Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Now. Mr. Kuvasz- I am posting the excellent reference made by Okie.

I addressed that reference by vincent gray yesterday at 4am. I had read it long before you did. apparently you are now unable to read.

It is available to you to read but I am giving the conclusion. Far different than the conclusions made by some of the IPCC's Anti-American scientists.

well that was scientific wasn't it?

Global temperature measurements remote from human habitation and activity show no evidence of a warming during the last century. Such sites include "proxy" measurements such as tree rings, marine sediments and ice cores, weather balloons and satellite measurements in the lower atmosphere, and many surface sites where human influence is minimal. The small average and highly irregular individual warming displayed by surface measurements is therefore caused by changes in the thermal environment of individual measurement stations over long periods of time, and not by changes in the background climate.



Rebut this, sir--He has a great deal of evidence.

blah blah blah, I did, long before you posted here. and cited page and paragraph and box where they were rebutted in the ICPP report. get a life, and read the posts of others first before you look stupid again.
You have not responded to the anomaly presented by differing SURFACE temperatures recorded over the last hundred years. WHY?

again, i did, and you just didn't see them.

I will repost some of them:

New York, New York---54.1 degrees F to 55.1 degrees F average yearly temperature -1930- 2000

Albany, New York----48.1 degrees F to 47.1 degrees F average yearly temperature- 1930- 2000

Pasadena, California---62 degrees F to 65.2 degrees F average yearly temperature--1930- 2000

Boulder, Colorado---51 degrees F to 50.5 degrees F average yearly temperature--1930- 2000

sources for above--UNITED STATES HISTORICAL CLIMATOLOGICAL NETWORK.

The study referenced by Okie shows NO evidence of warming during the last century. It is clear that any surface measurements near cities may have indeed been skewed by the "heat island" effect.

that is not what Vince Gray stated in his introductory paragraphs, go back and read them again. even his conclusions do not support your remark.
Surface temperature measurements, AS I HAVE STATED PREVIOUSLY, have severe shortcomings.

You show that his statements do not support my remarks and try to rouse your self to rebut my evidence. I will replicate the main points for you in case you have forgotten:

You are making the case for global warming based on man-made or, as the literature puts it, anthropogenic sources. YOU PROVE IT.

First of all, the PREDICTED CO2 GROWTH CAUSED BY NATURAL AND MAN MADE CAUSES ARE COMPUTER MODELS, I THINK THERE HAS BEEN ENOUGH EVIDENCE TO SHOW THAT THOSE MODELS ARE NOT ALWAYS CORRECT AND CAN SOMETIMES BE VERY VERY MISLEADING.,I REJECT THEM AS D E F I N I T I V E AND I N C O N T R O V E R T I B L E EVIDCENCE AS A RESULT.

Here are the questions that you have not answered. Please do not refer me to the ambigious and often contradictory literature again, As you will see, I have read enough of it to find that there is no certainty in it and as the IPCC A POINT YOU WILL NOT, WILL NOT ADMIT, EVEN THOUGH YOUR OWN IPCC SAID IT--UNCERTAINTY. YOU DO KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS- DONT YOU?

Let us proceed:

You never explained(post 2074543) how the Co2 increase has come LARGELY FROM FOSSIL FUEL AND CEMENT PRODUCTION. I have asked you several times to precisely QUANTIFY THE MEANING OF LARGELY AND ALSO TO QUANTIFY THE NATURAL EFFECTS ON THE CO2 AS DISTINCT FROMTHE FOSSIL FUEL AND CEMENT PRODUCTION.

This question keeps coming back, although we know the answer very well: all of the recent CO2 increase in the atmosphere is due to human activities, in spite of the fact that both the oceans and the land biosphere respond to global warming. There is a lot of evidence to support this statement which has been explained in a previous posting here and in a letter in Physics Today . However, the most convincing arguments for scientists (based on isotopes and oxygen decreases in the atmosphere) may be hard to understand for the general public because they require a high level of scientific knowledge. I present simpler evidence of the same statement based on ocean observations, and I explain how we know that not only part of the atmospheric CO2 increase is due to human activities, but all of it.

On time-scales of ~100 years, there are only two reservoirs that can naturally exchange large quantities of CO2 with the atmosphere: the oceans and the land biosphere (forests and soils). The mass of carbon (carbon is the "C" in CO2) must be conserved. If the atmospheric CO2 increase was caused, even in part, by carbon emitted from the oceans or the land, we would measure a carbon decrease in these two reservoirs.

Number of observations of carbon decreasing in the global oceans: zero.

Number of observations of carbon increasing in the global oceans: more than 20 published studies using 6 independent methods.
The methods are:
(1) direct observations of the partial pressure of CO2 at the ocean surface (Takahashi et al. 2002),
(2) observations of the spatial distribution of atmospheric CO2 which show how much carbon goes in and out of the different oceanic regions (Bousquet et al. 2000),
(3) observations of carbon, oxygen, nutrients and CFCs combined to remove the mean imprint of biological processes (Sabine et al. 2004),
(4) observations of carbon and alkalinity for two time-periods combined with an estimate of water age based on CFCs (McNeil et al. 2002), and the simultaneous observations of atmospheric CO2 increase and the decrease in (5) oxygen (Keeling et al. 1996), and (6) carbon 13 (Ciais et al. 1995) in the atmosphere.

The principle of the last two methods is that both fossil fuel burning and biospheric respiration consume oxygen and reduce carbon 13 as they produce CO2, but the exchange of CO2 with the oceans has only a small impact on atmospheric oxygen and carbon 13. The measure of atmospheric CO2 increase together with oxygen or carbon 13 decrease gives the distribution between the different reservoirs.

All the estimates show that the carbon content of the oceans is increasing by ~ 2±1 PgC every year (current burning of fossil fuel is ~7 PgC per year). One method is able to go back in time and shows that the carbon content of the oceans has increased by 118±19 PgC in the last 200 years. There is some uncertainty about the exact amount that the oceans have taken up, but not about the direction of the change. The oceans cannot be a source of carbon to the atmosphere, because we observe them to be a sink of carbon from the atmosphere.

What about the land biosphere? We know that deforestation has contributed to the increase in atmospheric CO2. Yet because carbon needs to be conserved, observations of the carbon increase in the atmosphere and the oceans combined with estimates of fossil fuel burning tell us that deforestation has been largely compensated by enhanced growth by the land biosphere. For example, during 1980 to 1999, fossil fuel burning was 117±5 PgC, and the carbon increase in the atmosphere and the oceans were 65±1 and 37±8 PgC, respectively. Thus that leaves 15±9 PgC that has been taken up by the land. This 15±9 PgC includes deforestation (and other land-use changes) which reduced the land biosphere by 24±12 PgC, and an additional land uptake of 39±18 PgC in response to elevated CO2 and climate changes (Sabine et al. 2004). Here also there is some uncertainty about the exact amount, but there is no uncertainty that the land biosphere has taken up a quantity of CO2 that is roughly equivalent to the deforestation.

Why are the ocean and land taking up carbon, when we know that warming of the oceans reduces the solubility of CO2 and warming of the land accelerates bacterial degradation of the soils? The answer is that warming is not the only process that influences the oceans and land biosphere. The dominant process in the oceans is the response to increasing atmospheric CO2 itself. If the oceans had not warmed, they might have taken up even more carbon, although we cannot say for sure because warming may have other impacts, for example on marine biota. On land, bacterial degradation of the soils may have increased in response to warming, but for the moment this effect is smaller than the land response to other processes (for example fertilization by CO2 and nitrogen, changes in precipitation, etc).

Is this consistent with what we know of the glaciations? Yes. During glaciations, the balance of processes was very different. Cooling and other climate changes occurred first. The response of the oceans and land biosphere to climate caused the atmospheric CO2 to decrease, which caused more cooling (more on the feedbacks between temperature and CO2 can be found here). During glaciations, there were no external changes in atmospheric CO2 and the oceans and land biosphere responded primarily to climate change. In the last 200 years, there have been large changes in atmospheric CO2 as a result of human activities, and the oceans and land biosphere respond primarily to rising CO2.

In summary, we know that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is entirely caused by fossil fuel burning and deforestation because many independent observations show that the carbon content has also increased in both the oceans and the land biosphere (after deforestation). If the oceans or land had contributed to the rise in atmospheric CO2, they would hold less carbon. Their response to warming may be real, but it is less than their response to increasing CO2 and other climate changes for the moment.

More on the carbon budget can be found in the last IPCC report here, which includes budgets and uncertainties for different time periods and additional numbers for the small contribution of volcanoes and other geological reservoirs.

References:
Bousquet et al. (2000), Regional changes of CO2 fluxes over land and oceans since 1980, Science, Vol 290, 1342-1346.
Ciais et al. (1995), A Large Northern Hemisphere Terrestrial CO2 Sink Indicated by the 13C/12C Ratio of atmospheric CO2, Science, Vol 269, pp. 1098-1102.
Keeling, Piper and Heimann (1996), Global and hemispheric CO2 sinks deduced from changes in atmospheric O2 concentration, Nature, Vol 381, 218-221.
McNeil et al. (2003), Anthropogenic CO2 uptake by the ocean based on the global chlorofluorocarbon data set, Science, Vol 299, 235-239.
Takahashi et al. (2002), Global sea-air CO2 flux based on climatological surface ocean pCO2, and seasonal biological and temperature effects, Deep Sea Research, Vol 49, 1601-1622.

Additionally, you must explain how these quantifications were determined--ANY USE OF COMPUTER SIMULATIONS IN THESE QUANTIFICATIONS MAKE THEM SUSPECT IS CLEAR FROM MY EVIDENCE.

'You did not present any evidcence that the Surface temperatures obtained are NOT in ANY WAY tainted by the "heat island" effect. You do know what ANY WAY, means, of course.

ou never showed that the "heat island" effect did not contaminate the surface temperature readings and you did not rebut the irrefutable fact that inspite of the rapid increase in co2 some cities close to each other like New York and Albany did not have similiar temperatures and that indeed, Albany's temperatures went down since 1930. THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING????

You did not rebut the statement made by the IPCC--the group you refer to often as the authority, concering the QUESTIONABLE ABILITY OF MODELS TO SIMULATE NATURAL VARIABLITY" This is their comment not mind so please do not refer again to "we're getting better. The IPCC said--Questionable ability. You do understand the meaning of the word questionable, of course.

You did not show exaclty how, even though I asked you again and again, exactly how the sceintists separated natural effects from man made effects.

he truth is that nobody knows exactly how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon and how much might be man made.

If you think you know it, and I am sure you are a brilliant scientist, you can say--Using xyz, scientists have found that 92% of the warming from 1990 to the present is anthropogenic and 8% is natural.

THERE IS NO SUCH STUDY THAT CAN GIVE THOSE NUMBERS WITH COMPLETE ACCURACY AND YOU KNOW IT, MR. KUVASZ-

REMEMBER WHAT THE IPPC SAID--"Questionable ability of models to simulate natural variability.

Your post on Satellite data refers to 1994data, If you reference my post on Satellite data from NASA, you will find it is after your data and is shows NO WARMING!!!

You have failed to explain completely why the earth was warmer from 1890 to 1960 even though the production of CO2 was lesser. You mumbled something about Krakatoa but it was unpersuasive. YOU KNOW THAT THE THEORY OF GLOBAL WARMING DEPENDS ON THE THE FACT THAT CO2 IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE GREENHOUSE GAS THAT WARMS THE EARTH--What warmed it from 1890 to 1960-- YOUR OWN TEMPERATURE FIGURES SHOW A RISE CULMINATING IN 1960--followed, of course, by the lemming scientists who predicted an ice age in 1975--very accurate- very accurate---

Your comment about Krakatoa was revealing. Can you be certain that there will not be another such occurrence in the near future? What would this do to the Warming trend? Or hasn't that ASSUMPTION BEEN FED INTO THE COMPUTERS OF THE IPCC?

When I commented on the IPCC's statement about Uncertainties- you said that the uncertainties of scientific consensus have become more certain.

SURE- Just like the model computer extrapolations on what the Arctic was like 55 Million years ago--THE ONLY PROBLEM THERE WAS THAT THEY WERE WAY OFF>

Astonishing!!!!

Some of your blurbs indicated that the CO2 growth is due to human activities and that there is no NATURAL VARIABLITIES that can account for it.

THAT IS FALSE AND YOUR OWN SOURCES SAY SO--

QUOTE-

This is not to say that THERE IS NO SOLAR AFFECT ON CLIMATE CHANGE ONLY THAT IT IS MORE DIFFICULT TO DETECT THAN SOME MAY THINK.

The present atmospheric CO2 increase is caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2. Climate Change 2001 P185

So there MAY be Solar effect on climate only it is difficult to ascertain.
Therefore, the POSSIBLITY must be left open( ACCORDING TO YOUR OWN SOURCES) that Solar activity may indeed affect climate change>

Do you begin to see how many holes there are in your thesis,Mr.Kuvasz?

When you claim that my statement about climate models was out of context, I not only gave you the IPCC quote about the questionability of computer models but a statement on the ideal computer model needed to track "five million parameters over the surface of the earth"

YOU NEVER REBUTTED THIS STATEMENT.

The statement was made--
We don't know for sure--The truest statement in all of this verbiage.

There has been no rebuttal of the statement made by Dr. Lindzen that--
the computer simulations ALL ASSUME that water vapor will amplify the small bit of warming expected from an increase of carbon dioxide in the air. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences (Good, you spelled it right this time, give yourself a cookie!) has stated that:

THE NATURE AND MAGNITUDE OF THESE HYDROLOGICAL FEEDBACKS GIVE RISE TO THE LARGEST SOURCE OF UNCERTAINTY ABOUT CLIMATE SENSITIVITY"

Whenever three or more contrarians are gathered together, one will inevitably claim that water vapour is being unjustly neglected by 'IPCC' scientists. "Why isn't water vapour acknowledged as a greenhouse gas?", "Why does anyone even care about the other greenhouse gases since water vapour is 98% of the effect?", "Why isn't water vapour included in climate models?", "Why isn't included on the forcings bar charts?" etc. Any mainstream scientist present will trot out the standard response that water vapour is indeed an important greenhouse gas, it is included in all climate models, but it is a feedback and not a forcing. From personal experience, I am aware that these distinctions are not clear to many, and so here is a more in-depth response (see also this other attempt).

First some basics. Long-wave (or thermal) radiation is emitted from the surface of the planet and is largely absorbed in the atmosphere. Water vapour is the principle absorber of this radiation (and acknowledged as such by everybody). But exactly how important is it? In terms of mass, water vapour is much more prevalent (about 0.3% of atmospheric mass, compared to about 0.06% for CO2), and so is ~80% of all greenhouse gases by mass (~90% by volume). However, the radiative importance is less (since all molecules are not created equal). One way to quantify this is to take a radiation model and remove each long-wave absorber (principally the greenhouse gases, but also clouds and aerosols) and see what difference it makes to the amount of long-wave absorbed. This gives the minimum effect from each component. The complementary calculation, using only each particular absorber in turn, gives the maximum effect. Generally these will not be equal because of overlaps in the absorbing spectra (i.e. radiation at a particular frequency can either be absorbed by water vapour or CO2).

The table @ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/

shows the instantaneous change in long-wave aborption when each component or combination of components is removed using the radiation code from the GISS GCM. (The source code is available for those who have the patience to get it to work). This isn't a perfect calculation but it's quick and easy and is close enough to the right answer for our purposes. (N.B. This is very similar to what was done by Ramanathan and Coakley (1978) using a single column model - their numbers are in the table for reference). Because of the overlaps, the combined changes are larger than the changes due to each individual component. Another calculation is the instantaneous radiative forcing at the tropopause, but that is complicated for clouds, O3 and Aerosols which have impacts on solar radiation as well as the long wave, so I only give that value for the 'pure' greenhouse gases.

The overlaps complicate things, but it's clear that water vapour is the single most important absorber (between 36% and 66% of the greenhouse effect), and together with clouds makes up between 66% and 85%. CO2 alone makes up between 9 and 26%, while the O3 and the other minor GHG absorbers consist of up to 7 and 8% of the effect, respectively. The remainders and uncertainties are associated with the overlaps which could be attributed in various ways that I'm not going to bother with here. Making some allowance (+/-5%) for the crudeness of my calculation, the maximum supportable number for the importance of water vapour alone is about 60-70% and for water plus clouds 80-90% of the present day greenhouse effect. (Of course, using the same approach, the maximum supportable number for CO2 is 20-30%, and since that adds up to more than 100%, there is a slight problem with such estimates!).

Since we are looking at the whole of the present-day greenhouse effect (around 33 C), it is not surprising that the radiative forcings are very large compared to those calculated for the changes in the forcing. The factor of ~2 greater importance for water vapour compared to CO2 is consistent with the first calculation.

So where does the oft quoted "98%" number come from? This proves to be a little difficult to track down. Richard Lindzen quoted it from the IPCC (1990) report in a 1991 QJRMS review* as being the effect of water vapour and stratiform clouds alone, with CO2 being less than 2%. However, after some fruitless searching I cannot find anything in the report to justify that (anyone?). The calculations here (and from other investigators) do not support such a large number and I find it particularly odd that Lindzen's estimate does not appear to allow for any overlap.





While water vapour is indeed the most important greenhouse gas, the issue that makes it a feedback (rather than a forcing) is the relatively short residence time for water in the atmosphere (around 10 days). To demonstrate how quickly water reacts, I did a GCM experiment where I removed all the water in the atmosphere and waited to see how quickly it would fill up again (through evaporation from the ocean) . The result is shown in the figure. It's not a very exciting graph because the atmosphere fills up very quickly. At Day 0 there is zero water, but after only 14 days, the water is back to 90% of its normal value, and after 50 days it's back to within 1%. That's less than 3 months. Compared to the residence time for perturbations to CO2 (decades to centuries) or CH4 (a decade), this is a really short time.
Only the stratosphere is dry enough and with a long enough residence time (a few years) for the small anthropogenic inputs to be important. In this case (and in this case only) those additions can be considered a forcing. Oxidation of anthropogenic methane (which is a major source of stratospheric water) and, conceviably, direct deposition of water from increases in aircraft in the lower stratosphere, can increase stratospheric water and since that gives a radiative forcing effect, they do appear on the forcings bar chart (under "H2O from CH4"). Some scientists have argued that changes to irrigation and other land use changes (which effect evaporation) are also direct forcings to water vapour amounts, but I think it's cleaner to think of that as an indirect water vapour response to the change.

When surface temperatures change (whether from CO2 or solar forcing or volcanos etc.), you can therefore expect water vapour to adjust quickly to reflect that. To first approximation, the water vapour adjusts to maintain constant relative humidity. It's important to point out that this is a result of the models, not a built-in assumption. Since approximately constant relative humidity implies an increase in specific humidity for an increase in air temperatures, the total amount of water vapour will increase adding to the greenhouse trapping of long-wave radiation. This is the famed 'water vapour feedback'. A closer look reveals that for a warming (in the GISS model at least) relative humidity increases slightly in the tropics, and decreases at mid latitudes.

How do we know that the magnitude of this feedback is correctly simulated? A good test case is the response to the Pinatubo eruption. This caused cooling for up to 3 years after the eruption - plenty of time for water vapour to equilibriate to the cooler sea surface temperatures. Thus if models can simulate the observed decrease of water vapour at this time, it would be a good sign that they are basically correct. A good paper that demonstrated this was Soden et al (2002) (and the accompanying comment by Tony DelGenio). They found that using the observed volcanic aerosols as forcing the model produced very similar cooling to that observed. Moreover, the water vapour in the total column and in the upper troposphere decreased in line with satellite observations, and helped to increase the cooling by about 60% - in line with projections for increasing greenhouse gases.

To be sure there are still some lingering uncertainties. Some recent data indicates that tropical upper tropopsheric water vapour does not quite keep up with constant relative humidity (Minschwaner and Dessler, 2004) (though they still found that the feedback was positive). Moist convection schemes in models are constantly being refined, and it's possible that newer schemes will change things . However, given the Pinatubo results, the models are probably getting the broader picture reasonably correct.

It is your job to prove that CO2 is increasing rapidly due to man-made effects, so then you must show, Mr.Kuvacs, evidence that indicates that there IS NO, I REPEAT, NO UNCERTAINTY ABOUT CLIMATE SENSITIVITY.

The ball is in your court, Mr. Kuvasz and please, you are a trained scientist. I know you can explain all of these questions completely,precisely and without extra verbiage.

Finally, There is a comment, which I am sure you will reject, but it is a comment which I am sure is true, made by a climatologist maned Patrick J. Michaels,professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.

"NO ONE GETS LARGE GRANTS BY SAYING SOMETHING ISN'T A PROBLEM.MEANWHILE, THE TEN BILLION( T E N B I L L I O N???) THROWN AT CLIMATE MODELING RESEARCH IN THE LAST 15 YEARS WAS WASTED"...PICTURE THIS, IT'S 1992 AND THERE'S A HEARING, SENATOR ALBERT GORE SAYS HE THINKS GLOBAL WARMING IS A SERIOUS ISSUE AND WOULD IT BE WORTHWHILE TO SPEND $1 BILLION OR SO STUDYING IT? NO ONE IS GOING TO SPEAK UP AND SAY IT'S AN OVERBLOWN PROBLEM, IF HE DID ALL HIS COLLEGUES WOULD TAKE OUT THEIR KNIVES AND THROW THEM INTO HIS BACK BEFORE HE COULD LEAVE THE ROOM".