Global warming/climate change discussion

[Robert]

It makes no difference in determining whether or not Emanuel was right about the effect of CO2.

The Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, found out that the climate is heavily regulated by one of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, whose mass represents four ten-thousands of our atmosphere--a tiny trace.

I think this would point away from the Asshenius statement of "heavily" regulated by just one gas. The difference in h2o and co2 is co2 stays transparent at the varying levels we are talking about. Water, condenses in the atmosphere as the percentage goes up, creating clouds, reflecting light and creating a self regulating affect.

I also think we have learned a lot since Asshenius made his initial observations and we would know a lot more now.

Did either Christy or Emanuel mention this?

No, but I have heard other reputable climatologist mention it. I suspect, if asked, Christy would speak about this. The reality is ANY gas in the atmosphere has an absorption rate of light. No light magically passes through gasses without interacting. Light even interacts with glass, just a very low absorption rate. The only thing that does not interact with light is a vacuum. Light is also affected by gravity. Light is just a form or radiation energy that travels through a vacuum. Any time a proton of light hits any matter, it will slow, thus changing from light to another waveform of energy. Most slower forms move towards the inferred spectrum which creates heat. A gas is just molecules spaced widely and light will often pass through without hitting an atom. When it does, it stays as light. When it hits something, in the air or on the surface of the planet, it turns to heat. I heavy atmosphere will slow the heat radiation. A light atmosphere, even if 100% co2, will allow for more heat radiation back into space. The heat has to go out without running into obstacles too. The more the obstacles, the slower it radiates back out, even in the lower waveforms.

This is why cloud cover affects the greenhouse effect much more than other factors. The high clouds, reflect the light and heat radiation back out through much less atmosphere. This is why, during the Jurassic and other high ambient temperature times, the earth did not have run away greenhouse, but had much more h2o in the atmosphere, which created a lot more rain, which created a lot more life, which used up a lot more co2. This is why Christy and other climatologists(and there are multiple) who do not see a crisis of climate. Watchful, but not in crisis mode. I think that is wise.

[ken_sylvania]

According to "Greenhouse gases and greenhouse effect," an article published by G. V. Chilingar et. al. in Environmental Geology, the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere should actually result in a net cooling effect.

[Bootstrap]

According to "Greenhouse gases and greenhouse effect," an article published by G. V. Chilingar et. al. in Environmental Geology, the increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere should actually result in a net cooling effect.

Yes, he does argue that. Here's a fairly complete list of articles in the peer reviewed literature that are skeptical of global warming as of 2011 (it needs updating now, of course):

https://www.skepticalscience.com/peerre ... .php?s=173

Science progresses through the peer-reviewed literature; unless an idea, theory, or interpretation is reported in a peer-reviewed journal, it is just someone’s unsubstantiated opinion. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal does not ensure that an author’s arguments will stand the test of time, but rather that they have been scrutinized by experts and judged to represent a contribution to science that others in the field can benefit from knowing about.

Climate skeptics give the impression that there is a substantial case against human-caused global warming. But is it true? One way to shed light on the question is to review the peer-reviewed literature, as Naomi Oreskes did in her classic article [Science 306, p. 1686, 2004; see http://sks.to/oreskes.] She searched papers written between 1993 and 2003 for the keywords “global climate change.” She turned up 928 papers, read each abstract, and judged that none “reject[ed] the consensus position” that humans are causing global warming.

Instead of starting with the literature, I began with a list of over 100 skeptics who have or give the impression they have scientific expertise. For example, Christopher Monckton, despite his lack of scientific credentials, gives talks in which he takes on the guise of a scientist. Anthony Watts, a former TV meteorologist, blogs about complicated scientific matters. George Will, in contrast, while acting as though he knows more than scientists, does not pretend to be one. I include Monckton and Watts, but not Will.

I searched the Web of Science (WoS), which covers more than 8,000 peer-reviewed journals, for each skeptic by name, being careful to include variations in the spelling of the first name. I counted only primary articles; no book reviews, review articles, comments, replies to previously published papers, speeches, presentations, conference summaries, etc. I searched for articles classified by the WoS as “Meteorology Atmospheric Sciences.”

I read the abstract and sometimes the conclusions of each article. If an article takes a negative or explicitly doubtful position on human-caused global warming, I included it. I did not include papers that propose some improvement in methodology but go no further.

Read the article for more detail and complete lists of skeptical papers written during this time. They do exist. But there aren't many, and the ones people cite are usually found on these lists.

I think scientists take these papers into account when they assess the consensus position. They also take the much larger number of papers that support global warming into account. And they go to great lengths to compare the findings of various papers, exploring different phenomena, when compiling overviews of the scientific literature.

[ken_sylvania]

Emanuel, like most scientists, thinks that the fingerprints on global warming are clear, and we can say that at least 50% of this is man-made. Christy disagrees, but did not say why.

I think I disagree with your take on this point. Christy says early in the debate that we don't have a thermometer that can accurately tell us how much warming is caused by greenhouse gases and how much is caused by natural forcings. Emanuel's response is that he thinks it is possible to tell what is the net effect of human forcings (cooling & heating combined), but he doesn't say it's because the fingerprints are clear. Emanuel says we can monitor and measure the natural forcings, such as solar intensity and volcanoes, and then attribute all the warming that we can't explain with these natural forcings to global warming.
Christy actually does say why he disagrees. He says that these models that we're using obviously aren't accurate, because they overshoot estimated warming by 2-3 times what actually happened. In other words, how can we trust the model's predictions of the effect of natural forcings. And the model's predictions of the effects of natural forcings is part of the equation scientists are using to measure actual effect of human forcings.

[JimFoxvog]

Light is also affected by gravity.

Yes, Einstein's General Relativity predicts that, and it has been confirmed by lens-like effects of black holes. But the earth's gravity is much too weak to have any measurable effect, so this is not relevant to a climate discussion.

[JimFoxvog]

They agree that in the next 100 years, warming will be somewhere between 2.5 degrees and 9 degrees Celsius - that's between 4.5 degrees and 16.2 degrees Fahrenheit. They agree that the low range of that is not too scary, but the high range is.

The high side would still just bring us in line with normal highs of the planet historically. How is this any worse than the other times the planet has warmed after ice ages?

The prediction is a change much faster than is believed to have happened in the distant past, making it much harder for migration and natural selection to compensate for it. Many species would likely go extinct, and large numbers of people would die. Human conflict would increase. Have you noticed how welcoming the US is toward migration from the south?

[Bootstrap]

Christy actually does say why he disagrees. He says that these models that we're using obviously aren't accurate, because they overshoot estimated warming by 2-3 times what actually happened. In other words, how can we trust the model's predictions of the effect of natural forcings. And the model's predictions of the effects of natural forcings is part of the equation scientists are using to measure actual effect of human forcings.

Emanuel responds by saying that Christy is right about this part: there is real uncertainty, the models can be off, but they can be off in both directions, not just the one. And Christy only mentions the one direction, Emanuel points out that they have underestimated the effects of global warming in some ways too, and suggests that Christy is overcomplicating it:

Well, I think it's relatively easy, and the fact Svante Arrhenius did it in 1897 without big supercomputers--my students do it after taking a couple of semesters with models they've built themselves. I don't think it's that difficult. But I would agree that internal random variability is there. And the climate would change even if all the forcing agents I talked about before were constant. We're confident of that. We're not terribly confident that we know this noise quantitatively. For example, it might be that if it weren't for carbon dioxide increasing that the climate of the earth would cool, would have cooled over the last 15 years. We don't know that that's not true. These fluctuations occur on top of the forcing. So it's a little bit like, you know, here in Alabama you can have a day at the end of April which is colder than a day at the beginning of April; and you wouldn't conclude from that, that summer isn't coming. Weather, superimposed on the seasonal cycle. I will say that climate models have been wrong in a lot of different regards. And there, John and I agree. Their predictions aren't particularly good. But it's not one-sided. For example, no climate model predicted the demise of summertime marking CIs[?] at the rate it's actually occurring. It's going much faster than the models--any model--predicted. And I'm in the field of hurricanes, and I actually made predictions back in the 1980s about how fast hurricanes would respond to climate change. In at least the Atlantic, they've been responding much faster than I can account for. No, I don't know why. Okay. So, these models aren't particularly good. But all the evidence points to a pretty compelling picture of risk here.

Perhaps we can take weather reports as an analogy. They are less accurate than climate models, because day to day weather is a chaotic system, and they often do get things wrong, but not always in the same direction, and they are good enough to be useful.

I really do think most scientists would agree with Emanuel on this, and I would have liked to hear Christy respond to this. And I would have liked an entire discussion on just this point, the fingerprints.

Now to be fair, when I went back and read the transcript, I noticed that Russ did not give Christy a chance to respond, here is his next question:

I want to come back to the economics point ...

[ken_sylvania]

I really do think most scientists would agree with Emanuel on this, and I would have liked to hear Christy respond to this. And I would have liked an entire discussion on just this point, the fingerprints.

That would have been interesting.

[PeterG]

The reality is ANY gas in the atmosphere has an absorption rate of light. No light magically passes through gasses without interacting. Light even interacts with glass, just a very low absorption rate. The only thing that does not interact with light is a vacuum. Light is also affected by gravity. Light is just a form or radiation energy that travels through a vacuum. Any time a proton of light hits any matter, it will slow, thus changing from light to another waveform of energy. Most slower forms move towards the inferred spectrum which creates heat. A gas is just molecules spaced widely and light will often pass through without hitting an atom. When it does, it stays as light. When it hits something, in the air or on the surface of the planet, it turns to heat. I heavy atmosphere will slow the heat radiation. A light atmosphere, even if 100% co2, will allow for more heat radiation back into space. The heat has to go out without running into obstacles too. The more the obstacles, the slower it radiates back out, even in the lower waveforms.

This is why cloud cover affects the greenhouse effect much more than other factors. The high clouds, reflect the light and heat radiation back out through much less atmosphere. This is why, during the Jurassic and other high ambient temperature times, the earth did not have run away greenhouse, but had much more h2o in the atmosphere, which created a lot more rain, which created a lot more life, which used up a lot more co2.

Okay, now I think I understand what you're saying—that water vapor offsets the warming effect of increased CO2. That seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

Did either Christy or Emanuel mention this?

No, but I have heard other reputable climatologist mention it.

Can you document this?

[Robert]

The prediction is a change much faster than is believed to have happened in the distant past, making it much harder for migration and natural selection to compensate for it.

2-10 degrees C in 100 years is not fast. This is in tract to what has happened before. This is in tract to a year to year variance we have now.

Many species would likely go extinct, and large numbers of people would die. Human conflict would increase. Have you noticed how welcoming the US is toward migration from the south?

This is a speculation, and not provable. It is also fear mongering and not relevant to the discussion just like my light affected by gravity statement. Migration from the south is about politics than climate.