Climate Change Denial, Anyone?

a reply to: Nathan-D

I just think you are being a little foolish to think that we do not have enough observations to conclude that the oceans dissolved CO2 is going up.

Whether or not you choose to believe it does not make it a questionable observation.

Just as there is no doubt the atmosphere's CO2 levels are rising, there is also no doubt that the oceans are dissolving more CO2 as a result.

a reply to: jrod

Funny thing that:

Global emissions of carbon dioxide stood at 32.1 billion tonnes in 2015, having remained essentially flat since 2013. The IEA preliminary data suggest that electricity generated by renewables played a critical role, having accounted for around 90% of new electricity generation in 2015; wind alone produced more than half of new electricity generation. In parallel, the global economy continued to grow by more than 3%, offering further evidence that the link between economic growth and emissions growth is weakening.

Global Atmopheric CO2:

www.esrl.noaa.gov...

In 2013, CO2 stood at approximately 395 ppm, currently it stands at 404.21, approximately 9 or 10 CO2 ppm increase.

Where is this increase coming from?

Tired of Control Freaks

a reply to: TiredofControlFreaks

It is coming from our carbon emissions. It takes a great deal of mental gymnastics to suggest the increase of CO2 is from something other than anthropogenic sources.

a reply to: jrod

It takes even more to suggest that CO2 rises are from anthropogenic sources while use of fossil fuels has remained flat since 2013.

Tired of Control Freaks

I just think you are being a little foolish to think that we do not have enough observations to conclude that the oceans dissolved CO2 is going up.

Well, how many observations do we have? The NOAA map posted before supposedly measures a variety of things using free-drifting Argo floats. Are there any time-series measurements by Argo showing PCO2(aq) concentrations?

I just think you are being a little foolish to think that we do not have enough observations to conclude that the oceans dissolved CO2 is going up.

Perhaps, although as mentioned before, even if PCO2(aq) is increasing it is not incompatible with the idea that a large portion of the increase could be natural. Humans have emitted about 2,000Gts since 1850 (according to the IPCC in AR5) and the increase in CO2 has been just over 900Gts. Hence more human CO2 must have been absorbed by sinks (primarily by the ocean) than what may have been emitted naturally. Say hypothetically the oceans have contributed 50% to the atmospheric CO2 increase due to the warming, then only about 450Gts would have been emitted by the oceans and being the main sink they would have absorbed more than what they have emitted, which would increase CO2(aq) in the oceans. I should point out though that I have no real interest in arguing that the increase in CO2 is natural and I am happy to accept for argument’s sake that the entire 120ppmv increase is man-made, as I have said many times. I think the essential question at issue is that of how much radiation enhancement the CO2 greenhouse is actually producing and if the increase in CO2 is the main cause of global warming.

a reply to: Nathan-D

I think the essential question at issue is that of how much radiation enhancement the CO2 greenhouse is actually producing

That is a very good question and the first part of the fundamental science, and has been the subject of extensive investigation since likely the 1950's---Air Force was interested in atmospheric properties as a basic science for all sorts of reasons.

That question has been definitively answered now in great detail---radiative transfer for most well-mixed greenhouse gases is essentially solved to the level necessary for macroscopic climate predictions.

and if the increase in CO2 is the main cause of global warming.

Summary estimates I saw attribute somewhere between 50-60% of anthropogenic influences (which include warming and cooling) to CO2, and it is the largest single contribution and the major greenhouse with a long persistence.

Orbital/solar influences are minimal in trend during the recent period.

originally posted by: TiredofControlFreaks
Global Atmopheric CO2:

www.esrl.noaa.gov...

In 2013, CO2 stood at approximately 395 ppm, currently it stands at 404.21, approximately 9 or 10 CO2 ppm increase.

Where is this increase coming from?

Tired of Control Freaks

Mining and burning of fossil fuels. What else is there?

Emissions have to go to zero in order to stabilize at the current level.

originally posted by: Nathan-D

Perhaps, although as mentioned before, even if PCO2(aq) is increasing it is not incompatible with the idea that a large portion of the increase could be natural.

OK, continue with that thought. If there is some 'natural' increase then this is added on to human increase. Not comforting at all.

Humans have emitted about 2,000Gts since 1850 (according to the IPCC in AR5) and the increase in CO2 has been just over 900Gts. Hence more human CO2 must have been absorbed by sinks (primarily by the ocean) than what may have been emitted naturally. Say hypothetically the oceans have contributed 50% to the atmospheric CO2 increase due to the warming, then only about 450Gts would have been emitted by the oceans and being the main sink they would have absorbed more than what they have emitted, which would increase CO2(aq) in the oceans.

What is all this circumlocution about? Obviously there is turnover of the specific molecules between ocean and atmosphere and not all of them have a recent fossil fuel origin, but so what?

There is more carbon in the atmosphere AND the oceans after humans discovered mining & burning. There is no other known or reasonably plausible source of this net carbon increase compatible with this sudden change at a human timescale.

The rapid ocean acidifying and increased greenhouse effect and global warming, today, come from humans.

a reply to: mbkennel

oh so we can't "save the planet" until 7 billion people either freeze or boil themselves and do without cooked food for a year.

Good luck with that

Tired of Control Freaks

so the first 6 months of 2016 were the hottest on record, and 2015 was the hottest year on record and The 10 hottest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998, and nine of the 10 have occurred since 2002.

CO2 levels are the highest they have been in 400,000 years

the only thing left to debate is what do we do about it ?

the politicians will screw it up, the markets are rigged by big oil interests

I did an energy audit on my house and it really helped. If everybody did something small, it could end up being something big

a reply to: syrinx high priest

That holds only if the you ignore the Medieval Warming Period and if you accept "adjusted" data bases

Things usually go up before they go down. It took 120 years for enough fossil fuels to be burned, so that CO2 raised the temperature by 1.5 degrees and CO2 to go up by 120 ppm, if you believe in the CAGW.

I think we have time


Tired of Control Freaks

That is a very good question and the first part of the fundamental science, and has been the subject of extensive investigation since likely the 1950's---Air Force was interested in atmospheric properties as a basic science for all sorts of reasons. That question has been definitively answered now in great detail---radiative transfer for most well-mixed greenhouse gases is essentially solved to the level necessary for macroscopic climate predictions.

Well, I personally have had trouble finding observational evidence of CO2’s atmospheric radiative forcing. There are very few studies, as Feldman et al (2015) notes ‘Despite widespread scientific discussion and modelling of the climate impacts of well-mixed greenhouse gases, there is little direct observational evidence of the radiative impact of increasing atmospheric CO2’. Someone on this forum mentioned a while ago that the observed radiative forcing of CO2 from Feldman et al (2015) estimates a forcing that is lower than what the IPCC predict. The IPCC assert that the amount of extra forcing produced by a given increase of atmospheric CO2 is determined by the equation: RF = 5.35loge(C/C0) W/m2, where RF stands for ‘Radiative Forcing’; C0 is the initial CO2 concentration; C is the final CO2 concentration, and W/m2 stands for ‘watts per square metre’. According to Feldman et al (2015) the observed RF from CO2 over a 10 year period (coinciding with an increase in CO2 of 22ppmv from about 368ppmv to 390ppmv) amounted to 0.2 W/m2. However the equation above estimates a RF of 0.31 W/m2. That increment of RF alone is 1.55 times the amount that has been observed. How is this disparity to be explained? Interestingly the study also pointed out that the 0.2 W/m2 from CO2 is only ‘approximately ten per cent of the trend in downwelling longwave radiation’.

What is all this circumlocution about? Obviously there is turnover of the specific molecules between ocean and atmosphere and not all of them have a recent fossil fuel origin, but so what?

I am not talking about the turnover time (otherwise known as residence time). What I am talking about is Henry’s law and I gave a thought-experiment on the previous page explaining how water can absorb almost all CO2 in the air that you artificially add while simultaneously releasing a large quantity of CO2 into the air due to a change in temperature. It is well-accepted that if the temperature of water increases, more CO2 will be released from the water into the atmosphere. By my understanding the oceans have increased in temperature and this will have inevitably released more CO2 into the atmosphere and contributed to the increase. How much would it have contributed? Those are complex calculations because the pressure, and temperature values are continually varying. According to calculations by Jaworowski et al (1997) ‘The IPCC estimated that the temperature of the surface waters increased between 1910 and 1988 by about 0.6°C. A similar increase was observed in the surface air temperature in this period. Increasing the average temperature of the surface of the oceanic waters (15°C) by 0.6°C, would decrease the solubility of CO2 in these waters (0.1970 g CO2 per 100 g) by about 2 percent. The CO2 flux from the ocean to the atmosphere should be increased by the same factor; that is, by about 1.9 GtC/year. This is similar to the observed average increase of atmospheric CO2 in the years 1958 to 1968, of 0.73ppmv/year, which corresponds to 1.6 GtC/year. The measured annual atmospheric CO2 increases were higher in the next two decades (2.5 GtC/year and 3.4 GtC/year), which indicates that changes in CO2 solubility in oceanic water were responsible only for a part of observed CO2 increases’.

Just so there is no misunderstanding, I’ll just lay out quickly what I agree with for argument’s sake:

* I accept that the atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased by 120ppmv

* I accept that most of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is caused by humans

* I accept that the average surface temperature has increased by about 0.8C

* I accept that CO2 has a radiative forcing effect and appreciably warms the atmosphere

Oh, and I should point that I got a lower CO2 increase than Jaworowski above.

a reply to: Nathan-D

Nathan-D

Can I ask why you accept that average surface temperature has increased by about 0.8 C?

Which temperature set do you accept and why?

We all thought it was wonderful when satellites began tracking temperatures and hoped it would resolve that known discrepancies and problems with the surface temperature set. Instead, what happened is that they found ways to adjust the satellite temperature set so that it matched the surface temperature set.

After the hockey stick fiasco and hide the decline - its easy to see that temperature sets are being "adjusted" to match climate change models instead of climate change models being based on the temperature sets.

Tired of Control Freaks

Can I ask why you accept that average surface temperature has increased by about 0.8 C?

Which temperature set do you accept and why?

We all thought it was wonderful when satellites began tracking temperatures and hoped it would resolve that known discrepancies and problems with the surface temperature set. Instead, what happened is that they found ways to adjust the satellite temperature set so that it matched the surface temperature set.

After the hockey stick fiasco and hide the decline - its easy to see that temperature sets are being "adjusted" to match climate change models instead of climate change models being based on the temperature sets.

Do keep in mind that I said ‘for argument’s sake’. The adjustments of satellite data is not something I’ve spent a great deal of time looking into and so I’ll have to reserve judgement, though due to the hazardous radiation-filled environment in which satellites must operate I imagine adjustments must be made from time to time if a satellite is malfunctioning and starts producing questionable results. Quoting from an article on the ‘Satellitegate’ scandal about the NOAA’s malfunctioning temperature-reading satellites:

“NOAA is now fighting a rearguard legal defence to hold onto some semblance of credibility with growing evidence of systemic global warming data flaws by government climatologists.” “(U.S. physicist Dr Charles R. Anderson) agrees there may now be thousands of temperatures in the range of 415-604 degrees Fahrenheit automatically fed into computer climate models and contaminating climate models with a substantial warming bias. This may have gone on for a far longer period than the five years originally identified.” “The satellite that first ignited the fury is NOAA-16. But as we have since learned there are now five key satellites that have become either degraded or seriously comprised.” “NASA's disgrace was affirmed in March 2010 when they finally conceded that their data was in worse shape than the much-maligned Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the UK's University of East Anglia.” “(Dr Anderson) advises it is fair to assume that NOAA were using this temperature anomaly to favourably hype a doom-saying agenda of ever-increasing temperatures that served the misinformation process of government propaganda.”

Also, you say that ‘temperature sets are being adjusted to match the climate models’. That may be the case, I wouldn’t know if that were true or not, but the satellite data that Roy Spencer uses (UAH) apparently shows a discrepancy between the predictions of climate models and the temperature:

a reply to: Nathan-D

So really - at the end of the day, with all the problems of land temperature data, satellite data, we are left with questionable climate proxies. We just don't know what the global temperature is.

Tired of Control Freaks

a reply to: TiredofControlFreaks

But we know globally that the temperature is going up, we know the CO2 levels are going up, we know industrialization and our addiction to burning fossil fuels is the root cause of the excess CO2....

....yet we still have people like you who choose ignorance over the less than comforting truth.

a reply to: jrod

hold the phone Jrod - we haven't even started questioning sea ice data yet.

Tired of Control Freaks

a reply to: TiredofControlFreaks

What most of us see here is you trying to cast doubt on what we are observing.

Man made climate is actually happening, the evidence is overwhelming.

If I did not know better, I would say you are a merchant of doubt. You have no science, no observations that contradicts AGW, so all you can do is attemp to cast doubt on what we are actually observing.

Lesser minds might fall for your tactics, but most of the good folks on ATS see right through your BS. You would have much better luck on other sites where the crowd is much more gullible.

originally posted by: TiredofControlFreaks
a reply to: mbkennel

oh so we can't "save the planet" until 7 billion people either freeze or boil themselves and do without cooked food for a year.

Good luck with that

That's why it's imperative to start to change the technology and the economy as early as possible, which was about 1993. And global economic incentives are the most efficient way to do so, as has been shown by the successful anti-acid rain policies since the late 1980's.