Re: OT: Global warming strikes again.

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We get to look at a lot of stars. Relatively few of them are variable, and none of the variable stars look much like the sun. I don't think that there's much chance that the research on the relationship between solar variablility and climate is going to come up with anything dramatic because we've got no historical or geological record that suggest that anything interesting ever happened in that area.

As you say, there can always be unknown unknowns, but I did say unlikely, not impossible.

This is a rational calculation of the chances, not a declaraion on faith or morals.

I hadn't heard that Hansen had been beatified, let alone promoted to Olympus - in this case you seem to be doing the pontificating, though I don't think that even the pope can declare a living mortal divine.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

He manages a weather forecasting service. It certainly looks as if he didn't know about the Argo buoy project, any more than he seems to have known about the recent work on solar variability vis a vis climate. I somehow doubt that he publishes much in the peer-reviewed journals where professional climatologists publish their way to professorships.

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I've known quite a few managers with a successful technical background. I've even been one myself - at a pretty low level. They don't get a lot of time to devote to keep up with the lierature.

Weather forecaster. Climatologists interested in global warming are concerned about longer term fluctuations.

Chemistry Today, the non-technical journal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute - of which I remain a member for sentimental reasons - got hijacked by the Australian branch of the denialist propaganda machine who had flown Anthony Watts out to Australia, and - as a consequence - printed three-quarters of a page of his demented opinions.

And I haven't visited his site only once - Google points me at it from time to time, but I don't spend much time looking at the - ostensibly relevant - absurdities I find there.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Speaking of Hansen,

"Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Nazarenko, a staff associate there, found soot is twice as potent as carbon dioxide in changing global surface air temperatures in the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere."

So, why are the alarmists so upset about CO2 and so silent on particulates? The answer is obvious.

John

There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Hope This Helps! Rich

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Here you go again. We can model weather - for about ten days - but after that the model becomes excessively sensitive to the starting condition, like many other chaotic systems. We have the same kind of problem with solar system, but that model only breaks down after 100 million years.

Climate may be chaotic - as you have claimed but have yet to prove - but the models we've go seem to suggest that climate can be modelled further ahead than can the weather.

In fact, the tests for climate models are called "seasons" rather than weather, but you do like to keep your concepts over-simplified.

We've got at least a century of "climate" to play with. One way of testing models is to give them a chunk of climate that we know about and see how well the subsequnet evolution of the model matches the actual climate observations the followed on from that chunk. Why you are hung up on weather escapes me.

But you can't actually find these predictions that you think were made.

Pity about that. Your development projects work perfectly from the first prototype and never have to be refined?

Grown-ups do know about this particular problem. It was talked about - in detail - in the undergraduate lectures I got on curve-fitting, and the non-linear multiparameter least squares curve fitting program I wrote to analyses the experimental data for my Ph.D. work consequently included a routine which worked out how well each best fit parameter was defined by the data (while allowing the other parameters to vary).

The people who wrote and tuned the hurrican prediction model aren't going to be any less sophisticated. Why not wait and see how well their system works in practice, rather than condemning on the basis of your inadequate appreciation of what is - in fact - practicable.

And so are the orbits of the planets. Weather is predictable for about ten days, planetary orbits for about 100 million years. Climate has cycled tolerably regularly for the past million years, and may well lie somewhere in between.

Sure, but show us the decade-old prediction. My guess is that it was conditional on more global warming having built up than we have seen yet.

And - as usual - you have snipped my comment about six feet of snow not being incompatible with drought, and not marked the snip. Global warming is raising the partial pressure of water vapour in the air over the oceans, which translates into more snow when that air crosses the coast. The drought predictions are all about getting on-shore winds less often.

Your six feet of snow isn't actually incompatible with a reduced total rainfall, but you can see six feet of snow, and digging out the rainfall records would take work, and might not give you the answer you want.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

CO2's residence time in the atmosphere seems to be about 800 years. CO2 levels are high, rising, and certain to rise progressively faster if we don't do something about it. Particulates are short-lived, and advanced industrial countries have been progressiely emitting less of them for some decades now. India and China are already starting to reduce their emissions. The answer is indeed obvious, but I'd guess that it isn't the answer that you were thinking of.

The particular problem of soot in the Arctic is that clean snow has a very high aldedo - around 95% - and consequently absorbs only 5% of the heat from the incoming heat from the sun. Soot has the lowest albedo around - close to zero - and absorbs twenty times as much heat.

Once the Arctic ice and snow stops being a year-round phenomena, the soot won't have anything like as big an effect.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

We don't prototype. We design the rev A production unit, formally release all the documentation, and let Manufacturing build us a couple for hardware/firmware testing. We can usually sell rev A.

Curve fitting is easy. Did they talk about extrapolation of chaotic systems?

Their models only seem to work in retrospect, after being tuned to match past seasons. You can't very well curve fit a chaotic system and have the fit be useful much into the future.

We could cut glacier ice melts in half if we controlled particulates. And that is subject to experimental test.

John

SNIP

March 2000:

/quote

The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east. It is the continuation of a trend that has been increasingly visible in the past 15 years: in the south of England, for instance, from 1970 to 1995 snow and sleet fell for an average of 3.7 days, while from 1988 to 1995 the average was 0.7 days. London's last substantial snowfall was in February 1991.

/end quote

/quote

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event"

/end quote

"A few years" ? Funnily enough the last 3 years Southern England has had more snow than most years since the 1970's.

Current satellite photo here:

SNIP

So basically, the AGW warmingist are really, really good at forecasting yesterdays lottery numbers?

How hard can that be?

Heck, they can tweak a couple of model parameters to take care of that little embarassment. No problem.

John

I've sometimes been lucky too. Cambridge Instruments had a policy of selling their Rev.A production prototypes, but the service engineers didn't much like maintaining them, and tended to swap in a few Rev.B boards to make their life easier.

Curve fitting is adjusting the parameters to get the best available fit to the data. As long as you are modelling your chaotic system within the period while the butterfly's wing-flaps haven't yet been amplified into a full scale excursion, curve-fitting techniques are a perfectly practical way of tuning your model.

The last model might have worked in retrospect - it isn't clear that it was sophisticated enough to have benefit from being tuned on past data. Perhaps you could identify exactly which hurricane prediction model you think you are talking about?

On the contrary Newton did exactly that when he constructed his model of the solar system. Chaotic systems eventually become unpredictable, but it takes a while before the sensitivity to the initial conditions builds up to a point where the uncertainly builds up to approach the dimensions of the system.

Weather is predictable over periods up to ten days, planetary position for periods of up to 100 million years and our climate - if it is chaotic, which you still haven't established - looks as if it should be predictable for a million years or so.

You do have this enthusiasm for invoking chaos as if it were a magic word that - if repeated often enough - will make anthropogenic global warming go away.

The only thing that your enthusiasm for this mantra actually establishes is that you don't know much about building, tuning or testing mathematical models.

Go for it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That's the way John sees it. He doesn't know all that much about the subject, and has yet to realise that chaotic systmes can be very predictable for a long - if finite - time. The planetary orbits in the solar system are chaotic, but you have to want to extrapolate ahead for about 100 million years before your predictions start to get uncertain.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The chimp may work for the National Center for Public Policy research, it looks as if he's paid by Exxon-Mobil or one one of their fossil- carbon-extracting friends.

I know you like recycling denialist propaganda, but the chimp is a little simple-minded, even for you.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

What do chimps demand, per hour, nowadays?

If the climatologists are wrong 75% of the time, the chimp wins.

John

Certainly not. Try again.

Water is essentially black in the thermal IR.

John

I have trouble believing that, for two reasons: First, CO2 is chemically reactive and eminently soluble. Second, the spectra of the concentration variations seem to contain too much energy at much shorter periods than 800 years. The yearly variations are evident even in the south pole record.

Where did you get that 800 year figure?

Furthermore, I note that the long-term slope of the concentration curve is much steeper in the Mauna Loa record that it is in, e.g., Germany, pointing to possible forcing by something in the Pacific.

Contrary to the global temperature case, there appears to be plenty of apparently objective data available on the net.

Jeroen Belleman

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How would I know? I'm not in the business of misleading the public with deceptive advertising.

If the climatologists actually are wrong. The only "example" of bad prediction that you have so far produced is an item planted by the National Center for Public Policy which is - like the Heartland Institute - one of the front organisations that exist to spend right- wing money on deceiving the public about the value of scientific evidence.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Other than preaching warmingism like some kind of fanatic.

Cheers!~ Rich

The yearly variation is due to vegetation growth in the northern hemisphere summer, and its decline in the norther hemisphere winter - more of the Earth's land surface - and thus more of the vegetation - is concentrated in the northern hemisphere.

Ice core data. In the ice core data CO2 changes lag temperature changes - glaciation and deglaciation as we cycle between ice ages and inter-glacials - by about 800 years.

CO2 does dissolve rapidly in the surface of the ocean, but the deep ocean water turns over a lot more slowly.

This talks about measurements taken at Westerland, Germany - a coastal station on the island of Sylt in the norht sea. The two measurments given on that web-page - 329 ppm in 1973 and 364 in 1997 seem to be the same as those from Mauna Loa. Apparetnly the south pole records also tie up with Mauna Loa, so I'd like to see your German record.

But the stuff I coud find didn't support your claim.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen