This week's Proceedings of the National academy of Science includes an open access paper which disagrees with John Larkin's optimism about the benefit s of of more CO2 in the air for agricultural production.
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Since John Larkin's optimism reflects what he has been told by denialist we b-sites, this won't come as any surprise. The study's methods are interesti ng, and fine-grained enough to look at least potentially realistic (which i s something the authors do crow about).
Plants love water, right? They do better when you water them, so clearly the secret to a beautiful garden is to transplant them to the bottom of a swimming pool.
It's perfectly logical, why hasn't anyone thought of this?
(someone is going post an "Actually..." follow-up about hydroponics in about 5 min)
Preliminary reading of this study I notice that it only covers the years
1951 to 1980 and compares that to 1981 to 2010. In other words if covers the lull (plateau with a slight drop) in temperature rise during the
1960s and the second comparison set is from 1980 through 2010 - when the temperature was rising again at the same rate as from 1920s to the early
50s - with a rather large spike in the 1930s.
Temperature records go back to the early 1900s, why then did they not consider the agricultural changes in the first part of the 20th century?
The study appears to be rather incomplete in that regard.
According to the report results also appear inconclusive so far:
"So far, the aggregate TFPC effects of regional climate trends have been relatively small. Observed trends in the climate indices have not all been significant, and their positive and negative effects on TFPC have partially canceled."
I will have to read it further, but there are a number of conditional statements in the report, and much of their concern appears to be riding on climate models (which don't always seem to follow reality):
"However, these key crop-producing areas are projected to see significant changes in climate in the coming years, including increased warming trends, decreased water availability, and enhanced extremes (28,
35). If the measured statistical relationships reflect reality, these changes could have important consequences for the long-term TFP growth of US agriculture."
In other words, if the future predicted changes in climate are true then they expect there to be a decline in production. Assuming their assumptions are valid.
The point some of us are trying to raise is the climate models appear to not be predicting what is really happening, with a majority of climate models predicting a hotter climate than is actually happening and also being unable to predict the almost level plateau in temperature rise over the last 18 or so years, where CO2 concentration has gone up about
30% in the same period. (And yes, I've heard the argument that the oceans are storing the heat, but Maxwell's equations seem to show that you can't get a high density heat sink (water) to emit heat to a low density heat sink (air) and get a temperature rise that is greater than the source. Fractional temperature rise in water only leads to a fractional temperature rise in air that is in contact with it. Unless my university thermodynamics course has completely left me...hell I forget names (always have), so perhaps I missed or forgot something important here.)
However I do wish they had covered the 100 year span from 1910 to 2010, as that data does exist. That would be more indicative of any long term trends. This may have helped proven their hypothesis more conclusively.
Not to mention I don't have time to do really exhaustive research into this as I have other stuff to do with my time.
My concern is - a lot is riding on computer models, and most models don't work past a few years even if they can hindcast just fine.
Therefore making extensive changes to energy supplies based on these is risky as best. I DO agree that fossil fuels should be phased out in developed countries (pollution is enough of a reason), however the developing countries need all the energy they can get to raise their standard of living to the point where they have a decent life like we in the west do. Lets solve fusion power or get thorium reactors running or other major sources of energy that don't have the drawbacks of fossil fuels such as coal, but let us not bankrupt ourselves in the process, nor stifle the underdeveloped countries in the process. Energy needs to be cheap and readily accessible for our children (all our children on Earth) to develop to their best potential.
My place (south east asia) I notice the monsoon season have shifted to end of december. 10 years ago, monsoon start on time from early nov to dec. Bec ause of monsoon started end of dec, it disrupt the fruit flowering process which appear on early jan. So there is reduce fruit production (mango).
You do remember that the 1930's was notable for the Dust Bowl which trashed US and Canadian prairie farming big time - Grapes of Wrath era.
Probably because in the immediate post WWI era through to post WWII the advent of widespread use of synthetic fixed nitrogen fertilisers and enhanced mechanisation totally obscures any climate effects.
I think the models are still incomplete but what is not in doubt is that adding more CO2 is gradually making the global climate warmer. I suspect the temperature peaks in 1930 and 2000 are related to lunar eclipse cycles creating stronger tidal ranges and oceanic mixing. This view is currently out of favour but I expect it will regain credibility if the climate starts warming up rapidly again post 2020.
You can see this ~60y periodicity most clearly in the PDO:
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The oceans can act as a heat sink and for that matter CO2 sink. But the input heat to the atmosphere is mostly coming from solar radiation at
5800K and backscattered longwave ~300K radiation from clouds and or CO2.
That is too pessimistic about the climate models. They might not be perfect but they capture the essence of what will happen if we continue on a business as usual trash the planet for fun and profit basis.
Unfortunately the trend at the moment is against nuclear power. UK new build of new nuclear is already well behind schedule and reliant on Chinese money and unproven possibly unworkable French technology. Germany has gone back to burning the dirtiest coal imaginable :(
open access paper which disagrees with John Larkin's optimism about the ben efits of of more CO2 in the air for agricultural production.
t web-sites, this won't come as any surprise. The study's methods are inter esting, and fine-grained enough to look at least potentially realistic (whi ch is something the authors do crow about).
Probably because there wasn't a lot of agricultural data recorded - or at l east not in form that was easily comparable with more modern records.
One degree Celcius isn't a lot of warming. If we can hold it down to two de grees Celcius, the general concensus is that we wouldn't have much to worry about. It seems unlikely that we will do that well.
The point here is that main thing that is going on in the oceans - all the time - is that they are moving heat from the equator towards the poles. The route followed matters, and changes over the years.
We've more or less got a grip on what the el Nino/la Nina alternation means for global temperatures and weather patterns, but the Atlantic Multidecada l oscillation (which is what you are complaining about, whether you know it or not) is a lot less well understood, in part because it doesn't seem to have been identified until 1994.
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The Argo buoys have been looking at the deep ocean currents involved since around 2000. The fleet got up to it's designed size by 2007, and people hav e published some results recently, but there's a lot of ocean and only 3829 operational buoys.
What makes you think that? Getting data out of handwritten ledgers isn't ea sy, nor is getting access to the ledgers.
They haven't got a hypothesis - or a least nothing worth "proving". They've just got a bunch of systematised observations.
What makes you think that? There are lot models around, and climate scienti st compare their various predictions without taking any of them as definiti ve.
Since they have more to lose if modern agriculture stops working as well it does now (and has done for the few hundred years since it was invented) th is may not be well thought out.
There isn't actually all that much oil left, so encouraging the developing countries to join the mob competing for the last of the easily extracted oi l might not be a good idea. The nice thing about renewable energy is that y ou aren't competing with anybody for wind or sunlight, so the price isn't g oing to go up. Both are now pretty much as cheap per kilowatt hours as burn ing fossil carbon, and bumping up the scale of manufacture by another facto r of ten to satisfy the developing country market will roughly halve the ca pital cost per kilowatt hour - this has happened twice in recent years, an d it seems likely to work just as well the next time somebody tries it.
Solar and wind power don't produce any nasty wastes that we haven't yet wor ked out how to dispose of.
Perfectly true. There's only a finite amount of fossil carbon in the ground left to extract, and we've extracted pretty much all the easily - and chea ply - extractable deposits. Renewables seem like a much better bet.
open access paper which disagrees with John Larkin's optimism about the ben efits of of more CO2 in the air for agricultural production.
The important stuff you missed is that the main effect of the oceans is to shift heat from the equator to the poles, and that the route that the heat follows matters.
We now more or less understand how the el Nino/ la Nina alternation affects the average global temperature and global weather patterns, but the Atlant ic Multidecadal Oscillation - which is what you are in fact complaining abo ut - is slower, and less well comprehended, perhaps because nobody noticed it until 1993
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We've known about surface ocean currents for a while - Ben Franklin seems t o be the first person to describe the Gulf Stream - but the deep ocean retu rn currents are still a bit of a mystery.
Since about 2000 we've been dumping Argo buoys into the ocean, and by 2007 we had the 3000 out there which looked to be about enough to do the job. Th e current count seems to be 3978.
People have started publishing stuff about the observation that have been c ollected so far, but there's a huge volume of ocean to be looked at and eve n 3978 Argo buoys end up looking rather lonely..
I'm not sure that you are right about the data being available from 1910. T he records from back then probably aren't as comprehensive or as reliable a s they have become, and they may not yet be web-accessible.
Climate scientist have lots of different computer models and they compare a nd contrast the various predictions they get. None of them say exactly the same thing, but the combined results are useful.
More CO2 in the atmosphere is definitely going to mean higher global temper atures, and probably changes in weather patterns. The Sahara was rained on for about 4000 years from about 7500?7000 BCE to about 3500? ?3000 BCE.
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Climate modelling doesn't yet seem to have nailed down why, but odd stuff c learly can happen.
Doing it by getting them to burn lots of fossil carbon would a bad idea. Th ey tend to be closer to the margin on food supplies at the best of times, a nd more global warming might do them a lot more damage than it would do to more prosperous countries.
More to the point, there's only a finite amount of fossil carbon around and we've dug up most of the easily extracted resources. Encouraging third wor ld countries to compete for the progressively shrinking pool of fossil carb on isn't a great idea.
Renewable energy is already pretty much as cheap per kilowatt hour as power generated by burning fossil-carbon. If we invest enough to manufacture on the scale required to deal with the developing countries energy needs, we'l l boost the scale of manufacture by at least another factor of ten, and hal ve the capital cost per kilowatt hour (again). We are going to have to do i t anyway, so we should do it now, and avoid burning a few more gigatonnes o f fossil carbon that we don't actually have to.
The nice thing about renewable energy in a developing country is that it is naturally distributed, so you don't have to invest a packet in setting up a grid to ship electric power from a single huge central power station to a ll the people who want it.
But it might not be good idea to saddle them with loads of nuclear waste wh en we haven't yet worked out an acceptable way of keeping it safe.
Perfectly true, but having them starve to death because of the side effects isn't a constructive approach.
Hindcasting is just curve-fitting, easy to do with a model that has hundreds of tweakable parameters. Curve fitting is not very predictive. Run thousands of sims, and publish the ones that correlate to "adjusted" past data.
Well said. Pollution from fossil fuels (and CO2 is NOT pollution) can be controlled; particulates are especially nasty, and melt the snow that we need to ski on.
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CO2 has been as high as 6000 PPM in the past, and plants thrived. In the last hundred million years, the CO2 concentration has been headed roughly linearly towards zero, which would be a lot worse than a little warming, if indeed there is any.
One thing the alarmists ignore is evolution, the old-fashioned kind and selective breeding and genetic engineering. When there is more CO2, plants will adapt to use it, or we'll make them do it. I'd hate to have a diet with 300 PPM of some vital food group.
Down with wussy Luddites!
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
That isn't what climate scientists do. John Larkin is a complete know-nothing when it comes to curve fitting - he thinks he has made every mistake in the book, and expects everybody else to have learnt in the same labour-intensive way.
Sadly, CO2 is pollution at current levels and higher. John Larkin chooses to believe what he reads on denialist web-sites, which makes him a gullible sucker - and ill-informed gullible sucker in this context.
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Since the CO2 level has been cycling between about 270ppm (during interglacials) and 180ppm (during ice ages) for the past 2.6 million years, the idea of a linear trend line extrapolating to zero is obvious nonsense.
John Larkin has failed to note that the sun has got about 10% bigger since it first formed, and is radiating about 20% more energy, which is a trend that will continue for the next few billion years,
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so we don't need as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we did 100 million years ago.
Plants don't have to adapt - at least some of them are already programmed to react to higher CO2 levels by forming less stomata, so that they can take in the same amount of CO2 while losing less water.
What John Larkin hasn't noticed is that plants never have any trouble getting enough CO2, but that they often have trouble getting enough water.
Anthropogenic global warming may give them more CO2 than they actually need, but can compromise the weather patterns that deliver the rain that they really need.
John Larkin does seem to be short of some vital food group necessary for keeping his neurones working right. Selenium deficiency can be a problem at rather lower levels than 300ppm, but it doesn't manifest itself in an inability to learn.
Not relevant to global warming, of course; greenhouse gasses and insolation and radiation heat loss only has a handful of constants and variables.
And since the manmade CO2 sources will exhaust in centuries, all life with long lifetimes (trees in our forests, for example) will die off. The weeds can out-evolve them, both on the upswing and downswing of the changes. Scientists KNOW about evolution, and know that it i sn't an answer. As for 'alarmists', I don't know any of them. Why would anyone specialize in ringing alarms? Not much of a career, if you only have a job to do when a disaster appears. Better to let responsible folk do the 'break-glass' thing when the occasion arises, and work at day jobs. That's how we've always done it here.
But it is a lucrative career for millions of academics and politicians (Al Gore ain't poor) and government employees and journalists. It's a trillion-dollar business.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
They have spent the last few million years getting well adapted to CO2 leve ls or 270pppm (during interglacials) and 180ppm (during ice ages). In a war mer world - with higher CO2 levels - other plants are going to out-compete them.
Al Gore got into it long before it looked profitable - "the Earth in the ba lance" was written in 1991 and published in 1992.
The academics who are expert on climate change get the same kind of money a s academics who are expert in areas of less public interest (and don't get harassed by denialists activists).
Journalists aren't picky about what they write about, and the denialist pro paganda machine is busy squeezing real journalists out of the - minor - bus iness of reporting on anthropogenic global warming, by churning out vast ma sses of lying propaganda which they give to the newspapers for free.
Judging from the stuff you post, the Murdoch media doesn't publish anything on climate change that hasn't been written for them by somebody affiliated with the Heartland Institute or one of the other merchants of doubt.
What would be really grim would be another Little Ice Age, which we are still recovering from. Or even worse, a real ice age with a mile of ice on top of Chicago.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
These is a lot of historical evidence about the rise and fall and rise again of the UK wine making depending on the climate (political and otherwise) of the day.
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Interesting read.
And yes, Canadians wouldn't mind if the place got a bit warmer.
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(1992) According to this report, spruce pollen records the treeline in Canada was further north from around 4,000 to 2,000 (years) PB (Before Present) and also 9,500 and 6,000 BP with a northward expansion between
nd of december. 10 years ago, monsoon start on time from early nov to dec. Because of monsoon started end of dec, it disrupt the fruit flowering proce ss which appear on early jan. So there is reduce fruit production (mango).
Weather is chaotic. Climate hasn't been for the last few thousand years, be fore we started pushing up the CO2 level in the atmosphere.
John Larkin's understanding of "chaotic" is imperfect - he thinks it just m eans unpredictable. In fact it means sensitive to initial conditions, and t he distinction between weather and climate is that weather includes the day
-to-day and minute-to-minute variations that are unpredictable more than ab out ten days in advance. "Climate" averages out those short term variations . It does show longer term variations, reflecting stuff that we could predi ct - like the elNino/ la Nina alternation - if we knew enough about deep oc ean currents.
"Chaotic" in Larkinesque just means "too complicated for John Larkin to bot her to try to understand".
That's moronic enough to have been posted by John Larkin. The problem with climate change is that you don't know what you will get in any given place.
One of the consequences of warming up the Greenland ice sheet enough to get it to slide off into the North Atlantic could be re-run of the Younger Dry as.
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That was essentially a consequence of the Gulf Stream turning off for about 1300 years. It is suspected that the Gulf Stream got turned off when the L aurentian ice sheet slide off into the North Atlantic. It would make The Li ttle Ice Age look like a walk in the park.
Global average temperature went up during the Younger Dryas - it may have b een a necessary part of the ending of the most recent ice age - but the tem peratures went down quite bit where you live.
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