sceptical.

And the CO2 is definitely a Greenhouse gas, this is basic physics that nobody questions at all.

Theory predicts and fact obliges.

This is perhaps the most basic mistake that the blogosphere makes in the science of Global Warming.
respectfully
BJ

Arguing about the quality of the science based on the ACTUAL quality of a blog doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

I don’t know what gets edited on RC, I am just a peon at this point. I have certainly seen contrarian arguments buried in reality often enough.

You are arguing that the debate is one sided. Perhaps that is because the truth is more on one side than the other?

Certainly Gareth Morgan did a reasonable job of investigating it. Consider buying his book rather than Wishart’s drivel.

“No, recent trends are not meaningless. They occur in a period in which CO2 forcing has been at unprecedented levels. The climate has failed to respond as predicted by climate models.”

I see the natural variation at a different timescale than you seem to understand it, and I don’t expect the climate to monotonically increase in temperature in lockstep with CO2. I DO expect temperature and variability to increase over the longer term, and it has been doing exactly that.

I think we disagree on this, and will not resolve the disagreement. In a few years we will know the truth… and if it turns out that I and the scientific community got it right but we did nothing, we’re toast.

Because this (the 40% target of the OP) is also about risk management, and as near as I can tell, very little consideration of that is being taken, at least not with respect to the what I see as the risks.

You and Andrei are the only ones who haven’t resorted to ad-hominems. Maybe there is hope for civilization.

…. naaaahhhh

respectfully
BJ

I don’t think the results in the paleoclimate indicate that any response should be expected. CO2 increase followed temperature increase, not the reverse as you imply.

I worked on the Laser Airborne Depth Sounder project under contract with the CSIRO and I worked at NASA JPL.
http://www.hydro.gov.au/aboutus/lads/lads-technical.htm

Both manage to do a very nice job of measuring stuff. You measure from the reference geoid, usually WGS84. You can use a variety of measures to take out both tides and waves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid

It is remarkably, even possible to measure the wind speed over the ocean by measuring the ripples on the surface.

So to answer your question, I actually know a little bit about this topic. I don’t know enough to claim to be a scientist, just an Engineer, but I know how Kalman filtering can be used to figure out where the mean surface is.

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/bathymetry/predicted/explore.HTML

…and el-nino has an effect here too.

http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/ENSO.htm

… and none of that is really pertinent to the real problem.

In terms of worrying about climate change the paleoclimate shows that in periods of slower CO2 growth we got temperature rises of several degrees and rates of change that are more like 1-2 meters per century than the 0.3 we currently observe. That was the end of an ice-age. We aren’t at the end of an ice-age now but we are seeing temperature change that looks a lot like it in terms of the rate of change, and CO2 changes that are 50 times as fast. The more rapid sea rise is the last thing to happen. If we get methane release from the deep clathrate deposits or from the tundra it will be out of our hands, and those will happen first.

The expected rates makes sense if you consider that the WAIS is simply Ice that is grounded below sea level, and Greenland is slipping. 2 meters by the end of the century is quite reasonable to expect if we don’t do something NOW to keep from tripping a positive feedback. Once again, to go back to the last time we had CO2 like this WE weren’t around. We didn’t evolve in those conditions.

Those rates do NOT make sense if you linearly extrapolate from the present. I don’t think the results in the paleoclimate indicate that linear responses should be expected.

respectfully
BJ

There is nothing in ANY of the data that leads me to believe that the short term is of any interest whatsoever in detecting climate change.

This is correct bjchip, which is why two decades of warming from 1980 to 2000 does not lead rational people to your fantasy land.

Take a look at the last million years temperature records BJ.

Something more powerful than human industialisation caused temperatures to drop from 1940 to 1980.

Most have given up because their posts are either blocked or edited in order to ridicule them.

I spent a day or two on RC once and was so utterly sickened at the disgusting prostitution of science to ad hominem attacks and one-sided debates I went looking for better sources and found them. There is now no good reason in my opinion to visit RC which was created as PR venture for the AGW cause and remains dedicated to that rather than to science.

Which is probably why Climate Audit and WattsUpWithThat have successively been voted “Best Science Weblogs”.

No, recent trends are not meaningless. They occur in a period in which CO2 forcing has been at unprecedented levels. The climate has failed to respond as predicted by climate models. Clearly natural factors and feedbacks are neither properly understood nor are they overwhelmed by the effects of increased atmospheric CO2.

Again… you are looking at a very short period of time. It is meaningless.

“The crowd you hang out with [RealClimate, Tamino, etc] block scientific opponents from responding”

I find this assertion interesting. Where is this blockage happening, in the refereed journals? What part of “bad science” are you so determined to accept? Certainly the folks who disagree do have their opportunity to post at RC.

I tend to watch GISS and HadCrut, not NOAA. Both those show that the temperature trend is going back up. Why the trend from one year to the next is of interest for a forcing that takes place over decades and centuries remains a bit of a mystery to me. I reckon that in a couple of years we’ll be able to look back at now and say “yup, it flattened out a bit there” or “no, that was a statistical outlier, just like 1998 was”. There is nothing in ANY of the data that leads me to believe that the short term is of any interest whatsoever in detecting climate change.

Swanson was a guest at RC, that is the article you’re referring to, and it mostly discusses natural decadal variability.

A flat decade would, if the internal variability of the systems caused such (it appears unlikely to me) let people stop measures to address AGW. That is a worry because the forcings are still in place. The scientists I know are 90-95% certain of the outcome.

BJ

Tell how do you measure “sea level change”.

Start with what is sea level measured with respect to.

Then factor in the well established fact that at any particular point on the earth where it is covered by water the actual level of the ocean varies by the second as waves move across it, on a minute by minute basis as the tides ebb and flow, on a monthly basis as the moon goes through its phases and on an annual basis as the earth moves through its elliptical path around the sun. Not forgetting the influence of the other planets. Each one of these influences except the latter have effects that can be measured in meters, not the fractions of a meter claimed for sea level rise.

Now there is a “mean sea level” but how do you establish what it is with any precision, say to within +/- 1 meter given what I have stated above.

And if you cannot establish the “mean sea level” to within one meter currently how on earth can you claim it has risen by 0.3 of a meter in whatever time frame is currently being claimed.

So tell how do you establish the current “mean sea level” , what is the reference frame is used and what is the tolerance of this figure ie +/- how many cms, meters, whatever and then i might begin to take your hysterics a bit more seriously.

As it is I live with the fact we inhabit a planet that is in a dynamic state of flux where things change continually, accept that without this occurring there would be no life in the first place and that there is very little we can do to alter this fact- even if we wanted to.

However El Nino brings warmer sea surface temperatures and the surface heats the air so the temperature gap may close a little next month:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/16/ncdc-june-2009-second-warmest-on-record-globally/

However even RealClimate ran a paper recently worrying that temperatures may not rise again for another decade.

Yes, the inimitable Dr Spencer.

He still knows more about the topic than some airhead actresses pushing a stupid tv ad campaign.

No, the crowd I hang out with allow debate from all points of view. The crowd you hang out with [RealClimate, Tamino, etc] block scientific opponents from responding, quote work they wish to criticise selectively while refusing to link to the full works and come from very narrow scientific fields whereas climate requires a huge range of expertise to understand.

“There is a remarkable disconnect between [Spencer's] blogs and his science.”
No, there isn’t. He publishes much of his science on his blogs. Moreover his principle satellite monitoring project co-workers share the same low opinion of AGW fanaticism.

“As for the increasing rate of sea level change, that is part of what is predicted”
Except that the rate of change is slowing not increasing as shown from the chart I linked.

I’ve seen the earthlights. The GISS chart you link tells us absolutely nothing about how it was calculated whereas there are many studies showing that the GISS temperature trends at individual locations are unsupported by raw local data until it has been “tortured into submission”, as someone recently put it ,via GISS “adjustments”.

My personal view is that surface-based measurements will never give a sufficiently accurate, unbiased and comprehensive coverage to validate or refute climate models unless run for a very long time and opened up completely to independent auditing. Automated satellite data is the only logical way to go. And the satellites are telling us that global warming is way below predicted levels, especially in the tropics which matter most and are supposed to be warming fastest.

BJ

The latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration:

NOAA: Global Ocean Surface Temperature Warmest on Record for June
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090717_juneglobalstats.html

First… you don’t have the minimum Sea Ice for this year yet. That gets taken in September. There are a lot of people watching it and despite last year being an el-nina and coinciding with an intense solar minimum, the ice extent hasn’t recovered from the two record setting years that preceded it. This year is going to have an el-nino, and the solar cycle appears to be ticking upward.

Second – The difference in the effective albedo of the planet when sunlight hits deep ocean instead of ice 24×7 for several months, is quite significant. It isn’t the only significant thing of course, but to dispose of the effects on the global climate by saying it doesn’t matter because it is at the pole, is nonsense. As for the sea-ice around Antarctica, that is not permanent and has moved in the past. I think your protest here loses something but the point is that I DID specify sea ice, not the ice on the continent.

I really find the “it isn’t happening” crowd to be among the most amazing of all.

Sea levels. Please consider the synthesis report, in particular on page 8 figure 1.
http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport

The point is that we are tracking the very top of the range of IPCC projections… and the period at issue is absurdly short.

To quote RealClimate on this…

The absurdity of this approach is see by picking an even more recent trend, say starting in June 2007, which gives 5.3+/-2.2 mm/yr! Secondly, this short-term trend (1.6 +/- 0.9 mm/yr) is not even robust across data sets – the French analysis shown above has a trend since the beginning of 2006 of 2.9 mm/year, very similar to the long-term trend. Third, the image Pielke links to shows the data without the inverted barometer correction – the brief marked peak in late 2005, which makes the visual trend (always a poor choice of statistical methodology) almost flat since then, disappears when this effect is accounted for. This means the 2005 peak was simply due to air pressure fluctuations and has nothing to do with climatic ocean volume changes.

As for the increasing rate of sea level change, that is part of what is predicted and the rate of increase is expected to increase as the process gains momentum. Since the equilibrium state for this CO2 level in the paleoclimate IS 25 meters higher than now, with the conditions I stated the only question is how fast we get there. Several positive feedback mechanisms have been identified. Sea Ice is only one of them.

Temperatures – Spencer has his opinions. He usually keeps them out of his science. I suggest you look at some of the whoppers he has been guilty of in the past before you rely on him to the exclusion of the Hadley Center and the GISS.

The various sources of the temperature record are of course, a matter of interest.

The “urban heat island” effects are of interest and MacIntyre has contributed something in trying to keep it clean. However, there are several reasons to believe that this is more “heat than light”

First here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/the-surface-temperature-record-and-the-urban-heat-island/

and more to the point – download this image
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0208/earthlights02_dmsp_big.jpg

Pretty picture and it also provides a really good idea where all the urban heat sources actually are.

Now examine the temperature data.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=06&sat=4&sst=1&type=anoms&mean_gen=0112&year1=2006&year2=2008&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg

Is there any sort of correlation between the locations of the fastest warming parts of the planet and the airport tarmac?

I think not.

That said I DO hope that MacIntyre gets enough traction with this to actually help get the stations set up so that he doesn’t have a complaint to make about it. I reckon that this is important, if only to make it clear to the doubtful that there is a real problem.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/cdrar/do_LTmapE.py

respectfully
BJ

Consider. If you take the average of the temperature change for both your thermometers on any given day, and measure the change in that average on the next day, what does that tell you about the system as a whole? THAT is a very robust measurement of temperature change providing that the thermometers are even reasonably accurate at measuring local temperature within the temperature range.

And what happens if you (for example) later discover that people stopped measuring the temperature at 9:00 am and 5:00 pm, and instead decided to measure it at mid-day and mid-night? Are your “averages” reasonable?

For example, a large change in sea surface temperture was noted post WWII. The reason was attributed to global warming, but there is now evidence that it was largely due to a difference where the WWII record was largely by the US navy who would measure the temperature in a different way from the British navy. Go figure.