OT: Climate Change... interesting data correlation...

Same story - without all the annoying ads (also, more reputable site):

Interesting, however it wouldn't be the first time that Nature made a mistake.

I don't know for sure there are external influences on Earth's climate - CO2 is just a bit too simplistic as the sole cause - but I follow these stories with interest.

John

The "spikes" in the record are interglacials, and the timing is usually exp lained by the Milankovitch effect, which is tiny.

The three major positive feedbacks that drive the switch between ice ages a nd interglacials are CO2 level, water vapour level and ice cover across the northern hemisphere - ice sheets and snow reflect a lot more solar radiati on than the vegetation that replaces them duing an interglacial.

The process that leads to a switch between an ice age and an interglacial - or back the other way - is tolerably complicated, but it is now pretty muc h understood. Nobody serious seems to find it necessary to include orbital resonances with Mars in the explanation.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The 'letter' is a preliminary report. It's not clear what meaning it holds.

The gravity of Sol that holds Earth in orbit, is 'way bigger than Mars exerts, it's unlikely to affect distance-from-the-sun. There's no orbital locking observed (periods aren't small-integer ratios). The observed periodicity was not predicted by a calculation. There's talk of 'chaotic' behavior, which could be something minor (precession of orbital ellipticity). If Mars were effectively coupled, we can't ignore Venus (heavier, and nearer).

The original article says nothing to alter the greenhouse gas picture of current global warming, of course.

The chilling thing is that many oil industry CEOs like Tillerson are not climate-change deniers, but understand the science and believe it to be correct, and the threat real.

Then calmly chose to do nothing.

The only data correlation I saw in that article was the graph of CO2 and temperature... Where is the data connecting any of this to the orbit of Mars?

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Rick C

You posted that just to bait Slowman, didn't you.

Shame ;-)

He is helping mankind to rid once and for all that evil oil by pulling it out of the ground and selling it to people to burn up.

Well, "tiny" is relative. I would say 2 deg is pretty small. Considering that average global temperatures are stated to have changed only of the order of a couple of degrees or so over 1000s of years, I would be interested in knowing how the techniques used to *infer* temperature so long ago, over the whole world, are accurate to say, 0.05 deg. Measuring ice cores and tree rings is not my speciality, but I do know that designing a diode sensor with 1 deg. accuracy, is a bit of a toil.

From an engineering perspective, when I look at graph such as at :

I just see noise, with maybe a bit of longer term random drift. I am open to presentations of the theory as to how the temperature measurements can be say, 5 times better than 3 sigma error. The earth is a very, very, big place, so my line of thinking is that you would need 100s of samples, from

10,000s of *different* sites to get a meaningful statistical, accurate, yearly average of the *whole* earth. But again, this is not my area of expertise.

From a practical point of view, I don't see it matters whether the climate change that has forever been happening since the earth was created, has a man made component or not. What matters is that simple running out of fossil fuels is surely a good reason to reduce their use. They stink as well.

-- Kevin Aylward

The real crazies are the ones who believe in "abiogenesis", that oil doesn't form in the way that geologists understand it to, but actually forms through some hitherto unknown process deep in the mantle and bubbles up into the crust. Which implies to them that supplies are actually near-infinite.

Yep, it's actually a thing.

Well... usually complex things are formed from simpler things. Hydrocarbons are pretty simple. Its the hydrogen and carbon bit. Why HC would need complex "life" to create something, way, way simpler is indeed a mystery to me, especially since they are found in space meteorites. There also seems to be a quite a lot of it. A really lot.

Or for example:

"According to new Cassini data, Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has ?hundreds? times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the liquid fossil fuel deposits on Earth." I guess there must have been a lot of dinosaurs and trees on Titan.

I would postulate that HCs were there at the start of the formation of the earth, and life developed from that as source material. Its the simpler solution.

-- Kevin Aylward

But we are *not* running out of fossil fuels. We may run out of petroleum over the next 40, 50 or even 100 years, but there is enough coal in the ground to last for many centuries.

--

Rick C

Well, yeah, maybe, but can coal miners swim...?

-- Kevin Aylward

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Oxygen isotope ratios seem to be the measure of choice.

You only had to ask.

You didn't look any further than Mann's hockey stick, did you.

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Clearly not. Osygen isotope ratios average evaporation over the whole of th e ocean surface of the earth. Water that gets trapped records that planet-w ide average, and if you dig it out of ice-cores or marine sediment you can have a long historical record. Ice cores go back a million years. Sediments can take you back further.

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The current bout of climate change is happening quite a lot faster than any thing we can dig out of geological history.

The Paleocene-Eocene thermal Maximum happened 55.5 million years ago, proba bly due to a massive methane release, but it took a couple of thousand year s to warm up the planet. We are warming it some ten times faster.

It is definitely worth worying about.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Since it gave me yet one more opporunity to point out that Jim Thompson is pig ignorant, Jim may just have been lifted by his own petard.

I don't know all that much about anthropogenic global warming, but around here I'm an expert.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Oxygen isotope ratios seem to be the measure of choice.

You only had to ask.

You didn't look any further than Mann's hockey stick, did you.

And your point is?

But that has no support/explanation on that link as to why such techniques can give 0.5 deg and resolution accuracy over the whole earth. I need to see some sort of analyses that explains how "...The ratio is linked to water temperature of ancient oceans..." actually results in hard accuracy sufficient to give give the required resolution and accuracy of temperature measurement. "links" just don't cut it. I also need to see the analysis of how many locations are required for the size of the earth to ensure the real average temperature of the *whole* earth is accurate, to 0.55degs

I need specific details of "...isotope ratios average evaporation over the whole of the ocean surface of the earth..." as to how this is true, to 0.05 deg accuracy and resolution.

Not for me it don't. I will be dead, and I don't have any children.

-- Kevin Aylward

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One. Atmospheric water vapour levels average out with a roughly three week time constant, so what falls as rain is representative of the earth a whole within a fairly short time scale.

As for validation, it's one of those thermodynamic things that falls out of Universal Gas Theory which I was taught as an undergraduate, and you seem to have missed.

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So get a university degree that includes second year thermodynamics.

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Nor neices and nephews either? I've got eight of them.

You seem to have missed the work on extreme weather events. The roughly one degree Celcius of warming we've had has raised the water vapiour pressure over the oceans by roughly 6%.

That means that engine driving weather is 6% more powerful, which doesn't s ound like much, but translates into more frequent - and more extreme - extr eme weather events.

The cyclone that hit the Philipines last year was the most intense on recor d. The UK had some remarkable floods not too much later.

And the fact that the Barents and Kara Seas (north of Finland) are more fre quently ice-free than they used to be translates into more frequent and spe ctacular winter snow-falls in the UK (not mention Northern France and the N etherlands).

Petoukhov, V., and V. A. Semenov, 2010: A link between reduced Barents? ??Kara Sea ice and cold winter extremes over northern continents. J. Ge ophys. Res., 115, D21111, doi:

Their paper came out in November 2010, and there was a lot more snow around that December than usual - it was decidedly prophetic.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I think we were all well aware of that, yet you keep carrying on like the world's greatest expert.

You are not answering the question. I guess you don't know.

I did graduate thermodynamics in MS physics, I passed with an A. I understand thermodynamics. I don't understand how temperatures occurring

1000 years ago can be measured to 0.05 deg accuracy. I am an engineer. I know about measurement errors. I know how difficult it is to accurately measure the temperature of a xtal in an oven compensated oscillator. Hint: every single oscillator is individually compensated by using several temperature sweeps. Its a toil.

As I have already requested, give me references to DETAILED MATHEMATICAL and PHYSICAL ERROR analyses that explains EXACTLY how INDIRECT measurements of temperature 1000 years ago are accurate to 0.05 degs. I am not interested in general overview WAFFLE descriptions from news outlets. If you don't know, you should state so, rather than given more of the same, and, apparently, attempt to insult by alleging a deficit to my educational background.

For example. Pretty much all Ph.D physicists, e.g. Lawrence Krauss, when explaining QM, invariably waffle on in pop accounts that "electrons are in two positions at one". I actually understand the principles of the core mathematics and foundations of QM and can therefore state that this view is wrong. It contradicts QM.

Of course, non of these QM experts actually use these daft concepts in their professional work, they just churn the mathematically handle and produce the results.

The point here, is that providing pop and general description accounts of principles and theory for the layman says nothing about the exact detailed verification of the accuracy of the claims. Pop accounts are invariable wrong in at least some details. Are you aware of just how much effort went on to verify the Higgs boson to statistical significance?

Either provide references to the error analysis of the temperature measurements, or state that you don't know, and that you just accept that the measurements are accurate to 0.05 deg on faith.

-- Kevin Aylward

Don't be silly.

It is always wise to be aware of other people's limitations /and/ your *own* limitations.

Too many people on this group have mastered the former but not the latter.