Ozone impacts on climate change
In a nice example of how complicated climate feedbacks and interactions can be, Sitch and colleagues report in Nature advance publication on a newly modelled effect of ground level (or tropospheric) ozone on carbon uptake on land (BBC). The ozone they are talking about is the 'bad' ozone (compared to 'good' stratospheric ozone) and is both a public health hazard and a greenhouse gas. Tropospheric ozone isn't directly emitted by human activity, but is formed in the atmosphere as a result of photolytic reactions related to CH4, CO, NOx and VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds like isoprene, benzene etc.) - the so-called ozone precursors.
It's well known that increased ozone levels - particularly downwind of cities - can be harmful to plants, and in this new study with a carbon-climate model, they quantify how by how much increasing ozone levels make it more difficult for carbon to be sequestered by the land biosphere. This leads to larger CO2 levels in the atmosphere than before. Hence the ozone has, as well as its direct effect as a greenhouse gas, an indirect effect on CO2, which in this model at least appears to be almost as large.
Actually it's even more complicated. Methane emissions are one of the principal causes of the rise of ozone, and the greenhouse effect of ozone can be thought of as an indirect effect of CH4 (and CO and VOCs). But while NOx is an ozone precursor, it actually has an indirect effect that reduces CH4, so that the net impact of NOx has been thought to be negative (i.e. the reduction in CH4 outweighs the increase of ozone in radiative forcing - see this paper for more details). This new result might prompt a re-adjustment of that balance - i.e. if the ozone produced by NOx has a stronger effect than previously thought (through this new indirect mechanism), than it might outweigh the reduction in CH4, and lead to NOx emissions themselves being a (slightly) positive forcing.
In a bizarre way this is actually good news. There are plenty of reasons to reduce NOx emissions already because of it's impact on air pollution and smog, but this new result might mean that reductions wouldn't make climate change any worse. It also, once again, highlights the role of CH4 (the second biggest GHG forcing), and points out a further reason (if that was required) why further methane reductions could be particularly welcome in moderating future changes in climate and air quality.
27 July 2007 at 2:37 PM
“CH4 (the second biggest GHG forcing),”
Isn’t water vapor the predominant greenhouse gas?
[Response: It’s not a forcing - gavin]
27 July 2007 at 2:44 PM
Just to be pedantic. It should be “principal causes”.
[Response: fixed. thanks -gavin]
27 July 2007 at 2:49 PM
Nice post. I saw the BBC article and was going to post on it, but haven’t had the time. Now I’m glad I waited, as your article will provide valuable insight. Thanks.
27 July 2007 at 3:18 PM
I understand that there are some climatologists who believe that at least in the short-term, methane should actually be a greater focus than carbon dioxide. In essence, by working on this front, we could buy some time in the reduction of carbon dioxide. Additionally, the success which we have made in terms of reducing our methane emissions so far does not appear to have been especially costly or difficult. Improvements in farming practices, properly sealing pipes, etc.
How does this work in terms of doubling? To what extent has increases in methane been responsible for the change in the world average temperature that we have seen so far?
Likewise, I understand that Hansen has argued that black carbon has been at least as important are carbon dioxide in the loss of Arctic sea-ice. In the near-term, reductions in black carbon emissions could be quite important.
PS Not sure what the problem is, but in my IE6 the bronze column is partly covering the textbox today. I believe the textbox is considerably wider than normal.
27 July 2007 at 5:05 PM
One way to reduce mankind’s CH4 emissions is to adopt vegan diets. No animals raised for food means far less CH4 released from farming, manure, and animal flatulence and burping. A tremendous side benefit would be much healthier people.
I’ve been on a mainly vegan diet for about 12 yrs now, and would never go back to my old animal foods-based diet. My cholesterol is only about 144, my BMI is about 21.5, and all other vital signs are well within the normal range. I’m 67, have a recently diagnosed mild case of cystic fibrosis. Now that I’m being properly treated for that condition, am healthy as can be. No more constant bronchitis. The vegan diet, I believe, has sustained me through 14 yrs of bronchitis.
27 July 2007 at 8:56 PM
Even though ozone isn’t produced directly by human activity,the methane contribution to ozone, has a number of anthropogenic sources, such as emissions from sewage treatment plants, mining leaks, rice paddies, the leakage of natural gas pipelines, and landfills( which could be cut substantially if more waste were recycled).
Steps can be taken in these areas that could cut down on CH4 emissions, and it would seem to be worthwhile to do so to mitigate climate change since CH4 is much more effective greenhouse gas on a molecular basis than CO2,even though it’s less prevalent and has a shorter atmospheric lifetime.
27 July 2007 at 9:03 PM
Re #5: I fear the vegan diet only helps with GHGs if you don’t live a lot longer as a result, since your very existence in the modern world almost certainly contributes to the problem. I think I’ll eat lots of cheese and die young of a heart attack. It’s the least I can do to help.
27 July 2007 at 9:45 PM
Or you can change the animal’s diet.
27 July 2007 at 10:14 PM
Can anyone tell me what the pre-industrial atmospheric concentration of methane is?As well as being easier than CO2 to reduce anthropogenic CH4, it is also easier to capture from natural sources.
[Response: About 700ppb (today’s value is close to 1750 ppb). - gavin]
28 July 2007 at 12:57 AM
There are those that hold out for trees and tree planting to save us from our sins. Yet our sins, it seems, have rendered our photosynthetic allies less useful than we’d hoped, perhaps not even as well as has been modeled. And thus by degrees we paint ourselves ever more tightly into our cramped little corner. Little left now but to change our ways. I wonder… what are the chances of that? And while we have fewer options all the time, political leadership are not apparently disturbed into meaningful actions.
If one were to conceive a trap for a technological society, they could have done no better than the trap we are currently caught in. We are stuck in our patterns, and thus we walk in lock-step over a cliff knowing full well what is happening to us.
28 July 2007 at 7:09 AM
Since ozone levels have actually been dropping in the developed world for 20 years or so, shouldn’t the focus of the paper have how this helps the climate rather than the potential damage from a modeled increase? Methane concentrations have leveled off and nox and voc levels are down substantially.
Re: #5&7. The obvious answer is cannibalism. We get to eat our meat, reduce population, and shorten lifespans. A win win.
Re: #6 Methane emissions are no longer allowed from landfills in Europe and the US.
28 July 2007 at 7:38 AM
Would anybody from Real Climate care to comment on a recent article by Schwarz,Charlson and Rodhe in Nature Reports June 27, “Quantifying Climate Change- too rosy a picture?”? http://www.nature.com/climate/2007/0707/full/climate.2007.22.html
Thanks for a great site.
28 July 2007 at 7:58 AM
I spotted the BBC’s post so neat timing.
Here’s my favourite stat on Ozone. If the Ozone layer was at sea level it would only be 3 millimetres thick - the thickness of a pound coin.
Dive in with your own favourite coin.
28 July 2007 at 9:07 AM
Man-made ozone [albeit manufactured in indirectly through emissions of other gases] also affects the oceans , because much of man’s pollution is in near-coastal cities and much of the seas’ productivity is focussed at the coasts , and the response time for phytoplankton to die is much shorter than land plants…
Also phtoplankton get arond the seas by being bourne by the winds in clouds , they live in the clouds and seed the oceans from there [and lakes and rivers for that matter) ,this is how they get around the earth and many have UV absorbing pigments to give them long lifetimes in the clouds …
This is something which climate models seem to have ignored, but the UV absorption by phytoplanktom influenecs the climate, changes the temperature profile in clouds and simplifying models by ignoring this factor simply must give the wrong answers [bearing in mind the instabilities from positive feedbacks of many varieties, physical, chemical, biological,all-too-human, …]
We now know that phytoplankton have controlled [in co-operation with other life-forms] the temperature of the earth way below the purely physical models would predict for aeons of time before mankind arrived on the scene , this recent ‘paleo-science’ thus conclusively proves that climate models must be made more sophisticated , including all major biological influences, including plankton in the clouds, to have any hope of being predictive, the effect is just too massive to be ignored in simplification of the modelling .
Phytoplankton also synthesise and emit dimethyl sulphide, a gas which interacts with atmospheric gases to generate sulphate nuclei in the air, potent cloud-generation by living organisms with a reason for their major investment in this seemingly unuseful gas to their immediate metabolism… they do so when under stress from lack of iron [a necessary trace element for them which is i very short supply in the seas because it precipitates out and is lost from the surface very quickly, becoming unavailable tp phytoplankton who live in the light of the surface of the ocean only…
There is then a complication of man-created ozone in the dynamics of cloud creation and distribution on the planet…
It comes back to the most pressing need of mankind which has not been fully recognised yet, that we are killing the oceans from out too rapid usage of fossil fuel;s to make life ‘easy’ for us in the short-term , the effect is likely to be mostly from CO2 which has already acidified the oceans and is killing the base of the food webs, the corals and phytoplankton , so that all life is slowly dying in the seas because of our industrialisation of huamn activities …
Besides killing off our fisheries eventually, we are also killing off our main safe place to put the CO2 back into, the potentially much larger biomass of sea [and land] lifeforms ,where it came from in the first place [that is why we know it is the safest place for the CO2 , it is a method tried and tested by nature long before we came along - it works, so long as one does not kill off the very things one needs to make it work!]
Worse still, killing off the oceans only adds further methane and CO2 to the air since dead life eventually decays if there is no life left to consume it [hence the insanity of putting CO2 underneath or on the sea-bed as some seriously propose, it would kill the life down there, some of it as much as 300metres below the seabed surface
and craete insoluble long-term problems when the CO2 re-emerges eventually]
Man has gleefully exploited what nature left us as a legacy in oil, without caring to do anything about recycling what we use or realising the terrible impact on us, now much-committed in infrastructure to the ‘easy’ life, whhen the artificially maintained low ‘price’ of oil can no longer be maintained because ‘demand’ exceeds max poss supply … we have behaved like spoiled brats on the earth and if we do not change and become as inteligent as we like to think we are, then our future is very troubled indeed and inceasingly more likely to be impossible for humans to live… It is thus not prudent that we still talk about things and take no action to cease behaving like uneduicated brats in our way of life , people need leadership to change our whole infrastructure and way of living to something which can last…
If one thinks about it but a short while, sustainability is NOT optional, it is a requirement … but it is not made a requirement of governments put in term for just a few years …
we are getting what we instituted to get in our lives, but people will not insist on sustainability until they see that it is necessary for themselves and their children and their childrens’ children … making the models good enough then is a primary task , else even the best fall under the welter of propaganda put out by those who think we do not have to change in order to live a sufficient lifestyle on this earth.
Since ew cannot have perfect knowledge before we begin to ACT ,we must have restraining control and close monitoring of our actions to ensure that they do not do more harm than good … one major advantage of providing the missing trace elements [mostly just iron] to bring the deadand dying seas to life, is that it is reversible to very great extent since simply ceasing to give iron causes the sea to revert to its previous dead state … it allows a dynamic monitored solution to getting the CO2 back into biomass where we know the earth can cope with it.
Strangely enough we would all live healthier lives WITHOUT the petrol-driven car , so one could hope that the oil price becomes realistic even more quickly than it is so that this vast hazard to short-term and long-term health of all of us dies out quickly… sadly few people realise that every car on teh road could be responsible for seven deaths in the future according to one model I developed … assuming, as many do, that tomorrow will e much like today, really is an imprudent way to live which could very conceivably not only cost much life on earth its existence, but spell the chnage of civilisation for man back to just smallis local communities living much in isolation from each other, much like in the past…not from choice, but from necessity … and the earth then supports far fewer people than today …
It does not seem worth taking the very describable risk of this happening for sake of the inaction we see today , but equally those trying to make perfect models of how tings work will also run out of time [and cheap oil] todo their research … we are complacent today in our industry and life support , but it is very largely fully dependent on cheap oil [which is already showing that it will never be cheap again, but will keep rising in ‘price’]
This site and forum does good work indeed in spreading the truth to combt the endless propaganda of ‘dinosaurs’ [who believe the ‘growth paradigm’ still, desp[ite the evidence already that it is a short-sighted and inefficient principle , thsu incompatible with sustainable life of men and other animals ,and plants!] ,but the dynamic question is can it spread the word fast enough and are minds open enough to change to learn and act on the truth before we have killed our seas and have no way to a sustaiable life left… ?
28 July 2007 at 10:11 AM
Animal farming accounts for 18% of GHGs–more than transportation. (UN Food & Agriculture Organization) One thing we can all do is eat less animal-based meals. Eating vegan vs eating animals, in terms of the impact on climate change is like riding a bike vs driving a Hummer.
The resistance to changing diet is huge. Sierra Club, Al Gore, etc. don’t even mention the vegan option in combating global warming. We must expand our imagination to see the cause & effect relationship between our life habits & the dying planet. The mega-corporations that take grain & water to feed to animals don’t want you to know how much methane they produce or how it affects the climate. They want you to eat more burgers & drink more milk.
We are in an emergency situation. We must act on all levels to reduce GHGs, including changing our personal habits & cultural traditions of eating.
28 July 2007 at 10:48 AM
Relying far less on animal husbandry (i.e., eating less meat) doesn’t require going all the way to “vegan.”
It’s possible to drastically reduce one’s intake of animal products without quitting entirely. Eating meat only a few times a week, emphasizing seafood over beef, expending the effort to secure meat products that are much more local than intercontinental, all will reduce the energy requirements (and therefore greenhouse gas emission) involved in animal husbandry.
And while a vegan diet brings undeniable health benefits, strict adherence to a strictly vegan diet over the long term also carries certain health *risks*. Moderation, rather than extremism, is likely to be more effective, and vastly likely to win more converts.
28 July 2007 at 11:09 AM
Re #15 [The resistance to changing diet is huge.]
Yes indeed, it’s interesting how even on this site, there’s what appears to be a defensive resort to levity (#7, #9), or proposing measures which would have much less effect (#8), when this is suggested. (I’m a lacto-ovo-vegetarian with occasional fish-eating, I’ve reduced the animal-derived content of my diet considerably over the past few years, but I hereby promise to shift further in a vegan direction from now on.) Methane production is not the only issue: large amounts of tropical forest have been and are being cleared to ranch cattle, and to grow soya to feed them in intensive systems elsewhere.
28 July 2007 at 12:00 PM
This is just my 2nd posting on climate matters, and as I’ve only been studying this for 2 months part time, and am not a climate scientist but merely a Ph.D in mathematical statistics, aficionados can take my views with a pinch of salt if they wish. Certainly, I am extremely impressed, and somewhat humbled, by the wealth of knowledge both here and on ClimateAudit.org. Even so, I am hoping that a posting from an outsider may have some value in summarizing the central issues.
Accordingly, I am going to ask 4 questions here, and then discuss the relevance to these of 3 recent papers.
I have to say that I am certainly in two minds on the issue of the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) - I do worry that in central England clear winter skies no longer guarantee frost the way they used to do, but from studying climate data I also find it difficult to believe in the IPCC’s central projection of a 3C increase during this century. In other words, I am not yet convinced that the CO2 effect will be as large as claimed.
The crucial questions, modulo changes to my chosen time intervals, seem to be along the lines of:
Q1: what degree of global warming actually occurred between 1970 and 2000?
Q2: how do we apportion this between CO2, the Sun, and other causes, and therefore how much is a doubling of CO2 worth?
Q3: how much warming will occur over the next 100 years?
Q4: how good, or bad, will this warming be for the world?
These questions are fairly simple to state, but furiously difficult to answer, apparently. I am not going to attempt that here, but merely discuss them.
For Q1, some would argue that a different interval should be studied, but the CO2 brigade (to distinguish from the “solar brigade”) have a valid question as to why it warmed significantly in that period - about 0.4C according to the ‘hadcrut3′ figures. But as an outsider I find it deeply disappointing that the physical basis for the accuracy and fairness of the quoted data is in some doubt for some of the terrestrial stations. Nevertheless I do not find it necessary to invoke a conspiracy to account for this - I have always believed in the cock-up version of history (sometimes with the occasional conspiracy to cover up the cock-up). I believe that it is important to establish a non-controversial set of data, for example from rural sites with thermometers placed a good distance from air conditioners etc.
Q2 is the biggy (insofar as it impacts Q3, which is where the politics come into play). In the CO2 brigade it may be possible to find claims as high as 125% for the CO2 effect - i.e. the sun weakened in that time, so CO2 warming covered the 0.4C plus more for solar loss. In the solar brigade, it might be put as low as 0%, but some of this brigade allow it to be in the region of 25% (i.e. 0.1C out of the 0.4C). The modellers rate the CO2 effect at a very high level, but it is quite possible that God is playing a cruel trick on them - making the CO2 models fit well in this period but really using some different effect for most of the change. I shall discuss this more below.
For Q3, even if we allow for 0.0133 = 0.4/30 degrees per year in 1970-2000, I don’t see how the IPCC can turn that into 0.03 degrees per year for their central 3.0C per century (or is it 92 years?). But I’m not an expert, so perhaps it comes from bits of modelling I cannot be expected to understand. The other thing about the 3.0C though, is that it ignores solar effects. I have seen no refutation of the association of the depths of the Little Ice Age with the Maunder Minimum of solar activity; further it appears that sunspot effects are greater than is the total solar irradiance (TSI). Now, if the Sun had been in an average state since 1960 or so, it would be reasonable for the IPCC to argue that over the next 100 years it might, on the whole, remain average. But Solanki et al have shown that the Sun has been in an unusually active state, and as with the housing market one might therefore be expecting a fall before 100 years are out.
Regarding Q4, I have seen many and many more arguments on both sides. Personally, I am quite happy for England to be a little warmer, and I am happy if more CO2 helps all those beautiful plants to grow. But my house currently (27/7/07) has no tap water, and the stream through our garden rose 5 feet to a torrent, coming within a couple of inches of our floorboards. Was that caused by global warming? The Met Office tells me that it probably was. On the other hand, the last time the River Severn got almost as near to Tewkesbury Abbey, in 1947, was at the onset of a period of global cooling, and there were several famous floods in the 50’s too. And the time when it got *really* high, in 1760 when the canon of the Abbey was rowing along the aisle rather than merely paddling, was - well I don’t really know, but it wasn’t during CO2-induced global warming. Warming followed by cooling (globally) is arguably the best recipe for heavy rains - just like with a cold front (locally), you have warm moist air precipitated by cold air.
Moving on to the 3 papers/talks, I want to start with Green and Armstrong. Here in RealClimate they have been criticized for translating their forecasting criteria formulated in the econometric world to the climatic world, as if that’s a bit of a dirty trick. As an interested outsider, I think that forecasting is forecasting - there are data, models, parameters, and errors between the data and the models. I don’t care if the models come from physics or economics, I just want a sound forecast. I am amazed that there could be so many forecasting principles as they claim, and I wonder how many forecasters in any sphere of life could pass a test of so much red tape. Nevertheless, if real climatologists want to convince me, then they need to answer the searching questions posed by that paper of Green and Armstrong; as others have said, they are at liberty to give their own versions of scores if they can demonstrate that G and A’s ignorance of climatology led to unreasonable assessments.
The second paper is Lockwood and Frohlich. I found this really interesting reading, and it certainly notched my personal CO2 brigadometer up a bit for a few days. But then I thought, if very little of the 11/22-year solar signal comes through in global temperatures, what effects there are must be smeared over longer time spans. So if the sun was extra active from (say) 1910 to 1985, then with the smearing time lag, one would expect global temperatures to rise beyond 1985, flatten off, and then fall. There’s a lot of argument over whether 2001-2007 data represents a flattening, but that’s the way it looks to me. I would be tempted to argue that this British summer represents a cooling, but that would be parochial, since it’s hot in Eastern Europe, and ‘hadcrut3′ is still holding up reasonably.
The third item is slides from David Archibald’s talk in Melbourne in June 2007. I had never seen this relationship between solar cycle length and temperature before - that an early (late) onset of a solar cycle is correlated with an increase (decrease) in global temperatures. There are things I don’t understand about this, especially the time lag, so I am trying to follow up some of the references to understand more. Possibly Archibald is over-egging it, especially since there are wide variations in the predictions for the sunspot count in Cycle 24, but a real downturn in the Sun would be a wonderful test between the two brigades. Lockwood and Frohlich say the Sun turned down from 1985 onwards, but by the measure of cycle length, Cycle 23 started earlier than average in 1996, so it can only be after Cycle 24 starts late (probably around 12.0-12.5 years compared with a mean 10.6) that there will be a concensus that the Sun is on the way down. Then, if the temperatures do not dip by as much as Archibald predicts (for given lateness of cycle), or even increase, we will be able to get a better estimate of how much effect a doubling of CO2 really has. And then we shall know whether they are right, those correspondents on this site who share thoughts of the ilk “Lockwood and Frohlich have banged in the last nail in the coffin of the solar theory of global warming”.
28 July 2007 at 1:49 PM
Re: #18 (See - owe to Rich)
I too am a statistician (my specialty is time series analysis), and I confess that certain aspects of your post puzzle me. There’s too much covered to ask all my questions in a single response without begin excessively long, so I’ll start at the beginning. You say:
How did you arrive at these figures? Straightforward linear regression of HadCRUT3 data from 1970 to 2000 gives a slope of 0.016 deg.C/yr, not 0.0133, and would imply an overall warming for the three decades of 0.048 deg.C, not 0.4.
Your estimate of 0.0133 deg.C/yr as the “present” warming rate (or even the rate from 1970 to 2000) is considerably in error. Furthermore, since 1970 global warming has shown statistically significant acceleration. The overall rate over the last 30 years is more like 0.018 deg.C/yr, and the rate since the year 2000 is 0.020 deg.C/yr according to HadCRUT3, and a whopping 0.031 deg.C/yr according to GISS. As you say, you’re not expected to know the details of the physics or the models, but as a statistician, I do expect you to know these details. So again — I’m sincerely curious — how did you arrive at your figures?
28 July 2007 at 3:41 PM
Good post. It’s along the lines I’ve been thinking from the beginning: we need a holistic approach.
I’d been mainly telling people, that measures to reduce GHGs, also reduce lots of other pollution (which cause harm & death), and have other positive non-environmental benefits, like:
1. saving money without lower living standards or economic productivity (up to perhaps a 3/4 reduction of GHGs or more)
2. improving health/spirits and crime and taxes for road building/repair (by off-setting some driving with walking/cycling)
3. reduce wars over oil
4. etc
But even the internal issue of GHGs & climate change are extremely complex.
I know science trudges along slowly and gets to the complex picture only after dealing with the more simple pictures. But we can conceive that our world is indeed exceedinly complex….so much so that, as anthropologist Roy Rappaport suggested, we need to hold the environment in awe and respect. Because we don’t know it all (& perhaps never will), and we should be careful in our dealings with it.
28 July 2007 at 4:30 PM
Re #18. It is not obvious that global warming will be beneficial for plant life on earth. For example see http://www.newswithviews.com/Peterson/rosalind4.htm for an indication of how trees are dying. The critical condition of the amazon is well documented.
In terms of your Q4, the situation we face is an emergency.
It is a bit like driving a car on motorway at 70 mph and seeing a pile up in a front at a distance of 96 metres and knowing that your stopping distance is about 96 metres. One might be tempted to slam on the brakes.
28 July 2007 at 4:41 PM
I recently read something on the heretofore unperceived threat of water dimers. I am wondering if Gavin-or anyone-would care to comment on this issue.
28 July 2007 at 5:45 PM
Re #s 18 + 19: Uses of phrases such as “the wealth of knowledge both here and on ClimateAudit.org” and “CO2 brigade” give away the game, IMHO. A PhD in mathematics honestly approaching the climate change issue for the first time would know better than to engage in the sort of cherry-picking of evidence and out-and-out asyllogisms evidenced throughout #18. Tamino’s pointing out of some pretty basic stats errors are the icing on the cake.
28 July 2007 at 8:52 PM
Re # 18 a Ph.D in mathematical statistics
I don’t mean to be flippant, but isn’t “mathematical statistics” redundant? Is there any kind of statistics that isn’t mathematical?
28 July 2007 at 9:11 PM
Paul (#22) wrote:
I hope that someone will comment on their specific application to greenhouse gas theory. Doing just a little research, I found that these weak hydrogen couplings between water molecules isn’t as well understood as we might like, and that part of the problem involves the interaction of the light hydrogen atoms with zero-point energy - that is, the virtual particle buzz thats always there even when space is “empty.”
I suppose the uncertainty involved in its interaction with the zero-point might help to explain why is able to amplify the chirality of the weak force at roughly ten times the magnitude that was predicted, and perhaps why we are able to freeze at room temperature with an electrical field at one one-thousand the strength that had been predicted.
Crazy stuff.
Going off of what Eli wrote earlier this afternoon (A Saturated Gassy Argument, comment 306), it would appear that they result in additional dimensions in the phase space description of water as it exists in the transitory dimer state. And it appears to be a bit of a black hole in our knowledge for the time being, but would apparently operate in the far IR spectrum.
At first glance a 2004 paper didn’t look that promising - but I am no expert.
However, doing a little more digging, I ran across something which is clearly related and from the perspective of theoretical understanding looks quite promising - which I had brought up previously - although I didn’t have the paper at the time.
Here is the write-up for it:
The paper is free access to any and all on the other side.
If you are interested in the other topics, you might check out the following:
2006 (technical)
P-Violation Manifested at the Molecular Level - A Simple Means for an Absolute Definition of “Left” vs. “Right”
Avshalom C. Elitzur, Meir Shinitzky
arXiv:physics/0601010 v1 3 Jan 2006
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0601/0601010.pdf
Number 742 #1, August 19, 2005 by Phil Schewe and Ben Stein
Room-Temperature Ice in Electric Fields
http://www.aip.org/pnu/2005/split/742-1.html
Oh, and an interesting implication of parity-violation…
2005 (technical)
Subtle differences in structural transitions between poly-L- and poly-D-amino acids of equal length in water
Yosef Scolnik,et al
Received 3rd October 2005, Accepted 21st November 2005
First published as an Advance Article on the web 5th December 2005
DOI: 10.1039/b513974k
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayArticleForFree.cfm?doi=b513974k&JournalCode=CP
29 July 2007 at 12:51 AM
PS (post #25)
It should be obvious, but I was still tuning into KWTC when I started writing the post. A little of that all too common static. Or perhaps it has something to do with the structured water in one of my brain cells or within the hydrophilic catalytic core of some ribozyme…
Who knows?
The second sentence should read:
29 July 2007 at 1:35 AM
Re: 18
“The third item is slides from David Archibald’s talk in Melbourne in June 2007. I had never seen this relationship between solar cycle length and temperature before”
Archibald’s paper, published in Energy and and Environment, was called by one commentator “The worst climate science paper ever, of all time, anywhere” (see: http://n3xus6.blogspot.com/2007/02/dd.html), and if you had taken the time to read it, as a PhD, you should have seen several of the most glaring statistical errors it is possible to make.
Here are a few of the howlers:
- Instead of using the world wide temperature, from say GISS or Hadley, he choses a total of five stations. Yes five, all in the within several hundred kilometers from each other in the South Eastern United States.
- The stations chosen buck the trend of increasing temperatures in the later half of the twentieth century. The stations chosen indicate lower temperatures in the later part of the twentieth century, which is not reflected in the vast majority of stations worldwide. Since so few met stations were chosen, one has to wonder if they were chosen so that they would fit Archibald’s argument.
- In order to predict the temperature response to the changing solar cycle length, he uses a single temperature station, (De Bilt in the Netherlands). Not even 5 stations. A single station.
- He then decides that the correlation between De Bilt and the solar cycle length is good (but fails to mention the R^2 value, because the correlation is poor). He also uses cherry picks data from the complete set of temperature records from the station. This is misleading and wrong. When the full data set is used, the R^2 value
for the correlation is only 0.0177.
- Archibald then predicts a reduction in temperature of 1.5C over the next solar cycle. He claims he can do this due to correlation with cycle amplitude, but then presents a graph of solar cycle length to illustrate the correlation. He offers no explaination. He also has used very strange predictions of the solar cycle.
In short, this paper is weak as starbucks coffee, and citing it is unlikely to earn you any credibility. As one who has studied stats, you should probably be able to pick these errors from the paper without difficulty.
-
29 July 2007 at 1:54 AM
Re: #16 If you are in the US, then you can’t increase fish consumption unless some other country
volunteers to decrease its consumption because the US is a net fish importer by about
2.4 billion pounds — http://www.st.nmfs.gov/st1/fus/fus06/fus_2006.pdf
Fish farming, as currently practiced (usually with carnivorous fish), is a net consumer of fish,
not a producer.
Re: #6. The list of anthropogenic methane sources omitted the biggest source: livestock.
Researchers at Sydney University in conjunction with the Australian Conservation Foundation
have recently put a very good eco-calculator on line. Pretend you live in Australia and
see what influences your personal carbon footprint:
http://www.acfonline.org.au/custom_atlas/index.html
For most people on the planet (except the sort of people who perform at “Live Earth”) what
they eat is the principle determinant of their own personal climate forcing footprint. This is
usually obscured because most studies simply don’t follow the full production chain.
Even the much publicised Japanese “Life Cycle Analysis” looking at the ghg emission intensity of beef
stopped at the farm gate — no refridgeration, no abattoir costs, etc etc. It still found
the emissions cost of a kg of beef to be about double that of aluminium.
Lastly: back to #16, No you don’t need to be a vegan to lower you emissions substantially, just
like I am not car-free, but I use a bicycle for most of my transport and my car is
small and old. Lastly, given
that vegetarians/vegans have lower rates of most diseases than meat eaters, then whatever these
risks are, they are smaller than the risks associated with meat — like heart disease,
colorectal cancer, the destruction of the amazon, etc.
29 July 2007 at 8:46 AM
re#21, your link is a giggle. Damn those jet contrails. Loved the references, and 5 year old tree photos.
You were joking, Michael?
29 July 2007 at 10:17 AM
I’ll go with the vegan diet the day the vegans agree to shoot the 100 million cattle that call the good old USA home.
And say goodbye to wool.
And having human beings live longer does what to greenhouse gas production?
And how many ruminants do countries that eat little meat have? Not eating them is enough. That really does nothing much at all. All the grain will still be needed for ethanol, so that won’t stop. Additional fossil fuels will be burned to add the mountains of vegetables that will be needed to replace meat calories. The net benefit is unlikely to be as advertised.
How many greenhouse gases will all these long-lived people be producing when they’re vegetating in nursing homes until they’re 110?
You have to kill ruminants them to stop them from belching.
29 July 2007 at 10:29 AM
Gavin: Improved Modeling of Tropics Temperatures?
… and IR absorption by clouds?
Water dimer absorption of visible light
J. Hargrove
Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 7, 11123–11140, 2007
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11123/2007/acpd-7-11123-2007-print.pdf?FrameEngine=false
Exciting stuff… Just a guess, but this might help with modeling of the Indian Monsoon and the western edge of the Tibetean Plateau - which has been a bit of a problem for all models so far.
29 July 2007 at 11:57 AM
Re #30: [You have to kill ruminants them to stop them from belching.]
Not that I’m buying into the “vegetarianism stops climate change” argument, but you don’t have to kill them all unless you want an immediate effect. You just stop letting them breed, and in a decade or two you’ll find the numbers greatly reduced.
Of course you could short-circuit the vegetarian phase, and just apply the same logic to H. sapiens
29 July 2007 at 12:32 PM
Just another reason for the denialists claims we should eradicate termites, rather than reduce emmissions. But there’s an even more ominous hurdle, from AnnCoulter sychophant:
Mr.Magoo
Location: California
Mr Magoo was blind, wasn’t he?
29 July 2007 at 2:16 PM
Re 33. wildlifer’s comment. The Ann Coulters of this world have one main interest;to draw attention to themselves, regardless of who might get hurt by the outrageous comments. It’s good for her book sales. I don’t know of anyone who has less credentials to call global warming “claptrap”.
Plant species are migrating northward in the northern hemisphere, as are animal species. Does the cockroach have more of sense about global climate change than the Cockburn and Coulter. I’m afraid so.
The subject of this latest article prompted me to read up on the strength of methane gas and I found that the enhanced greenhouse effect of a molecule of methane is about 8 times that of a molecule of CO2 (”Global Warming”- by John Houghton p. 42), but when an index called Global Warming Potential(GWP) is used,which measures the instant release of 1 kg of a gas to that of the release of 1 kg of carbon dioxide, then methane has a GWP of 23, since the atomic weight of methane is 16/44 or 36% of that of CO2(same source as above Table 10.2).This is for a time horizon of 100 years. GWPs have to be used with caution because GWPs for different time horizons are very different.
29 July 2007 at 2:36 PM
Paul (#22) wrote:
Paul,
I believe this is what you were refering to:
Water dimer absorption of visible light
J. Hargrove
Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 7, 11123–11140, 2007
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11123/2007/acpd-7-11123-2007-print.pdf?FrameEngine=false
It is from the article I mentioned in #31.
The good news is that this is something climatologists can use to objectively improve the predictive power of climate models - assuming its real. And as Hansen has pointed out, they tend not to feel comfortable in suggesting the existence of vague threats - but only in stating that there exist certain well-defined threats which they can identify.
If it is real, then it will be great that we have identified it sooner rather than later.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we have made another one of those big discoveries regarding water. As I’ve said, its crazy stuff!
[Response: Don’t get too excited. The dimer idea has come up repeatedly in the past as a solution to the ‘anomalous absorption’ issue that was all the rage a decade ago. Since then, most of the anomaly has disappeared (mainly due to improved understanding of aerosol effects), but the dimer idea persists. A brief conversation with our radiation people left me with the impression that the only substantial effects can be seen in the microwave region, which is irrelevant for climate purposes. This latest paper seems interesting, but there are a couple of howlers in the intro and conclusions (confusion of a short-wave absorption effect with the long wave water vapour feedback - SW effects do not contribute to the greenhouse effect!), and so I’d wait for the reviews to come in before assessing it’s worth. The biggest problem is that existing line-by-line models do a really good job of explaining what is seen either at the ground or at the surface, and so there isn’t any huge discrepancy that requires exotic new physics to explain. Having said that, this isn’t my field and I’m open to being corrected by people who know better. - gavin]
29 July 2007 at 4:08 PM
gavin (inset to #35) wrote:
Sounds good enough for me.
I will let the experts worry about it, at least until they say there is something to worry about.
29 July 2007 at 4:36 PM
Re #18, the writer seems to have some sincere but easily avoided misunderstandings. Instead of posting here, the writer should first read more carefully the basics, for example in the IPCC reports (it won’t take two months!). For me the first tipoff was in Q1, the phrase,
“I believe that it is important to establish a non-controversial set of data, for example…” (etc.)
The writer evidently is unaware of the enormous efforts by literally thousands of people to establish a land temperature record independent of urban effects etc. The writer is not even aware that one can leave out all the land-based data altogether, just use ocean data, and get entirely convincing evidence of the warming since 1970 and its relationship to greenhouse gases (since the pattern seen in the oceans cannot be explained by solar forcing).
One could go on with the lack of knowledge shown elsewhere, but why bother. The writer should go and learn the basics before trying all this fancy number stuff.
29 July 2007 at 4:37 PM
Gavin (inset to #35) wrote:
I have run across some new stuff being found out there, but it makes sense that it would be more or less irrelevant with respect to climatology. Time to start digging for what they’ve found on aerosols.
29 July 2007 at 4:37 PM
Vegan diets arguments are complicated by nature of the meat production itself. If the beef is grain-fed or grown on lands that could be ploughed then this is an inefficient use of earths resources. On the other hand, I dont see many crop options for land around here where sheep are raised and the Soviet union had some disastrous forays into cropping steppe grazing lands.
29 July 2007 at 4:51 PM
Re 29. Whoops, wrong link. Trees in UK: see report “A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare” by Woodland Trust http://www.woodland-trust.org.uk/publications/publicationsmore/climatechangereport.pdf There are many other studies of specific species being impacted in different ways.
29 July 2007 at 5:32 PM
[[Personally, I am quite happy for England to be a little warmer, and I am happy if more CO2 helps all those beautiful plants to grow.]]
Will you be happy if European agriculture crashes due to droughts in continental interiors and more violent weather along coastlines? And would you be as happy if you lived in Bangladesh, or Florida?
29 July 2007 at 5:34 PM
[[I recently read something on the heretofore unperceived threat of water dimers. I am wondering if Gavin-or anyone-would care to comment on this issue.]]
Water dimers are the probable (not certain yet, I don’t think, although I could be wrong on that) cause of the “continuum absorption” in the big 8-12 micron IR window in Earth’s atmosphere. But their prevalence is most likely a function of the prevalence of water vapor in general in the atmosphere. I don’t see how you could reduce one without reducing the other. Or am I missing your point?
29 July 2007 at 6:49 PM
Regarding the various veggie arguments. The post was about
ozone. Methane produces ozone in the troposphere and water
vapour in the stratosphere. Its a triple nasty whether it
comes from leaky gas pipes or livestock and suggestions to
reduce livestock are as clear and simple as suggestions to
fix leaky gas fields in the soviet union (and elsewhere) or
drive less and be more energy efficient. What is it about
suggestions to eat less meat that prompts such a defensive
reaction?
29 July 2007 at 7:14 PM
I’m probably mistaken, but I thought that ozone’s main indirect GHG forcing effect was due to the fact that it retards the atmospheric decomposition of methane. It’s a pretty fascinating subject and I’m hoping that RC or a certain wily rabett can explain the dynamics in an idiot-proof manner…
30 July 2007 at 4:54 AM
Re #36 Yes, I think that’s pretty much right: if the only sources of meat and dairy were land that couldn’t be cropped (used for ruminants), and food waste (fed to pigs or chickens), then we’d see an enormous reduction in both methane emissions and animal suffering. One complication is the use of animals for labour and as sources of manure in many countries - not easy to find affordable substitutes, or ones that would not cause worse environmental problems, but as discussed on this site some while ago, there’s a lot of scope for reduction e.g. in India.
Re #30 A fine example of the sort of defensiveness any suggestion of changed diets evokes.
[I’ll go with the vegan diet the day the vegans agree to shoot the 100 million cattle that call the good old USA home.]
I’d have no problem with that. Admittedly I’m not a vegan, and I imagine many vegans would, but even if you just stopped cattle breeding the problem would solve itself within a few years.
[And say goodbye to wool.] The market for wool is in decline anyway - sheep are mostly kept for meat these days.
[And having human beings live longer does what to greenhouse gas production?]
So you’re against medical research, improved diets generally, reducing accidents and smoking, etc., I presume?
[And how many ruminants do countries that eat little meat have? Not eating them is enough. That really does nothing much at all. All the grain will still be needed for ethanol, so that won’t stop. Additional fossil fuels will be burned to add the mountains of vegetables that will be needed to replace meat calories. The net benefit is unlikely to be as advertised.]
For reasons discussed previously on this site, biofuels are almost certainly not a good idea from a GHG emission perspective, but if the grain were used for ethanol it would at least not be producing methane. As for the “mountains of vegetables needed”, this is just nonsense. It is enormously inefficient to grow crops to feed to animals and produce meat rather than for humans to eat directly. For cattle, I think the loss in terms of calories is about 90% - less for pigs and chickens but still substantial.
[How many greenhouse gases will all these long-lived people be producing when they’re vegetating in nursing homes until they’re 110?]
So is it mass suicide you’re advocating, or genocide?
[You have to kill ruminants them to stop them from belching.]
True, but the amount they belch depends on how much (and what) they are fed. Intensively reared ruminants are fed enormously amounts to maximise the rate of meat and dairy production.
30 July 2007 at 5:16 AM
RE #30 [I’ll go with the vegan diet the day the vegans agree to shoot the 100 million cattle that call the good old USA home.]
Incidentally, notice the structural and emotional similarity to all the statements of the “I’ll take global warming seriously when Al Gore goes to live in a cave” variety, coming from what I’d call “amateur denialists” (members of the public making casual denialist comments).
30 July 2007 at 8:29 AM
RE #37 - Nick Gotts Says:
You are way off base. I do not deny the science of global warming in any respect, and see little in it to be very skeptical about.
Animal populations that are not harvested tend to increase in size, so a vegetarian diet is likely to result in more enteric fermentation, not less. You have to kill a ruminant to prevent its production of methane.
And my family has supported Al Gore’s family politically since Al Gore was his father’s snot-nosed kid.
30 July 2007 at 8:44 AM
Re: #28
Are we individuals capable of influencing the state of the planet by our lifestyle choices or are we aggregates (countries) who must act in a unified fashion in order to have a positive effect?
Quote:
“If you are in the US, then you can’t increase fish consumption unless some other country volunteers to decrease its consumption because the US is a net fish importer by about 2.4 billion pounds — http://www.st.nmfs.gov/st1/fus/fus06/fus_2006.pdf
Fish farming, as currently practiced (usually with carnivorous fish), is a net consumer of fish, not a producer.”
You imply that if you eat fish and live in the US, the fish must result from aquaculture; furthermore you imply that all locations in the US suffer equally from a shortage of fish and must import it from other countries.
Perhaps tamino lives in Vermont and decides to go trout fishing in the local stream on Fridays? Maybe he will hunt a moose, have it butchered, and freeze the meat to use for the rest of the year. Every one of us has to make judgment calls and decide how best to improve our lifestyle–based on our individual circumstances–to make a positive impact.
30 July 2007 at 9:00 AM
Also, recent research done on dairy cows in California indicates cattle fed quality diets produce less methane than grass-fed range cattle.
30 July 2007 at 9:16 AM
Re #47 True. But assuming this research is correct, which seems intuitively likely (ruminants house methanogens as part of a complex symbiosis with various bacteria that allows them to make use of cellulose), what follows? Whatever they’re fed on, the enormous numbers of cattle kept to provide people with meat and dairy products are going to be an important source of methane.
30 July 2007 at 9:35 AM
re #47 [RE #37 - Nick Gotts Says:
You are way off base. I do not deny the science of global warming in any respect, and see little in it to be very skeptical about.
Animal populations that are not harvested tend to increase in size, so a vegetarian diet is likely to result in more enteric fermentation, not less. You have to kill a ruminant to prevent its production of methane.
And my family has supported Al Gore’s family politically since Al Gore was his father’s snot-nosed kid.]
Most of this is simply irrelevant, since I neither implied nor believed that you are a global warming sceptic, nor anything about your attitude to Al Gore. Rather, I think the rhetoric you’re coming out with on this specific issue shows marked similarities to that we repeatedly encounter among denialists.
The vast majority of ruminant-derived methane production is from domestic animals, mostly cattle. Their huge populations are almost entirely dependent on human-provided food supply (this is largely true even of grass-fed range cattle, when we consider the destruction both of forests to produce ranges, of competitor species, and of predators). Domestic ruminants produce far more methane per head than wild ruminants, because they have been bred to maximise the rate at which they turn their food into meat and milk, rather than survival and reproduction under natural conditions. The populations of wild ruminants are of course limited by a combination of limited food supply and predation. If we decided to reduce the number of domestic ruminants, the only sensible course would be to continue to slaughter the existing animals for food, while reducing the breeding rate until the desired reduction in numbers was achieved.
30 July 2007 at 11:01 AM
re: #45 Nick
“For reasons discussed previously on this site, biofuels are almost certainly not a good idea from a GHG emission perspective, but if the grain were used for ethanol it would at least not be producing methane.”
I think this is an over-generalization, albeit a common one.
Ethanol is ethanol.
a) Brazil has done well with sugar cane.
b) IMHO, corn-based ethanol is a transient approach. Corn wasn’t bred for this, and it’s seriously non-optimal, but the corn infrastructure is there, people are doing corn ethanol for a raft of different reasons, and the efficiencies are improving. If doing corn ethanol for a while helps get the distribution infrastructure in place, and induces a big increase in Flex-Fuel Vehicles, that’s a Really Good Thing.
c) But, in the long-run, we’re likely to use other C4 crops, like my current favorite, miscanthus. We’ve had millennia of food crop breeding. We’re in for a period of intense design of fuel crops, as there is a lot of work to do, as we’ll need variants tuned to different climates and soils. We’ll have to build infrastructure, and likely optimize harvester design for this.
http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/miscanthus/miscanthus.html
http://miscanthus.uiuc.edu/
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-07/asop-iso070607.php
[This says miscanthus looks about 2X more productive than switchgrass.]
30 July 2007 at 12:40 PM
Re #52. I’m sceptical, but certainly prepared to take another look at the biofuels issue. In the current context, if you’re right this would strengthen the case for a shift toward vegetable-based diets, since there would be competition for land between food and biofuel, and the amount needed for the former increases with the proportion of animal products eaten.
30 July 2007 at 2:40 PM
OK, it is good to see posts about GH gases other than CO2. What is confusing in reports about those, is claims like “X is N times more potent than CO2 in producing global warming…” but they don’t specify the calibration: Do they mean, comparing the same ppm by mass/vol., the same gas pressure, etc?
[Response: The only calibration that makes sense is in terms of the radiative forcing - and usually the global mean number. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/attribution-of-20th-century-climate-change-to-cosub2sub/ - gavin]
30 July 2007 at 4:11 PM
Re #37
“(since the pattern seen in the oceans cannot be explained by solar forcing)” - could you possible elaborate a bit on that statement, e.g. which pattern and which kind of solar forcing??
30 July 2007 at 4:17 PM
re: #53 Nick
Some of the negative press on biofuels derives from the famous Pimentel/Patzek paper, http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/Biofuels/NRRethanol.2005.pdf.
However, their negative results seem to be outliers compared to other studies.
One meta-study is this one in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/311/5760/506
There’s a nice chart on p 18 of:
http://enews.lbl.gov/Publications/Director/assets/docs/03_20_2007_EBI_Forum.pdf
and p.21 has nice photos of switch grass and miscanthus (this stuff grows like the bamboo that some previous owner planted on our property, i.e., indefatigable).
p.26 has some nice charts from BP about expected cost reductions of biofuels.
===
Bottom-line: unsurprisingly, there are plenty of disagreements about exact numbers for relatively immature technology, but some serious people (including some very smart local venture capitalists) think biofuels will be economic and important. In particular, from both farming & semiconductor experience, one always has to allow for learning-curve and volume improvements over time, and not get hung up on early-stage economics.
As for methane, since many people wish to keep their beef & milk, at least people are starting to use approaches to lessen the amount of methane added to the atmosphere:
http://www.epa.gov/methane/sources.html
and certainly people are generating electricity from cow-generated methane in poop-filled lagoons. Note: we eat mostly veggies, fruit, grains, and fish, so this isn’t me wishing to preserve cows
30 July 2007 at 4:55 PM
Nick Gotts — I recommend you follow
http://biopact.com
for awhile to learn some approaches to sensible, even carbon-negative, biofuels.
30 July 2007 at 8:46 PM
I admit I have not read all of the above posts. But isn’t any one concerned that this article is about a computor modeled plants response to a computor modeled change in ozone levels. Best as I could tell no living plants were used in this study.
30 July 2007 at 11:20 PM
Re # 58 computer models
Yeah, but the models are based on established scientific principles and documented responses based on actual experiments on plants. That is the nature of models - it is best to consider them hypotheses that need to be tested, either experimentally, or naturally over time. The problem is, if we wait to see how plants in their natural environments respond to increased CO2 and ozone levels for, say, a decade or two, and the models turn out to be correct, it may be too late to take corrective measures.
30 July 2007 at 11:25 PM
Er, Chuck, nope. You can look this stuff up. Field biologists have been doing this kind of experiment for a very long time with all sorts of different tweaks.
Tell ya a story: When I was a kid in North Carolina, in the 1950s, some botanists decided to test the notion that Civil Defense was telling everyone, that a nuclear war would be survivable, wouldn’t hurt the plants much, the people would just have to stay in fallout shelters for a couple of weeks then come out and everything would be fine. They took a gamma source out into the piney woods (in a well fenced off area) and put it down a well and cranked it up and down to provide the same radiation dose in the immediate environment that was predicted for a one-shot atomic war. The results made the cover of Scientific American — a big, brown, dead circle of killed trees, killed grass, killed soil, around the source. Oops. It caused the whole notion of winning an atomic war to be reconsidered. Good thing, that. Nothing like actually testing what you’re being told to find out if it’s right.
Similarly botanists have been putting big tents over all kinds of plants and environments and boosting carbon dioxide, varying humidity, and so forth, for years. The model study documents exactly which of that kind of study they looked at, to get an idea whether their model was getting it right.
31 July 2007 at 2:39 AM
Could someone please comment on James Hansen’s report in New Scientist (25 July) that the IPCC is far too conservative and that a business-as-usual scenario is more likely to give a sea level rise of 5m in the next 100 years.
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming–unless-we-act-now.html
31 July 2007 at 4:13 AM
John Mashey, David B. Benson - Thanks for the refs. on biofuels, which I’ll follow up. I’ll send anything further on this to the “Friday roundup”.
31 July 2007 at 8:28 AM
Re: 59 Except of course that ozone levels have been falling for 20 plus years, at least in the US and Europe. Nox emissions are down as well, and methane in the atmosphere has leveled off. We are already taking the corrective measures and they are working.
31 July 2007 at 8:46 AM
Is there an accepted reason for why methane has leveled off (the corrective measure)?
[Response: Not really. There has been speculation that it was related to the economic downturn after the collapse of Communism, and there are ongoing methane reductions through landfill management, flaring and reducing pipeline leaks, but there are too many uncertain terms in the total budget for a clear answer to emerge. Note however, that stabilisation only implies that the increased sources are balanced by increased sinks (atmos. oxidation), not that the sources are back down to pre-industrial levels. This Sci. Am. piece has more details. -gavin]
31 July 2007 at 10:33 AM
Gavin - OT, but looking at the monthly global temperature anomaly plots produced by UAH, GISS, RSS, HadCRUT3, and NCDC, almost all of the monthly high temperature spikes occur in January. Are you aware of a reason for this? It seems odd given the different methods of measuring temperature and the five databases involved. Thanks.
[Response: Maximum usage of AC units obviously! Seriously though, you are probably seeing the impact of ice-albedo feedbacks on the NH land - warming is greatest there and during winter. You could make a case that direct CO2 effects are strongest during the coldest months and the effect of water vapour feedback more important in the drier periods. However, I haven’t seen that quantified. - gavin]
31 July 2007 at 12:08 PM
Re # 59 Hank,
I think your clarifications were covered by my comment that:
“the models are based on established scientific principles and documented responses based on actual experiments on plants.”
The “mesocosm” experiments you described (”big tents over all kinds of plants and environments”) are still community-level experimental manipulations that don’t necessarily tell how an intact forest (or grassland, or whatever) ecosystem will respond over decade- or longer time scales. I’m not disputing the methods or conclusions of the Sich et al paper. But, I think Gary made a valid comment.
31 July 2007 at 12:31 PM
Gary “Best as I could tell …” can read online or download from the same page where the abstract appears the details he didn’t find about the plant studies. I tried a longer post quoting from them with pointers, but it’s not showed up.
Gary: The models were evaluated compared to real plant studies. The supplemental material for the paper is online as a PDF file available to nonsubscribers, via links on the same page as the abstract.
See that — it has descriptions and references.
31 July 2007 at 12:55 PM
You do realize that if the temperature proxy being used is not actually measuring temperature or the instrumented readings for some reason are wrong, most of this discussion is meaningless?
Briffa (2006) The spatial extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years (http:www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006.html) clearly shows that the temperatures decreased from an early 20th century high and that the proxies and the instrumented readings do not match (or are even close).
With the out the connection between abnormal warming now and increased CO2, then what does O2 matter? Without graphing on the instrumented reading to the proxies, then what is being shown is that the climate is not as sensitive as we were lead to believe and CO2 will cause some warming but not the warming that is being proposed.
Please point out where I am wrong on this.
31 July 2007 at 1:06 PM
RE #33, the religious right’s denial of GW or that it’s harmful.
This goes to both behavioral science & religious dimensions of GW. As for the social sci dimension (including the cultural, social, and psychological), people who consider themselves long ago “saved” or deeply religious might be less amenable to believing their GHGs could cause harm, than others who see themselves as less holy and more sin-prone. For instance, I became a GW activist around 1990, shortly after (or while) I was undergoing a conversion to a deeper spirituality — and I was already looking at my sins & ways to become a better person, so I was amenable to accepting my fault & responsibility re GW. I wonder if I had undergone that experience a decade earlier, if I would have been as open to accepting GW.
In attribution theory, it is found that people have ways (cognitive manipulations) of downplaying their own failures and inadequacies, & magnifying those of disvalued others. Sort of like focusing on the speck in the other person’s eye, but failing to see the plank in one’s own. In highly complex situations (as in GW in general, and as in this post’s discussion of ozone complications), I think false (self-serving) attributions would surface up even more easily.
RE the religious dimension of GW, I’m sure there’s a method in God’s madness — of allowing humans to cause GW, then deny it — though we can’t 2nd guess God. However, going beyond “GW is just further sign the Apocalypse upon us” attitude, it occurred to me that perhaps we have come to this era that requires us to truly convert and change, to truly establish a world of love & peace. Up till now it’s been a lot of preaching, & good practices on the part of a few saints here & there. All the previous world and personal problems (that God as allowed) have somewhat helped some to “convert,” turn to righteousness. But obviously not much, or not enough for this problem of GW at hand.
So now to stop global harm from global warming, we all (or most of us) will have to mitigate and stop killing by turning to a more perfect life. That’s the only way. And if this conversion is profound (which I think it has to be to work - along the lines of a revitalization or social movement), people would reduce their meat consumption and live more simply not just to save lives by mitigating GW, but because of a desire for holiness, whole-ness, holism, and I’d think this would be a joy to do so, not just a drudgery.
I’m thinking of my husband’s uncle — who was a parish priest in a boondocks village in India. He never thought of himself as a vegetarian & knew nothing about GW, but in his holy simplicity, he rarely ate meat, ate very little food, in fact (a strong wind would blow him away — but he lived up to 89), and had only 3 sets of clothing. He never had much money, and what he had, he shared with the needy. He also helped a religious order make a bio-gas pit, where the villagers put in dung and converted it to gas for cooking and electric generation for the few tube lights the village had.
Perhaps GW could be the instigator for humanity of a true conversion to a truly holy lifestyle — not just a fake, self-righteous religiosity that serves to make one feel superior, and cover up one’s own flaws and sins.
But the 1st step is accepting what we are doing is wrong (or at the least could be wrong). And that is a very difficult hurdle.
31 July 2007 at 1:44 PM
Vernon,
That’s almost a correct cite. It gets a 404 Not Found result.
That means it’s wrong, but keep trying.
This is a correct cite, that actually gets you to the page. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/osborn2006/osborn2006.html
You make some claims about what you believe is on that page.
I don’t see what you claim to see.
What are you talking about?
Did you download the data file and do something with it?
Did you read the actual Science paper?
31 July 2007 at 1:55 PM
Vernon, I gave you more cite help in the Friday Roundup thread where you were talking about this. Let’s not confuse the ozone thread.
31 July 2007 at 3:02 PM
Vernon said in 68:
“Please point out where I am wrong on this.”
You are wrong in this that you do read the actual articles you claim to support your opinions. By reading the articles it is very easy to see, that you distort their conclusions completely.
Other posters here have educated you in detail, in what respect your opinions are based on the twisted denialist arguments. Please, do not degrade you by twisting the truth yourself.
31 July 2007 at 3:18 PM
Vernon,
If you want people to keep pointing out to you the same things and correcting the same errors as in the Friday Roundup, take it over there. I might even oblige you. Or perhaps not - I find repetition so… repetitive.
You might want to find another link before posting it on the Friday Roundup: NOAA seems to have noticed you were trying to use the page and took it down.
I suppose its part of that conspiracy… You know the one: they keep adjusting the temperatures upwards to a greater and greater degree in order to create the impression that temperatures keep rising. They are probably shining hot spotlights on the Arctic sea-ice and glaciers, too. Or perhaps they are just editing all those images. You might want to do some digging there, Vernon.
Anyway, see you back at the Friday Roundup, perhaps.
31 July 2007 at 5:24 PM
Re #68:
“Briffa … clearly shows that the temperatures decreased from an early 20th century high and that the proxies and the instrumented readings do not match (or are even close).”
A pdf of the paper is available at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/311/5762/841.pdf
Nowhere in the paper is there any graph of temperatures, proxy or instrumental. The paper performs a statistical measure of the geographical extent of historical variations of northern hemisphere proxies. The figures in the paper illustrate this geographical extent by displaying the relative fraction of proxy locations which show anomalous variation expressed as standard deviation from the normalized mean.
The authors specifically point out that their results are indicative only of “periods of unusually high or low proxy values rather than as indicative of warm or cool periods”. The comparison with a similar analysis of instrumental records is used to support the argument that (italics added): “analysis of these proxy records is a useful indicator of Northern Hemisphere temperatures”.
31 July 2007 at 5:49 PM
RE:54 There is an index called the Global Warming Potential, which might be used to facilitate trading of emissions reductions among countries and nation by nation rankings of individual contributions to climate change, would be a possible use.
Back in 1992 The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted the index called the Global Warming Potential ( GWP). It’s a weighting factor to allow comparisons between the global warming impact of 1kg of any greenhouse gas compared with 1kg of CO2, and includes a time horizon for which the impact will be felt. An example is that since the 20 year GWP for NO2 is 280, 1kg of NO2 emitted today will have 280 times the global warming effect over the next twenty years as 1kg of CO2 emitted today, or 1kg of NO2 emitted today will have the same effect as a release today of 280kg of CO2 over the next 20 years. A book titled “Introduction To Environmental Engineering and Science” 2nd Ed. by Gilbert M. Masters has some interesting comparisons using the GWP. Methane, for example has a GWP of 56 over a time horizon of 20 years, but decreases to 21 for 100 years.( above ref.- Table 8.6).The difference is due to the longer atmospheric lifetime of CO2.
Here’s an interesting example given in the source cited above- In 1992 anthropogenic emissions of CO2 were approx. 24,000×10^9 kg per year, emissions of CH4 were about 375 X10^9 kg per year. A comparison over a twenty year time span shows:
CO2: GWPx emissions= 1×24,000×10^9=2.4×10^13
CH4: GWPx emissions= 56×375x10^9 =2.1×10^13
In other words the impact on warming of methane is almost as much as CO2 over the next twenty years! But over longer time horizons, CO2 becomes the dominant greenhouse gas. The GWP for methane over a 500 year time horizon is only 6.5.
31 July 2007 at 10:04 PM
Re #69: [RE #33, the religious right’s denial of GW or that it’s harmful.]
In respect of which, those inclined to believe on religious grounds that AGW can’t/won’t happen because “…He designed it and the universe to withstand just about anything humans could do” might want to reflect on the Biblical account of Noah and the Great Flood
31 July 2007 at 10:09 PM
Re 68 Vernon: “Please point out where I am wrong on this.”
If at first you don’t succeed, try spamming another topic, eh Vernon?
Your problem is that you have already reached your conclusion and are 1) looking for data points to cherry pick in support of it, and 2) looking for any _perceived_ chink in the real science in order to use it to discredit evidence that does not support your conclusion. Given that you repeatedly ignore those who make a serious attempt to answer your “questions” it is quite obvious that your sole purpose for posting here is to obfuscate and waste people’s time.
1 August 2007 at 12:30 AM
Vernon said:
I chased his URL to the abstract page and saw no graph of temperature.
Guess this explains why.
Vernon is representative of the people who are going to overturn the work of thousands of climate scientists?
1 August 2007 at 8:49 AM
On #18. A classic howler:
“I am an eminent mathematician (string theorist, thermodynamic engineer,…) and I have some serious objections to the theory of AIDS (Climate, Evolution, …)”
See e.g. Serge Lang (Lubos Motl, Stuart Burgess,…)
1 August 2007 at 9:28 AM
PBS had a piece on the end-Permian extinction last night (7/31/07) on Science Now (also here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3318/01.html )
This could happen to us eventually over the following many thousands of years, but triggered by us in this time period. However, as some have pointed out here, life is now more resilient, so maybe only 70% of all life rather than 95% will go extinct this time around.
I’ve also been reading about dead zones in Oregon & the Gulf of Mexico (the latter largely caused by nitrogen run-off from synthetic fertilizers, but also because the fresh water stays on top, bec there isn’t enough “roiling”?)
I think (I may be wrong) that these synthetic fertilizers are also implicated in GW in several different ways, and the less roiling may be (if not now then later) caused by a slowing or halting of the THC ocean conveyor (which, by the way, no one is talking about how that might make the south a lot hotter, since people here say it won’t make the north a lot cooler, and the 1st law of thermodynamics says that GW heat has to go somewhere — like my home).
1 August 2007 at 11:23 AM
You forgot to add …
“even though I’ve not bothered to take the time to understand the theory I object to”.
1 August 2007 at 12:34 PM
Okay, Mr. Eminent Mathematician, here’s how I deal with it, since I, too, don’t have time or the necessary post doctoral work in climate science to understand the finer intricacies of the matter….
(Of course, I already knew a little about the natural greenhouse effect (that it warmed the earth enough so life could exit) before I learned about anthropogenic global warming…..so perhaps I did have some background that made it easier for me to understand. Too bad others didn’t have such good science classes in high school, or fell asleep during that part.)
Let’s assume for a moment that we are back in 1990, before 1995 when the first climate science studies started coming out at .05 significance on AGW, or before today, when virtually all bonafided, honest climate scientists are now (if not 15 years ago) highly confident AGW is indeed happening, and most agree many consequences and effects are and will be harmful to people (not to mention to much of biota).
So in this heuristic world there are only theorists, neither side with conclusive evidence, debating whether or not AGW (with negative consequences for people) is happening or will happen. Take Pascal’s model (being a statistician, you may have heard of him), and look at the following scenarios to help you decide what to do (mitigate or fail to mitigate):
1. THE FALSE POSITIVE: If AGW is not happening, and we think it is and we mitigate, that will save us money and strengthen the economy, without lowering living standards or productivity …. at least down to reducing GHGs by three-forths with known technology; perhaps there could be further reductions with future tech. We also reduce many many other problems associated with emitting GHGs (e.g., other pollutants, wars for oil, taxes for roads damaged by Hummers and SUVs, etc). Making AGW perhaps be the best fallacy we ever believed in. (Just remember to divest from Exxon early on, and you should be fine.)
2. THE TRUE POSITIVE: AGW is happening & we mitigate. All the benefits above, plus we reduce a serious problem and avoid the worse.
3. THE TRUE NEGATIVE: AGW is not happening and we don’t mitigate. Well, we don’t have problems from GW, but we do run into economic, financial, and political (war) disaster (not to mention all sorts of other environmental harms) from our proligate, wasteful, gluttonous use of energy and resources.
4. THE FALSE NEGATIVE: AGW is happpening, but we fail to mitigate because mathematical statisticians have convinced us not to do so. Not only do we have all the problems listed in #3 from failure to become resource/energy conservative/efficient, but we cause tremendous death and suffering through AGW for people and much of biota after passing the tipping point where nature in response to the warming causes a lot more warming over the next many thousands of years. Of course, when the water warms and oceans go superanoxic leading to massive hydrogen sulfide outgassing, humans can wear gas masks (assuming we’ve saved a few resources to make those gas masks), but gas masks and oxygen tanks for crops in the field, I don’t know about that (see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3318/01.html ).
Oh yeh, that’s right, we haven’t achieved 95% scientific certainty yet on the hydrogen sulfide outgassing mass extinction scenario. It’s just a theory, based on known chemical/biological principles.
1 August 2007 at 12:35 PM
Re 68. Vernon, I have to say that your interpretation of Osborn and Briffa 2006 is certainly creative. Most of the graphs I see show significant positive anomalies late in the 20th century. In particular, I wonder if you read the abstract, which says: “but comparison with instrumental temperaturesshows the spatial extent of recent warmth to be of greater significance than that during the
medieval period.” What is more, I’m going to trust the instrument readings where we have them over the proxies. Certainly they show no reason to believe things are cooling significantly. Moreover, note that O&B specifically smoothe most of their graphs to eliminate trends less than about 20 years. I must say, you work very hard to justify your preconceived notions.
1 August 2007 at 12:51 PM
On my post #75 I unforgiveably didn’t put in the units of the last GWP calculations.
The lines showing the 20 year comparison of CO2 and CH4 should read:
CO2: GWPx emissions= 1×24,000×10^9=2.4×10^13 kgCO2
CH4: GWPx emissions= 56×375×10^9 = 2.1×10^13 kg as CO2
first mistake I ever made(not!)
1 August 2007 at 12:58 PM
[Response: Not really. There has been speculation that it was related to the economic downturn after the collapse of Communism, …”)
Well, I guess perhaps the cowmoonists ceased rumination after the collapse.
1 August 2007 at 2:59 PM
Off topic: I need to find the emissions of diesel per kilwatt hour for Nox and CH4. I’m writing a grant to put solar panels on a school and I want to boast about the amount of emissions we’ll be offsetting. I will appreciate any assistance from the brain trust here.
1 August 2007 at 3:29 PM
What specific fuel and model of diesel generator is the school using, Tavita? Probably the manufacturer of the generator will have the info.
(Assuming you don’t mean you’re using an electric utility that burns diesel, but if you do, the utility should have the info.)
Diesel is a type of engine, and they can run on all sorts of fuel. If you’re using a diesel generator running on biodiesel, for example, that’s going to be very different than one running off of high sulfur #2 diesel typically used for home heating oil.
1 August 2007 at 5:20 PM
Lynn Vincentnathan (#80) wrote:
Actually the problem in Oregon isn’t the fertilizers - with most deadzones which are occuring at present it is, but not in Oregon. In Oregon the problem is that at certain times of the year, the coastal lands warm much more quickly than the coastal waters - and of course there is that lag in the ocean due to its thermal inertia - and the temperature differential should greater the more prolonged the warming trend. The higher temperatures over land result in a low pressure near the coastline - and thus roiling near the coastline.
The roiling dredges up nutrients from below causing a burst of algae growth - giant “blooms” must like those one gets from sewage and fertilzer - but which have been common at certain times in the distant past during earlier instances of rapid global warming. When these die off, their organic decay takes all of the oxygen from the surrounding water - creating the hypoxic conditions which - in the case of Oregon at least - kills off everything except some of the heartiest species. So far, starfish have survived, but even the crabs are dead - for as far as they looked.
The vertical coastal roiling may also warm the shallow water methane hydrates - one of those things we should try and avoid. But the vertical roiling along the coasts will also disturb the oxycline - the boundary between the normally oxygenated waters and the anoxic layer of the deep where one finds the anaerobes - including the sulfate reducers - which also have the ability to render the waters more anoxic.
We have seen thick mats of anaerobes whose growth is promoted both by the increased conditions of anoxia and the nutrients from the algae blooms of the Oregon coastline. They were described as being white - which would be suggestive of sulfate reducers. More recently the Oregon deadzone has been extending into Washington State waters. If I stay here long enough I will probably see it. And I can’t really imagine living anywhere far from the coasts. I love the sea and the port cities too much.
*
Normal ocean circulation and turnover which carries water from the lower latitudes to the higher latitudes is generally good - and currently it has become even more pronounced. Its driven by the temperature differential of between the waters of the higher latitudes and the equatorial latitudes. But there are a number of reasons you want to avoid especially pronounced vertical roiling along the coasts.
1 August 2007 at 5:21 PM
RE: 76
One of the godbotherers (again from chat.anncoulter.com)stated that since he didn’t know the mind of his god, he couldn’t be certain his god didn’t want man to warm the earth ……… That this was all part of “THE PLAN.”
1 August 2007 at 5:41 PM
Hank it’s a diesel generator that the utility uses. The fuel is diesel No. 2 and the generator is a 4 stroke diesel engine made by Deutz Mannheim, Germany.
Thanks for your assistance.
1 August 2007 at 5:41 PM
Is there a simple explanation for the vertical leading of warming in the lower troposphere? Or at least a basic statement of the dominant physical mechanism for it? And is this leading only expected in the tropics, or is it expected at all latitudes?
[Response: Yes. It’s the moist adiabat. This is independent of the mechanism of warming and works for solar driven changes as well as for GHGs. The enhancement of the warming aloft is seen purely as a function of the surface warming and a relative humidity that is roughly constant. Since the humidty is a nonlinear function of temperature the amount of latent heat available for moist convection increases strongly as temperature rises - as that latent heat is condensed in the tropopshere it will increase the temperatures aloft by more than the surface warms. Since moist convection (and the moist adiabat) are predominantly tropical issues, this will be true in the tropics only. - gavin]
1 August 2007 at 6:13 PM
Tavita, this site might have the answer for you (though some of their info is just promised but not yet available online):
http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/altfuel/altfuels.html
1 August 2007 at 6:40 PM
Re #79: I hate to defend a man whose Algebra book caused me so much pain many years ago, but as far as I am aware Serge Lang never suggested that anything he said about either mathematical or non-mathematical topics should be believed on the basis of his prior work. An appeal to lack of authority is every bit as fallacious as an appeal to authority.
1 August 2007 at 8:00 PM
Re: The Attitudes of the “traditionally religious” towards climate change
My last post on this topic for a bit, but…
I would be careful about generalizing too much in this area. There are those who believe that God made the world resilient enough to withstand anything we might throw at it, and thus we couldn’t possibly cause dangerous climate change, there are those who believe that climate change may very well be part of the End Times, but there are also those who believe that this world is a gift which we should cherish and take care of, that we are responsible for taking care of it.
This last attitude is growing even among the Evangelicals. I have seen at least a couple of different evangelical organizations promoting this sort of an approach - and I haven’t been looking but just noticing when I bump into them on the net.
As for myself, although not being traditionally religious, I have always liked the view of the priest in the original Poseidon Adventure - he thought that God wanted and intended for people to do everything the could in the face of any disaster. Then again, he was a bit of a rebel. I think he and I would have some serious differences in politics - but that is probably another topic I should try and avoid.
1 August 2007 at 9:01 PM
Lynn (82), I appreciate your logic structure, but your certainty leads to not well-developed conclusions.
Your conclusion that the world economy will be just peachy if we mitigate GHGs, whether we have to or not(!!), is way obviously blithe and pat, and evidently stems from your view that mitigating AGW will produce a world and economy that you would choose for everybody else so therefore must be great.
1 August 2007 at 9:54 PM
Rod, you’re aware the same people expressed the same doubts about controlling chlorofluorocarbons. Lead. Asbestos. Many other industrial byproducts. And they were wrong. So far they’ve been wrong every single time the business and market people have argued against the health and science people.
If we use the linear trend method of forecasting, assuming things will go on the same as always, you can see it’s most likely the scientists are right this time too. (That’s irony.) The evidence isn’t arguable, though it will always be deniable by individuals who can’t imagine the world could be different than their politics allows them to imagine. Dustbin of history, awaits such believers.
1 August 2007 at 10:43 PM
Re 96 Hank Roberts: “Rod, you’re aware the same people expressed the same doubts about controlling chlorofluorocarbons. Lead. Asbestos. Many other industrial byproducts.”
Not to mention even the Paris sewer system.
2 August 2007 at 12:23 AM
I could not read the entire paper so I don’t know exactly what the researchers said. How big an issue is this? How much effect will it have on the biosphere’s ability to absorb CO2?
Ozone is present when air pollution reaches certain levels. These area are generally urban areas where there is little vegetation. Ozone does drift down wind into non-urban areas but how big are these areas? If am right ozone is very reactive so doesn’t have a long residence time, so how much vegetation will be subject to the negative effects of ozone? If ozone harms a large amount of plants a large amount of CO2 will not be sequestered, but if ozone harms only a relatively small number of plants then only a small amount of CO2 would not be removed from the atmosphere.
Rod B. the claims of economic catastrophe that environmental regulation would have have been proved wrong time and time again. The National Academy of Sciences has researched the costs and benefits of laws that reduce air and water pollution and concluded that the monetary costs of reducing pollution have had substantial positive monetary benefits.
There have been some in the US business community that have come out in favor of laws that will require GW pollution reduction in the US. They think that this will encourage US companies to develop technologies that will make them better able to compete in a global economy that is trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.