Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Climate Science Compare & Contrast

Headline, November 3rd USA Today: Biggest jump ever seen in global warming gases

Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center:
2010 was by far a record year for CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and cement manufacture. Globally 9,139 Teragrams of oxidized carbon (Tg-C) were emitted from these sources. A teragram is a million metric tons. Converted to carbon dioxide, so as to include the mass of the oxygen molecules, this amounts to over 33.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. The increase alone is about 512 Tg-C, or 5.9%, over the 2009 global estimate. The previous record year was 2008, with 8,749 Tg-C emitted; the 2010 estimate is about 104.5% of that, or 391 Tg-C more.



The Global Warming Policy Foundation:
When examined more objectively Best data confirms the global temperature standstill of the past decade. That the standstill should be present in land only data is remarkable. There have been standstills in land temperature before, but the significance of the past decade is that it is in the era of mankind’s postulated influence on climate through greenhouse gas forcing. Predictions made many times in the past few years suggest that warming should be the strongest and fastest in the land data.


JoNova blog:
The oceans have warmed for the last 200 years, but that’s awkward, the timing doesn’t match with our CO2 emissions which rocketed from 1945 and can’t have caused the oceanic shift that started around 1800. The longer data doesn’t explain why we can’t find the warming for the last five years. . .

The models say the Earth system ought to accrue energy at the rate of 3W/m2. Instead the best estimate we have of recent energy balance suggests we’ve been losing energy at a rate of about 0.1 W/m2 (Knox and Douglass 2010). The models don’t match the observations.

There is no getting around it. The models are wrong. The energy balance is so central that none of their other predictions can be relied on.


Conclusion: Carbon emissions are up, but warming's stopped--making nonsense of USA Today's headline. In fact, there's little positive correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature increase. There's actually an 800-year lag in 420,000 years of ice core records and a year or two lag recently.

No wonder the "Climategate emails" say "the temperature needs a ‘fudge factor’" and in GCMs [General Circulation Models predicting future climate], "[t]uning may be a way to fudge the physics." And that's ignoring Columbia's Ed Cook's profane summary of what "we know of historical temperatures from paleo-reconstructions."

More simply, as Peter Thorne warns in a Climategate II email: "the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run." Welcome to the long run.

(via Hot Air, Watts Up With That?, Coyote Blog, Junk Science)

4 comments:

suek said...

I can't say I understand the science, but what I really don't understand is the psychology.

What was the point? If we assume that there was deliberate deception, _why_ was there deliberate deception? to what end?

@nooil4pacifists said...

Sue:

1) Funding, for institutions and individuals.

2) Socialism and Marxism--in other words, re-distribution of wealth.

3) Confirmation bias.

4) The belief in government by the elite -- scientists, authoritarians and bureaucrats -- rather than by the people via representative democracy.

KitWistar said...

Thank you for showing the science with hard data. I've often thought that this is the case, but didn't quite have the whatevers( data, PhD, reputation, etc) to back up what niggled at me as wrong science,
propaganda, political spin etc.
( I didn't say this very articulately,but I trust you get what I mean.)

OBloodyHell said...

Sue, I'm with Carl -- this is about power, nothing more.