Is Global warming real?

[gogo]

I don't mow

Mowing can be enviromentally friendly.

[jag]

Al Gore must have read this Endless Sphere thread and answers our questions:

Methane accounts for about 27 percent of the man-made warming so far, largely because of how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols.

Halocarbons have caused 8 percent of the warming.

Black carbon (sooty emissions from burning wood, dung, and diesel) 12 percent

Carbon monoxide and volatile organics, 7 percent.

Carbon dioxide, 43 percent.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/220552
http://ourchoicethebook.com/

So indeed, global warming is more complex than just CO2

[RTLSHIP]

Scientists have only been accurately recording temperatures for maybe half a century. So the evidence of global warning
is incomplete but nonetheless persuasive.
Lets not rely on Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh to decide whether global warming is real or scam.
I say warming has got to be real at least temporary. It may be permanent.

[liveforphysics]

Al Gore must have read this Endless Sphere thread and answers our questions:

Methane accounts for about 27 percent of the man-made warming so far, largely because of how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols.

Halocarbons have caused 8 percent of the warming.

Black carbon (sooty emissions from burning wood, dung, and diesel) 12 percent

Carbon monoxide and volatile organics, 7 percent.

Carbon dioxide, 43 percent.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/220552
http://ourchoicethebook.com/

So indeed, global warming is more complex than just CO2

Yep. More than CO2 for sure. Something like >95% directly linked to water vapor. It's in the remaining 5% that we look at when we talk about all the combined greenhouse gasses. Then a tiny fraction of that 5% that we look at as far as human influence, and then write all our percentage statistics and things (like the above quoted data) from that tiny fraction of the >5%.

Interesting report just released by US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a day ago. If you get science rag, it's in there.
Here a very brief summary:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthn ... tists.html

[julesa]

Yes, water vapor in the atmosphere is a major factor. The thing is, warmer temperatures put more water vapor into the atmosphere. That's why a relatively small input of new greenhouse gases can result in a larger overall effect. It's feedback.

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

[boostjuice]

[spinningmagnets]

I'm having a difficult time finding data on how much CO2 and CO has been expelled (roughly) from the major volcanoes. Off the top of my head I can name Mt St Helens, Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Mt Vesuvius...and apparently they weren't even the biggest ones in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vo ... death_toll

If their carbon footprint has not had a major effect, it would seem to me that there would be some rough estimates floating around somewhere...

[boostjuice]

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ice_cores

[julesa]

I'm having a difficult time finding data on how much CO2 and CO has been expelled (roughly) from the major volcanoes. Off the top of my head I can name Mt St Helens, Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Mt Vesuvius...and apparently they weren't even the biggest ones in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vo ... death_toll

If their carbon footprint has not had a major effect, it would seem to me that there would be some rough estimates floating around somewhere...

http://www.springerlink.com/content/631t022372116213/

Continuing interest in the effects of carbon dioxide on climate has been promoted by the exponentially increasing anthropogenic production of CO2. Volcanoes are also a major source of carbon dioxide, but their average input to the atmosphere is generally considered minor relative to anthropogenic input. This study examines eruption chronologies to determine a new estimate of the volcanic CO2 input and to test if temporal fluctuations may be resolved. Employing representative average values of 2.7 g cm−3 as density of erupted material, 0.2 wt percent CO2 in the original melt, 60 percent degassing during eruption, and an average volume of 0.1 km3 for each of the eruptions in the recently published eruption chronology of Hirschboeck (1980), a volcanic input of about 1.5 · 1011 moles CO2 yr−1 was determined for the period 1800–1969. The period 1800–1899 had a somewhat lower input than 1900–1969, which could well be related more to completeness of observational data than to a real increase in volcanic CO2. This input is well below man's current CO2 production of 4–5 · 1014 moles CO2 yr−1.

[Lessss]

Global warming ~> NO Solar Warming ~~>YES
Will high CO2 levels make Solar Warming worse AND MAKE IT'S EFFECTS LAST MUCH MUCH LONGER THAN NATURAL~~~>HELL YES.
Our only hope to mitigate that is Greenland icecap melt will trigger a shut down of the NA ocean heat pump and trigger a northern hemisphere mini ice age.

The Earths orbit is not mechanically precise. It varies.
http://www.nowykurier.com/toys/gravity/gravity.html
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/a ... /what.html

[boostjuice]

..........
Sunspot cycles and other changes

Solar radiation also changes over decades and centuries, time scales that are comparable to the human influence on climate.

The mechanisms that have perhaps received the most popular attention are solar cycles. These refer to physical solar changes which cause increases or decreases in the amount of solar energy emitted from the sun itself.

The 11-year sunspot cycle is perhaps the most widely known form of this type of solar variability.

Understanding the sunspot cycle is still an area of active research. However it is reasonably clear that a regular cycle of magnetic activity is associated with the appearance of darker regions (known an sunspots) and brighter regions (known as faculae) on the surface of the sun.

The sunspot cycle is literally a cycle in the number of sunspots, which causes solar radiation to slightly rise and fall over an 11 year period.

The existence of sunspots was known to very early astronomers, with the earliest regular observations taken in China around 2000 years ago. Modern science has been observing and recording sunspots for around 400 years, since the invention of the modern telescope. These days, satellite measurements provide very accurate observations of the sunspot cycle and associated changes in solar radiation.

Sunspot cycles can have a slight impact on global mean temperature and might even have a subtle affect on weather patterns. However to date, scientists have not found that sunspots have a regular and profound influence on the climate system.

Direct solar radiation varies on longer timescales as well. Over decades to centuries other, less well understood changes in solar magnetic activity occur. A significant decline in sunspot activity during the 17th century is today known as the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced solar radiation.

The Maunder Minimum appears to have contributed to cooler global temperatures and a series of crop failures in parts of the northern mid latitudes.

What about the last 100 years or more?

There are a range of methods for estimating past solar radiation changes that represents an entire field of research.

Suffice to say, reconstructions of changes in solar radiation, over the 20th century in particular, are highly important to climate scientists seeking to understand why our climate has warmed.

The best way to understand how 20th century solar changes affected the climate system is with global climate models.

Changes in solar radiation in a climate model are known as solar forcing. Climate models capture the effects of solar forcing well. The most basic proof of this is that climate models reproduce the diurnal cycle (the difference between night and day) with great accuracy.

Climate models also represent the seasonal cycle in land and ocean temperatures; as well as the seasonal cycle in patterns of rainfall, pressure, winds, ocean currents and sea-ice, with impressive fidelity.

Models can also reproduce climates from the geological past, based on palaeo evidence of solar energy changes.

Using the same physics, climate models are able to include observed changes in direct solar forcing over the 20th century. To do this, they use a number of different estimates of solar forcing from different research teams.

All of the modelling conducted over the last 20 years has shown that solar changes do have a discernible affect on the climate of the last 100 years, but that those changes are typically very small compared to those associated with increasing greenhouse gases

Finding the fingerprints

Climate scientists like to look at so-called fingerprints of climate change when examining their models to understand drivers of climate change.

They run the models with a range of different forcing experiments and examine the patterns of change associated with one or more climate influences. Then, they match those fingerprints against the climate observations.

Some of the patterns of change associated with solar forcing are similar to greenhouse gas driven changes, such as more rapid warming of the Arctic. However when the pace of change is also factored in, solar changes have been far too small to explain the dramatic warming of the Arctic that has been observed.

Other patterns of change provide a means of distinguishing between solar warming and greenhouse warming.

Perhaps the best pattern to investigate the role of the sun on the climate system is the temperature of the upper atmosphere known as the stratosphere.

If solar energy increases, so too should the temperature of the stratosphere.

Conversely, increasing greenhouse gases should cool the stratosphere, as they change the way long-wave radiation is absorbed and re-emitted through the atmosphere.

Years of study have now confirmed that the upper atmosphere is cooling, and that this cooling is consistent with both global increases in carbon dioxide and decreases in stratospheric ozone in the southern hemisphere.

On average, solar forcing has been in relative decline in recent decades, and global temperatures have continued to warm.
.........

http://theconversation.edu.au/theres-always-the-sun-solar-forcing-and-climate-change-1878

[Kingfish]

The NY Times today - 'One disaster after another': Most tie extreme weather to global warming, poll finds

Scientists may hesitate to link some of the weather extremes of recent years to global warming — but the public, it seems, is already there.

A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.

This article was republished on MSNBC and has a link to a video that has the tagline: "In the lower 48 states, only Washington State had below normal weather."

Figures.

Forecast for today: Rain showers as oppose to just plain o' Showers. And tomorrow, we'll have Partly cloudy with PM showers.
~ KF

[iamsofunny]

The earth has been cooling since its inception. The molten core of the earth has been cooling for billions of years. In about 1 billion years the earth will be completely frozen and nobody will live here. You are welcome to stay, pay your carbon taxes and continue to feel the increasingly cold temperatures until your descendants are so cold that life becomes unbearable and food is so scarce that achieving a net energy gain from foraging becomes impossible. Or you could study science and hope your children can figure out a way to cast off into space to find new planets that are in a better state.

[RTLSHIP]

Interesting comments from iamsofunny. 30,000 years ago the summertime temp in France/Spain was about 30 to 40 below. That was the daytime high according to a science book dealing with Paleolithic Cave Art.

[Joseph C.]

Interesting comments from iamsofunny. 30,000 years ago the summertime temp in France/Spain was about 30 to 40 below. That was the daytime high according to a science book dealing with Paleolithic Cave Art.

That, and one billion years from now the Earth will be toasted out of it by the expanding Sun.

I don't think the cause matters at this stage. The Earth is well on its way to heating up and starting a new Ice Age cycle. I did see a video on micro-algae lamps that would absorb the CO2 on a large enough scale but it is probably too little too late.

Besides I think all global warming has done is put off the next Ice Age for a little bit. It was always going to come anyway.

It would be interesting to see if our species survives it or not. The last time the human population was reduced to pockets of handfuls of people and we just about survived. It is also intriguing to note that the Neanderthals were wiped out in the last Ice Age, 28,000 years ago (it may have had something to do with the energy needed for their larger brains).

We are much more technological advanced now. However, on the flip side our population is perhaps a million or more times larger.

[Kingfish]

Stay or go? Communities are eyeing a retreat from sea

Whether we agree or disagree on GW, the West is slowly eroding – an undeniable fact. Of course, it could be caused by subduction… but for some reason I think that process is even slower than GW.

Above sea level last I checked, KF

[RTLSHIP]

Stay or go? Communities are eyeing a retreat from sea

Whether we agree or disagree on GW, the West is slowly eroding – an undeniable fact. Of course, it could be caused by subduction… but for some reason I think that process is even slower than GW.

Above sea level last I checked, KF

In S Florida, some of the beaches ( maybe 10,000 yrs ago) used to be about 1 inland from the present beach. So if there is erosion we would have a ways to get back to the old shoreline. Of course, it could be different out there in the Pacific.
Where was your ancient beachfront?

[Kingfish]

Technically, the US Western seaboard jumps around a bit due to tectonic activity. During the slow process of subduction, the shoreline shortens as the ground behind it bunches up and bows upward. Then when the zone breaks (as it did in the year 1700), the seabed leaps beneath the continent, the bowed-up land springs back down, and the shoreline becomes wider and slightly higher. Rinse and repeat. There’s a good example of a submerged and drowned forest left by the 1700-earthquake beneath Willapa Bay in Washington, just north of where the Columbia River exits to the sea. Here we find peat up to a foot or two thick, and stumps around the shoreline, submerged and decomposing. Some 400 years ago this “bay” was a thick rain forest, but the ground subsided after the earthquake and the sea crashed in to reclaim it; we can only imagine the height of the tsunami that hit this region.

However, at the same time there is erosion from rising tides over decades and centuries due to the continuous melting of glaciers. About 25,000 years ago Seattle was buried under nearly a mile of ice; by 12,000 most of the lowland, plateau-scrubbing glaciers had retreated, leaving hanging valleys and alpine glaciers exposed. All this runoff went into the ocean. The tides slowly eat away at the coast, stealing away beach sand and cutting into the bluffs. The most dramatic examples of erosion activity are at the bluffs of Malibu, or perhaps the sea stacks between Oregon and Washington coasts; these pillars of stone and rock had to come from some place; once upon a time it was shoreline.

In another example, San Francisco Bay didn’t exist 20,000 years ago; the shoreline was 400 feet lower and 26 miles away, and the Farallon Islands were just a ridge. However, by 10,000 years ago the sea was actively knocking at the door of the Golden Gate, and by 6,000 years ago the inland part of the Bay had been flooded, however the Suisun Bay and the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta had yet to form. The water though is still rising, and the aging levies in the Delta are continually at risk; the State-Federal agency managing these levies is on the verge of financial insolvency trying to keep up.


Map: Land Subsidence in the Delta, ca.1995

Where I live, Redmond, Washington – the heart of old downtown is only 43 feet above sea level, though it’s a good 30-60 minute drive (depending on the time of day) to the nearest sea shore. They say the sea has risen 7 inches in the last century. In Washington, the Puget Sound is still bounding upward from the loss of the glaciers, and the earthquakes – though small, are nearly daily. We’re bouncing up, but not enough to keep pace with the encroaching ocean. People that live in the lowlands of Tacoma, Everett, Marysville, and even Snohomish – these people have to be concerned because seasonal flooding along the rivers is worse each year. Where’s the water going to go? I used to make jokes that I had a “lake view” when the Snoqualmie Valley would flood, but it’s serious business for those living down there in the plain.

Well, at least my webbed feet from living here in the rain country will come in handy.
~KF

[RTLSHIP]

where I live it's 6 to 10 feet above sea level. That's the way S Fla is. It's relatively new. Inland there are sea shells to be found in ordinary sand. Sea shells use to be mixed into asphalt road.

[rojitor]

Global warming is real!

[Kingfish]

Global warming is real!

No telling what the next decade will bring!

A silver lining in every cloud; gotta love it!
~KF

[317537]

The nitrogen cycle concerns me.

As the planet warms, more bacteria is taking its fair share of N2 turning into nitrates, we cut down trees so it breaks the cycle. Ammonium leves rises in the soil and starts to poison everying. N2 wich absorbs more heat and is a better thermal conductor than Co2, N2 is a great coolant and also is make up 70% of our air and is the buffer green house gas. If its not as much ppm then its not absorbing heat and infrared hits the oceans and land mass more. N2 absorbs heat from out lands and oceans as it expands upon heat rapidly, it rises fast into the atmosphere taking evapourated water with it, as it reaches the high regions of our atmosphere it unexpands and and the evapouration condenses and it rains and storms, turing N2 into usable nitroget for the pants to florish, but we are killing the plants and shade so then the bacteria dies.

It is a very compelx set of events I dont fully understand. On one hand N2 works wonders with the weather and aids to cool the surface of the planet, but on the other, if plants and trees are not converting heat and light energy into sugars, its can be liike a sauna of hot air burning evey thing over a certain temperatur.

This is one theory. I honestly dont think we should be paying carbon tax, but they cant tax us for making nitrogen can they? But we can blame industries for killing rain forests because they cant grow hemp or something similar that converts light and heat into sugars really well for biomass.

Just because the air is cold doesnt mean there isnt plenty of Infrared about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i7imehO36I. Explains how even in colder climates plants convert heat energy into sugars.

[Drunkskunk]

Global warming is real!

You have convinced me, Sir. Global Warming is real, and I support it!









\

[TylerDurden]

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
By RICHARD A. MULLER
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Published: July 28, 2012
New York Times

Berkeley, Calif.

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural.

Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist, Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions.

The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.

How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does. Adding methane, a second greenhouse gas, to our analysis doesn’t change the results. Moreover, our analysis does not depend on large, complex global climate models, the huge computer programs that are notorious for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters. Our result is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.

The careful analysis by our team is laid out in five scientific papers now online at BerkeleyEarth.org. That site also shows our chart of temperature from 1753 to the present, with its clear fingerprint of volcanoes and carbon dioxide, but containing no component that matches solar activity. Four of our papers have undergone extensive scrutiny by the scientific community, and the newest, a paper with the analysis of the human component, is now posted, along with the data and computer programs used. Such transparency is the heart of the scientific method; if you find our conclusions implausible, tell us of any errors of data or analysis.

What about the future? As carbon dioxide emissions increase, the temperature should continue to rise. I expect the rate of warming to proceed at a steady pace, about one and a half degrees over land in the next 50 years, less if the oceans are included. But if China continues its rapid economic growth (it has averaged 10 percent per year over the last 20 years) and its vast use of coal (it typically adds one new gigawatt per month), then that same warming could take place in less than 20 years.

Science is that narrow realm of knowledge that, in principle, is universally accepted. I embarked on this analysis to answer questions that, to my mind, had not been answered. I hope that the Berkeley Earth analysis will help settle the scientific debate regarding global warming and its human causes. Then comes the difficult part: agreeing across the political and diplomatic spectrum about what can and should be done.


Richard A. Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, is the author, most recently, of “Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.”

[MitchJi]

Hi Tyler,

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
By RICHARD A. MULLER
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Published: July 28, 2012
New York Times

That study might be biased it was funded by the Koch brothers:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/28/602151/bombshell-koch-funded-study-finds-global-warming-is-real-on-the-high-end-and-essentially-all-due-to-carbon-pollution/

Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’, ‘On The High End’ And ‘Essentially All’ Due To Carbon Pollution

By Joe Romm on Jul 28, 2012 at 5:31 pm


“The decadal land-surface average temperature using a 10-year moving average of surface temperatures over land. Anomalies are relative to the Jan 1950 – December 1979 mean. The grey band indicates 95% statistical and spatial uncertainty interval.” A Koch-funded reanalysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports finds that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”