It paints a pretty dire picture of life on Earth caused by a 0.25 drop in ocean pH.
nigeljsays
Keith Woollard @147
“So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?
C02 increases, warming, H20 increases. Then as CO2 decreases, (absorbed into natural sinks, rock weathering etc), cooling, H20 then decreases as atmospheric temperatures fall and hold less H20.
Keith Woollardsays
MA, as well as Ray and MAL,
Can we just pretend for the moment that the industrial revolution never happened, or in fact humans if you like.
H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?
Thank you. I am delighted, and encouraged… [not because your idea was flawed ;-)], but that you demonstrated for readers how actual scientific reasoning and discussion is supposed to work.
I think we are all familiar with getting attached to an idea and needing outside input to fully develop it, one way or the other.
Now if only we could get the Denialist idiots to sincerely engage, and admit an error when the evidence is presented… yeah, sure…
zebra,
Sorry for not replying earlier. I had not noticed that post.
However, as far as I am concerned it is not the Denialist idiots, but rather the Scientist idiots who need to engage! Their models are flawed, but they will insist that they are correct.
Perhaps the most obvious error is their denial that the absorption is saturated. At 1km many lines are saturated, most noticeably at 615, 670 and 720 rcm (reciprocal centimetres). See https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijas/2013/503727/fig13/
And the models are underestimating the decline of the Arctic sea ice.
My point is that the greenhouse effect operates in the boundary layer, not at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). The TOA balance is maintained by the albedo from clouds and ice sheets. Contrary to what I have been arguing, it is the back radiation from CO2 which melts the land and sea ice sheets. The result will be an abrupt climate change when the extent of the Arctic sea ice passes a tipping point and both the ice-albedo and water vapour positive feedbacks kick in.
My apologies to everyone else who has responded to me and to whom I have not replied. These responses are very time consuming and I should really be getting on with other important work that may find a publisher, unlike the ideas above.
KW 147: So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?
BPL: It’s a converging series, not a diverging one.
So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?
Dude, past greenhouses weren’t driven by anthropogenic transfer of fossil carbon to the climatically active pool. MA Rodger’s otherwise excellent reply only touched on this: water vapor’s perturbation response time is short relative to CO2’s. CO2’s perturbation response time is on the order of decades to thousands of years. H2O’s partial pressure in the atmosphere, OTOH, both increases and decreases solely with temperature, and the temperature of an air parcel varies adiabatically (i.e. internally due to pressure variation) as well as by heat flux across its boundary. Perhaps KW has not heard the term ‘lapse rate‘, derived from the temperature profile of the air column with pressure and thus elevation. The extra water an air parcel may hold due to CO2-dependent radiative forcing is rained out when that parcel inevitably moves higher in the atmosphere (to be sure, AGW has resulted in a trophospheric hot spot). That’s the ‘natural’ short-term negative feedback.
jgnfldsays
How is outgoing LWR a feedback? Since it escapes to space, wouldn’t you call it radiated loss?
Killiansays
Woollard: Another cliamte denial concern troll.
Please, people, stop feeding them.
Killiansays
Re #148 mike said Large loss of CO2 in winter observed across the northern permafrost region
“Recent warming in the Arctic, which has been amplified during the winter1,2,3, greatly enhances microbial decomposition of soil organic matter and subsequent release of carbon dioxide (CO2)4. However, the amount of CO2 released in winter is not known and has not been well represented by ecosystem models or empirically based estimates
Right. Not new info wrt process…
We estimate a contemporary loss of 1,662 TgC per year from the permafrost region during the winter season (October–April). This loss is greater than the average growing season carbon uptake for this region estimated from process models (−1,032 TgC per year).”
Yes, it was reported in the NYTimes, drawing parallels with the anthropogenic transfer of petatonnes of fossil carbon to the atmosphere. One commenter asserted:
CO2 cannot shift the pH of sea water. The chemistry is laid out in any high school chemistry text book. Just look up carbonic acid buffers.
I replied (humbly, of course) with an argument from authority, citing a five year old Comment by the Editor-in-chief of Environmental Science and Technology (published by the American Chemical Society):
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, earth’s oceans have absorbed 560 billion tons of CO2 which has increased acidity by 30% and suppressed the pH of surface waters from 8.2 to 8.07.
And concluded with “You know [the ACS] is way past high school chemistry, don’t you?” ;^). She did not reply. I was at least able to correct her misinformation definitively for readers of the comments, even if not by my own authority. Small victories 8^}!
Mal Adaptedsays
John Cook, Geoffrey Supran, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes and Edward Maibach have just published America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled Americans about climate change. It’s a substantial contribution to the public record of the campaign of public disinformation conducted by fossil-fuel capitalists, which may be the best contemporaneously documented ‘conspiracy’ in history. Conspiracy doesn’t seem quite the right word, however, as it hasn’t been a very well kept secret. Neither is it especially constrained to secrecy, as it’s both legal and profitable in the US to mislead the public and (still more so following Citizens United v. FEC) to pay top dollar for compliant government at election time.
While the public deception campaign may not be a proper conspiracy, one can certainly wish it more widely known. The announcement of Cook et al. 2019 led me to explore the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, where co-authors Cook (founder of skepticalscience.com) and Maibach are employed. The website is impressive. CCCC programs including “Climate Change In the American Mind”, and another named “The 4D Project: Countering Misinformation”: more of that in general, please. I’ve lost another smidgeon of bleak pessimism.
Keith Woollard @153,
You ask “H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?”
When it comes to “runaway GW”, it is not relevant that the major cause of the +ve feedback is a condensing greenhouse gas. It could be some other form of feedback, albedo for instance.
What is relevant is the collective size of those +ve feedbacks, all of them combined. They have to be big enough. For a runaway situation, they have to create at least as much warming as the warming that created them. That is the point when, as Barton Paul Levenson @155 says, the feedback becomes a ‘divergent series’. On Earth, the +ve feedbacks aren’t big enough for that and thus they represent a ‘convergent series’.
Ray Ladburysays
Keith Woolard,
It is important to understand how feedbacks work in the climate system. Yes, there are positive feedbacks, but the thing that is most important is that whenever the temperature rises, the planet will radiate more radiation toward space.
Think of it this way. Imagine a bucket with a source of water and holes in the bottom. The flow through the holes at the bottom depends on the pressure.
At equilibrium, the flow into the bucket from the source (e.g. the Sun) equals the flow out, and the water level is constant. Now if we stop up one of the holes in the bottom, the water level will rise, but so will the pressure and more water flows out of the unstopped holes. Eventually. the pressure may rise to the point where water out equals water in, and equilibrium will be attained at the new, deeper water level.
Hopefully, the analogy to the climate system is clear.
The non-runaway feedback is a D-K effect among a class of engineers who think that every positive feedback is runaway. It’s true that the Arrhenius rate laws in the C-C relation provide a self-limiting feedback mechanism which will elevate temperature until it converges to a specific set-point.
This research may be of interest on hurricanes. It’s open access. “…We find no anthropogenic signal in annual global tropical cyclone or hurricane frequencies. But a strong signal is found in proportions of both weaker and stronger hurricanes: the proportion of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased at a rate of ~25–30 % per °C of global warming after accounting for analysis and observing system changes. This has been balanced by a similar decrease in Category 1 and 2 hurricane proportions, leading to development of a distinctly bimodal intensity distribution,…”
Most of the damage is caused by the category 4 and 5 hurricanes.
I never liked the “humans murdered them all!” theory. How many buffalo, et al., before the mass slaughter by those w/ guns and railroads? And, while nobody is perfect, cultures closer to Nature *tend to* understand not to destroy it.
It makes much more sense that the bolide did most of the work, then humans left with much reduced plant-based foods due to “nuclear winter” and cooling ate more meat to survive, finishing off much of what little survived – even in their reduced numbers.
Also makes sense why Central and South America had such high populations and greater scientific development compared to the northern peoples.
The muliple strike scenario also makes sense. How could a planet-wide ecosystem-altering impact hide so well when so young? Chicxulub is really obvious once you stop looking for what you want to find and see what’s there. But regardless the cause, that boundary jumps up and skakes your hand and it’s 66M yrs old, not less than 12k. Pretty much had to be a multi-bolide impact giving you a global signature like one smallish impact.
j 157: How is outgoing LWR a feedback? Since it escapes to space, wouldn’t you call it radiated loss?
BPL: As the temperature rises, IR is lost as the 4th power of temperature. This results in a negative feedback, restraining the temperature increase.
Barton, thank you again for your admirably brief, lucid answers to basic climate science questions. Perhaps contrary to appearances 8^}, IMHO concision is an effective framing device. We can all learn or at least borrow it from you.
Al Bundysays
Keith Woollard: Can we just pretend for the moment that the industrial revolution never happened, or in fact humans if you like.
H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?
AB: Good question! Cuz H2O can’t function as a driver. If you try to increase relative humidity, rain happens. But water’s effect is based on absolute humidity. With relative humidity held relatively constant absolute humidity increases with temperature. So water vapor is pretty much reduced to a calculation, as opposed to a measurement.
Stop playing the village ignoramus and read a bloody textbook.
Good man, Russell. To Hell with ironic detachment 8^D!
Al Bundysays
Mal Adapted: While the public deception campaign may not be a proper conspiracy,
AB: A conspiracy in plain sight. Link it to a political party and watch it go. Charles Koch’s been directing the show for decades. I’m reading Kochland. It’s written by someone somewhat sympathetic to the Kochs. So far I rate it fair minded, informative, and a good read.
The wrong Koch brother died. Charles Koch is on a quest to eliminate any and all restrictions on oligarchs’ freedom. If his refineries want to dump sludge in the river then that’s his business. He used to cheat, such as by having his oil-buyers measure their purchases in a sketchy fashion that resulted in millions of dollars of stolen crude making its way into his pocket every year. He got caught and now goes for 100% compliance 100% of the time, but not a step further and with the definition of “complies” being, well, Koch does employ lawyers, eh?
What really sucks is that apparently Charles Koch is a nice guy.
The Mumbai chart shows that the air above Mumbai is pretty close to saturated; the temperature and dew point are very close from the ground to minimum tehperature of -85 degrees C, and the soundings bow toward the upper right of the chart. This represents a concentration of energy captured by the greenhouse effect and kept in the atmosphere at lower altitudes. The reason the lines curve is because as the temperature falls aloft, condenses out, and its contribution to holding energy decreases; By 100mbar pressure altitude, the water vapor contribution has become very small – but CO2, which oesn’t condense, is still giving 10% of the total column GHG effect. If that CO2 disappeared, the small amount of water at 100 mbar would decrease as the temperature fell with no more energy from CO2 aloft, and the minus 95 degree C level woul fall towards the ground.There would be precipitation which woul quickly turn to snowfall as the surface cooled below freezing, and the increase in albedo would provide further cooling.
The Giles chart shows a very dry air column The laps rate shows less curvature, because there’s less water vapor in the lower troposphere to capture and hold it. The minimum temperature reached is higher, about -75 degrees C, because the partition of energy between sensible heat, latent heat, excited water vapor, and excited CO2 means more is in excited CO2 and transferred to CO2 at 100mbar pressure altitude.
More soundings can be found at http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html
I’ll leave it as a brain teaser why http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=ant&TYPE=GIF%3ASTUVE10&YEAR=2019&MONTH=10&FROM=2612&TO=2612&STNM=89664 on the edge of Antarctica the minimum column air temperature is only -50 centigrade?
Keith Woollardsays
Thanks BPL@165, but doesn’t the Clausius-Clapeyron relation just provide the SVP of H2O? Other than occasionally in the tropics when is this relevant?
Terry Haskewsays
How about an EASY question for the believers in the “greenhouse effect” the cornerstone of the AGW story. Show the model that predicts the 33 degrees Celsius warming for earths surface using only the composition of the atmosphere. Then using the same model apply it to venus and mars as well.
jgnfldsays
@176 Terry…If you’ve disproven spectroscopy and/or the greenhouse effect, don’t you think you owe us an explication before you go to Sweden to collect your Nobel?
TH 176: How about an EASY question for the believers in the “greenhouse effect” the cornerstone of the AGW story. Show the model that predicts the 33 degrees Celsius warming for earths surface using only the composition of the atmosphere. Then using the same model apply it to venus and mars as well.
Terry Haskew @176,
As your enquiry is indeed so easy, I’m not sure why you don’t try answering it for yourself. Lacis et al (2010)‘Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature’ run a model using a better route to examine the power of our GHGs. They start with the atmosphere and the world we all know and love, then suddenly set the levels of CO2, O3, N2O, CH4 & CFC to zero and see what happens.
The paper does not repeat the task for Venus or Mars (I’m not sure what that would achieve in the way of learning anything) although it does give consideration to the functioning of CO2 on both Venus & Mars.
And finally HadCRUT has posted for September with an anomaly of +0.715ºC, a little down on August. (GISTEMP & NOAA also showed little change, one up, one down.) The monthly anomalies for 2019-so-far span from +0.87ºC to +0.61ºC.
It is the 3rd warmest September on the HadCRUT record (=1st in NOAA, 2nd in GISTEMP), behind 2015 (+0.80ºC) and 2016 (+0.73ºC), and ahead of 2014 (+0.60ºC), 2018 (+0.60ºC) and 2005 (+0.57ºC).
It is the 25th highest anomaly on the all-month HadCRUT record (13th highest in NOAA, 27th highest in GISTEMP).
Now with three-quarters of the year complete, 2019 sits in 3rd place for the HadCRUT year-to-date which looks pretty certain as being its final HadCRUT placing at end-of-year. For HadCRUT to drop to 4th place by end-of-year behind 2017 would require Oct-Dec to average less than +0.54ºC while 2nd place above 2015 again looks beyond reach as it would require Oct-Dec to average higher than +0.88ºC. (In NOAA & GISTEMP 2019-to-date sits in 2nd place.)
The table is ordered by Jan-Sept averages.
How about an EASY question for the believers in the “greenhouse effect”…
“Believers” is the wrong term for scientists who accept the theory of AGW. Belief can’t be changed by evidence; acceptance can.
He also wrote
Then using the same model apply it to venus and mars as well.
It’s been done. The URL “https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=venus+climate+model&btnG=”, for example, shows more than 70,000 papers.
Keith Woollardsays
Al@171 “Cuz H2O can’t function as a driver.” – ???? Why? because you say so?
and the clanger… ” If you try to increase relative humidity, rain happens”
really??? I thought rain came from clouds, not humidity. There is a huge difference between water vapour and clouds.
You summed up my question though and no-one has answered it
” absolute humidity increases with temperature” which therefore increases temperature… which therefore increases absolute humidity etc etc
Alastair B. McDonaldsays
Re 147 where Keith Woollard says:
“So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?”
and 182 where Keith Woollard says:
“You summed up my question though and no-one has answered it.”
Keith,
Was 147 the unanswered question? If so the answer is that when water vapour increases so do the clouds, although not in a directly linear fashion. However, the clouds act as a negative feedback countering the positive feedback from the water vapour.
Note the positive feedback factors from both water vapour and ice-albedo increase as the surface temperature rises. Water vapour feedback is related to the Clausis-Claperon effect, which causes an almost exponential rise in humidity, and the ice-albedo effect is related to the ice-free area which also increases almost exponentially. (The ice is almost circular around the pole. As the radius of the ice decreases linearly with temperature, the area decreases with the square of the forcing.) I suggest that this led to the runway warmings which happened in the northern hemisphere at the end of the last glaciation (i.e. entry to the Bolling-Allerod interstadial) and at the end of the Younger Dryas stadial (i.e. entry into the Holocene inter-glacial).
Ray Ladburysays
Keith Woollard,
OK, think about it. Because the temperature on Earth is below the boiling point of water, there is a limit to how much water the atmosphere can hold at a given temperature. For this reason, the amount of warming water vapor can supply is limited by the amount of warming it could supply when the atmosphere was saturated. In reality, the atmosphere is usually not saturated, but that still means there’s a limit, and that limit is driven by temperature.
No such limit exists for CO2. You can pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as you want, regardless of temperature. As such CO2 content drives temperature (to first order). Temperature drives H2O content. For this reason, the effect of H2O on temperature is best modeled as a feedback, not a driver.
Alastair B. McDonaldsays
Further to my post re 147 & 182
I should have written “Clausius-Clapeyron relation”. Thanks Barton for the correct spelling.
Because the positive feedback is increasing, it is possible for it to pass from being a converging series to a non-converging series and a runaway to happen. The runaway will be terminated when the global climate changes to create additional clouds to offset the decrease in the area of sea-ice. A runaway cannot continue forever, e.g. Venus which now has a stable climate.
New research with serious implications: “New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding” (open access)
The goal has always been, Charles says, “true democracy,” where people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money.” (“Now in our democracy you elect somebody every two to four years and they tell you how to run your life,” he says.)
MRDA: he owes his and his family’s wealth to their freedom to socialize the climate-change costs of their business, especially after they began reinvesting a fraction of their revenues on weakening democracy’s ability to avert the Tragedy of the Climate Commons.
Also from that Forbes.com (!) article:
Both [Charles and David] Kochs innately understand that–unlike the populist appeal of their fellow midwestern billionaire Warren Buffett and his tax-the-rich advocacy–their message of pure, raw capitalism is a much tougher sell, even among capitalists.
Who said these guys weren’t smart?
So their revolution has been an evolution, with roots going back half a century to Koch’s first contributions to libertarian causes and Republican candidates. In the mid-1970s their business of changing minds got more formal when Charles cofounded what became the Cato Institute, the first major libertarian think tank. Based in Washington, it has 120 employees devoted to promoting property rights, educational choice and economic freedom. In 1978 the brothers helped found–and still fund–George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the go-to academy for deregulation; they have funded the Federalist Society, which shapes conservative judicial thinking; the pro-market Heritage Foundation; a California-based center skeptical of human-driven climate change; and many other institutions.
Okay, bleak pessimism is back. It’s hardly a conspiracy when the master-mind is so forthcoming about it, backed up in detail by the public record. And it’s all legal and proper: the expected ROI for the strategy, even if not every purchase paid off. Am I bitter? IMHO, this is the rot hollowing out American democracy before our eyes. What shall we do?
mikesays
It’s happening now. It’s been increasing since 1990. The feedbacks are real and they will be difficult to slow/reverse.
Globally rising soil heterotrophic respiration over recent decades
“Here we use an updated global soil respiration database9 to show that the observed soil surface RH:RS ratio increased significantly, from 0.54 to 0.63, between 1990 and 2014 (P = 0.009). Three additional lines of evidence provide support for this finding. By analysing two separate global gross primary production datasets10,11, we find that the ratios of both RH and RS to gross primary production have increased over time.”
October 20 – 26, 2019 408.71 ppm 2.1 ppm increase from this week last year
October 20 – 26, 2018 406.61 ppm 23.97 ppm increase from the week in 2009
October 20 – 26, 2009 384.74 ppm
Skyrockety? No, just steady increase.
warm regards,
Mike
Mr. Know It Allsays
187 – Killian
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Dang, I was up there making some BBQ on deck and my propane tank fell overboard – it was tied to an anvil to keep it from being washed over board! They fount it! Can they retrieve it for me? Just joking, K!
;)
Seriously though, the article does not have enough information to determine if this CH4 seep was caused by AGW. We’d have to know the depth of the water at that location, and around it for say 1/4 mile radius, to determine if it was shallow enough for warmer water to have melted the permafrost there. How far from land was it? Latitude/longitude?
Can researchers spot the CH4 from a satellite, or from drones, or planes to determine about how many of them exist? If they haven’t been looking for them in the past, then we can’t say if it’s something new, right? Maybe they just never noticed it before. One data point does not make a trend, so K may be correct – it may be nothing.
;)
The daily NOAA MLO CO2 reading for October are now complete yielding a prelimenary value for the 12-month CO2 rise Oct-to-Oct of 2.53ppm/yr.
So how are my grand projections of MLO CO2 increases stacking up? After three projected months have passed, it’s still not showing any signs of being unsuccessful, so far.
The projections (with preceding data) are graphed out here (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’) and tabulated below. (Model explained in August’s UV thread.)
The Kochs are (were) lying hypocrites. They were all for small government and low taxation and no regulations–until wind power came to Oklahoma, and then suddenly they were for regulations and taxes to restrict wind power. Believe me, their god is the almighty dollar and they couldn’t care less about Libertarian principles. They’re only Libertarian when it suits them. Him, now that one’s gone.
I don’t know if this has already been mentioned.
There’s a recent article in PNAS on ocean acidification titled “Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact” by Michael J. Henehan, Andy Ridgwell, Ellen Thomas, Shuang Zhang, Laia Alegret, Daniela N. Schmidt, James W. B. Rae, James D. Witts, Neil H. Landman, Sarah E. Greene, Brian T. Huber, James R. Super, Noah J. Planavsky, and Pincelli M. Hull.
It paints a pretty dire picture of life on Earth caused by a 0.25 drop in ocean pH.
Keith Woollard @147
“So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?
C02 increases, warming, H20 increases. Then as CO2 decreases, (absorbed into natural sinks, rock weathering etc), cooling, H20 then decreases as atmospheric temperatures fall and hold less H20.
MA, as well as Ray and MAL,
Can we just pretend for the moment that the industrial revolution never happened, or in fact humans if you like.
H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?
Re 131 where zebra says:
zebra,
Sorry for not replying earlier. I had not noticed that post.
However, as far as I am concerned it is not the Denialist idiots, but rather the Scientist idiots who need to engage! Their models are flawed, but they will insist that they are correct.
Perhaps the most obvious error is their denial that the absorption is saturated. At 1km many lines are saturated, most noticeably at 615, 670 and 720 rcm (reciprocal centimetres). See https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijas/2013/503727/fig13/
The models are overestimating the temperature rise in the tropical troposphere. See https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/yothal_020516_fig.jpg?itok=_roFX44p
And the models are underestimating the decline of the Arctic sea ice.
My point is that the greenhouse effect operates in the boundary layer, not at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). The TOA balance is maintained by the albedo from clouds and ice sheets. Contrary to what I have been arguing, it is the back radiation from CO2 which melts the land and sea ice sheets. The result will be an abrupt climate change when the extent of the Arctic sea ice passes a tipping point and both the ice-albedo and water vapour positive feedbacks kick in.
See my poster which a climate modeller refused to even read because she “knew” that the climate is modelled using the water vapour feedback system. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316656802_Abrupt_Climate_Change_explained_by_an_old_scheme_for_outgoing_long_wave_radiation
My apologies to everyone else who has responded to me and to whom I have not replied. These responses are very time consuming and I should really be getting on with other important work that may find a publisher, unlike the ideas above.
KW 147: So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?
BPL: It’s a converging series, not a diverging one.
Keith Woolard:
Dude, past greenhouses weren’t driven by anthropogenic transfer of fossil carbon to the climatically active pool. MA Rodger’s otherwise excellent reply only touched on this: water vapor’s perturbation response time is short relative to CO2’s. CO2’s perturbation response time is on the order of decades to thousands of years. H2O’s partial pressure in the atmosphere, OTOH, both increases and decreases solely with temperature, and the temperature of an air parcel varies adiabatically (i.e. internally due to pressure variation) as well as by heat flux across its boundary. Perhaps KW has not heard the term ‘lapse rate‘, derived from the temperature profile of the air column with pressure and thus elevation. The extra water an air parcel may hold due to CO2-dependent radiative forcing is rained out when that parcel inevitably moves higher in the atmosphere (to be sure, AGW has resulted in a trophospheric hot spot). That’s the ‘natural’ short-term negative feedback.
How is outgoing LWR a feedback? Since it escapes to space, wouldn’t you call it radiated loss?
Woollard: Another cliamte denial concern troll.
Please, people, stop feeding them.
Re #148 mike said Large loss of CO2 in winter observed across the northern permafrost region
“Recent warming in the Arctic, which has been amplified during the winter1,2,3, greatly enhances microbial decomposition of soil organic matter and subsequent release of carbon dioxide (CO2)4. However, the amount of CO2 released in winter is not known and has not been well represented by ecosystem models or empirically based estimates
Right. Not new info wrt process…
We estimate a contemporary loss of 1,662 TgC per year from the permafrost region during the winter season (October–April). This loss is greater than the average growing season carbon uptake for this region estimated from process models (−1,032 TgC per year).”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0592-8
It’s happening now. I wish the facts were otherwise. This is going to have consequences for my kids and grandkids.
…but the improved quantification is very useful.
It will be getting worse. Is, rather.
Cheers
Steve Emmerson:
Yes, it was reported in the NYTimes, drawing parallels with the anthropogenic transfer of petatonnes of fossil carbon to the atmosphere. One commenter asserted:
I replied (humbly, of course) with an argument from authority, citing a five year old Comment by the Editor-in-chief of Environmental Science and Technology (published by the American Chemical Society):
And concluded with “You know [the ACS] is way past high school chemistry, don’t you?” ;^). She did not reply. I was at least able to correct her misinformation definitively for readers of the comments, even if not by my own authority. Small victories 8^}!
John Cook, Geoffrey Supran, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes and Edward Maibach have just published America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled Americans about climate change. It’s a substantial contribution to the public record of the campaign of public disinformation conducted by fossil-fuel capitalists, which may be the best contemporaneously documented ‘conspiracy’ in history. Conspiracy doesn’t seem quite the right word, however, as it hasn’t been a very well kept secret. Neither is it especially constrained to secrecy, as it’s both legal and profitable in the US to mislead the public and (still more so following Citizens United v. FEC) to pay top dollar for compliant government at election time.
While the public deception campaign may not be a proper conspiracy, one can certainly wish it more widely known. The announcement of Cook et al. 2019 led me to explore the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, where co-authors Cook (founder of skepticalscience.com) and Maibach are employed. The website is impressive. CCCC programs including “Climate Change In the American Mind”, and another named “The 4D Project: Countering Misinformation”: more of that in general, please. I’ve lost another smidgeon of bleak pessimism.
More Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis evidence:
https://m.phys.org/news/2019-10-extraterrestrial-impact-trigger-extinction-ice-age.html
South Carolina this time.
Keith Woollard @153,
You ask “H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?”
When it comes to “runaway GW”, it is not relevant that the major cause of the +ve feedback is a condensing greenhouse gas. It could be some other form of feedback, albedo for instance.
What is relevant is the collective size of those +ve feedbacks, all of them combined. They have to be big enough. For a runaway situation, they have to create at least as much warming as the warming that created them. That is the point when, as Barton Paul Levenson @155 says, the feedback becomes a ‘divergent series’. On Earth, the +ve feedbacks aren’t big enough for that and thus they represent a ‘convergent series’.
Keith Woolard,
It is important to understand how feedbacks work in the climate system. Yes, there are positive feedbacks, but the thing that is most important is that whenever the temperature rises, the planet will radiate more radiation toward space.
Think of it this way. Imagine a bucket with a source of water and holes in the bottom. The flow through the holes at the bottom depends on the pressure.
At equilibrium, the flow into the bucket from the source (e.g. the Sun) equals the flow out, and the water level is constant. Now if we stop up one of the holes in the bottom, the water level will rise, but so will the pressure and more water flows out of the unstopped holes. Eventually. the pressure may rise to the point where water out equals water in, and equilibrium will be attained at the new, deeper water level.
Hopefully, the analogy to the climate system is clear.
KW 153: H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?
BPL: Because water vapor feedback is a converging series, not a diverging series. Google “Clausius-Clapeyron relation.”
j 157: How is outgoing LWR a feedback? Since it escapes to space, wouldn’t you call it radiated loss?
BPL: As the temperature rises, IR is lost as the 4th power of temperature. This results in a negative feedback, restraining the temperature increase.
The non-runaway feedback is a D-K effect among a class of engineers who think that every positive feedback is runaway. It’s true that the Arrhenius rate laws in the C-C relation provide a self-limiting feedback mechanism which will elevate temperature until it converges to a specific set-point.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-013-1713-0
This research may be of interest on hurricanes. It’s open access. “…We find no anthropogenic signal in annual global tropical cyclone or hurricane frequencies. But a strong signal is found in proportions of both weaker and stronger hurricanes: the proportion of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has increased at a rate of ~25–30 % per °C of global warming after accounting for analysis and observing system changes. This has been balanced by a similar decrease in Category 1 and 2 hurricane proportions, leading to development of a distinctly bimodal intensity distribution,…”
Most of the damage is caused by the category 4 and 5 hurricanes.
Re #162 David B. Benson said
More Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis evidence:
https://m.phys.org/news/2019-10-extraterrestrial-impact-trigger-extinction-ice-age.html
South Carolina this time.
I never liked the “humans murdered them all!” theory. How many buffalo, et al., before the mass slaughter by those w/ guns and railroads? And, while nobody is perfect, cultures closer to Nature *tend to* understand not to destroy it.
It makes much more sense that the bolide did most of the work, then humans left with much reduced plant-based foods due to “nuclear winter” and cooling ate more meat to survive, finishing off much of what little survived – even in their reduced numbers.
Also makes sense why Central and South America had such high populations and greater scientific development compared to the northern peoples.
The muliple strike scenario also makes sense. How could a planet-wide ecosystem-altering impact hide so well when so young? Chicxulub is really obvious once you stop looking for what you want to find and see what’s there. But regardless the cause, that boundary jumps up and skakes your hand and it’s 66M yrs old, not less than 12k. Pretty much had to be a multi-bolide impact giving you a global signature like one smallish impact.
BPL:
Barton, thank you again for your admirably brief, lucid answers to basic climate science questions. Perhaps contrary to appearances 8^}, IMHO concision is an effective framing device. We can all learn or at least borrow it from you.
Keith Woollard: Can we just pretend for the moment that the industrial revolution never happened, or in fact humans if you like.
H2O has by far the largest GH affect. It is also a +ve feedback. Why don’t we therefore have runaway GW?
AB: Good question! Cuz H2O can’t function as a driver. If you try to increase relative humidity, rain happens. But water’s effect is based on absolute humidity. With relative humidity held relatively constant absolute humidity increases with temperature. So water vapor is pretty much reduced to a calculation, as opposed to a measurement.
I missed this earlier. Russell:
Good man, Russell. To Hell with ironic detachment 8^D!
Mal Adapted: While the public deception campaign may not be a proper conspiracy,
AB: A conspiracy in plain sight. Link it to a political party and watch it go. Charles Koch’s been directing the show for decades. I’m reading Kochland. It’s written by someone somewhat sympathetic to the Kochs. So far I rate it fair minded, informative, and a good read.
The wrong Koch brother died. Charles Koch is on a quest to eliminate any and all restrictions on oligarchs’ freedom. If his refineries want to dump sludge in the river then that’s his business. He used to cheat, such as by having his oil-buyers measure their purchases in a sketchy fashion that resulted in millions of dollars of stolen crude making its way into his pocket every year. He got caught and now goes for 100% compliance 100% of the time, but not a step further and with the definition of “complies” being, well, Koch does employ lawyers, eh?
What really sucks is that apparently Charles Koch is a nice guy.
For Keith Woolard and anyone else that wants to see the effect of water vapor in nice chart form, first read this;
http://www.csun.edu/~hmc60533/CSUN_103/weather_exercises/soundings/smog_and_inversions/Understanding%20Stuve_v3.htm
then downloa these 2 atmospheric sounding charts;
http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=seasia&TYPE=GIF%3ASTUVE10&YEAR=2019&MONTH=10&FROM=2600&TO=2600&STNM=43003 Mumbai, India
http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=pac&TYPE=GIF%3ASTUVE10&YEAR=2019&MONTH=10&FROM=2600&TO=2600&STNM=94461 Giles central Australia
The Mumbai chart shows that the air above Mumbai is pretty close to saturated; the temperature and dew point are very close from the ground to minimum tehperature of -85 degrees C, and the soundings bow toward the upper right of the chart. This represents a concentration of energy captured by the greenhouse effect and kept in the atmosphere at lower altitudes. The reason the lines curve is because as the temperature falls aloft, condenses out, and its contribution to holding energy decreases; By 100mbar pressure altitude, the water vapor contribution has become very small – but CO2, which oesn’t condense, is still giving 10% of the total column GHG effect. If that CO2 disappeared, the small amount of water at 100 mbar would decrease as the temperature fell with no more energy from CO2 aloft, and the minus 95 degree C level woul fall towards the ground.There would be precipitation which woul quickly turn to snowfall as the surface cooled below freezing, and the increase in albedo would provide further cooling.
The Giles chart shows a very dry air column The laps rate shows less curvature, because there’s less water vapor in the lower troposphere to capture and hold it. The minimum temperature reached is higher, about -75 degrees C, because the partition of energy between sensible heat, latent heat, excited water vapor, and excited CO2 means more is in excited CO2 and transferred to CO2 at 100mbar pressure altitude.
More soundings can be found at http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html
I’ll leave it as a brain teaser why
http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=ant&TYPE=GIF%3ASTUVE10&YEAR=2019&MONTH=10&FROM=2612&TO=2612&STNM=89664 on the edge of Antarctica the minimum column air temperature is only -50 centigrade?
Thanks BPL@165, but doesn’t the Clausius-Clapeyron relation just provide the SVP of H2O? Other than occasionally in the tropics when is this relevant?
How about an EASY question for the believers in the “greenhouse effect” the cornerstone of the AGW story. Show the model that predicts the 33 degrees Celsius warming for earths surface using only the composition of the atmosphere. Then using the same model apply it to venus and mars as well.
@176 Terry…If you’ve disproven spectroscopy and/or the greenhouse effect, don’t you think you owe us an explication before you go to Sweden to collect your Nobel?
TH 176: How about an EASY question for the believers in the “greenhouse effect” the cornerstone of the AGW story. Show the model that predicts the 33 degrees Celsius warming for earths surface using only the composition of the atmosphere. Then using the same model apply it to venus and mars as well.
BPL: Okay:
http://saspcsus.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/64696386/planet%20temperatures%20with%20surface%20cooling%20parameterized.pdf
Terry Haskew @176,
As your enquiry is indeed so easy, I’m not sure why you don’t try answering it for yourself.
Lacis et al (2010)‘Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature’ run a model using a better route to examine the power of our GHGs. They start with the atmosphere and the world we all know and love, then suddenly set the levels of CO2, O3, N2O, CH4 & CFC to zero and see what happens.
The paper does not repeat the task for Venus or Mars (I’m not sure what that would achieve in the way of learning anything) although it does give consideration to the functioning of CO2 on both Venus & Mars.
And finally HadCRUT has posted for September with an anomaly of +0.715ºC, a little down on August. (GISTEMP & NOAA also showed little change, one up, one down.) The monthly anomalies for 2019-so-far span from +0.87ºC to +0.61ºC.
It is the 3rd warmest September on the HadCRUT record (=1st in NOAA, 2nd in GISTEMP), behind 2015 (+0.80ºC) and 2016 (+0.73ºC), and ahead of 2014 (+0.60ºC), 2018 (+0.60ºC) and 2005 (+0.57ºC).
It is the 25th highest anomaly on the all-month HadCRUT record (13th highest in NOAA, 27th highest in GISTEMP).
Now with three-quarters of the year complete, 2019 sits in 3rd place for the HadCRUT year-to-date which looks pretty certain as being its final HadCRUT placing at end-of-year. For HadCRUT to drop to 4th place by end-of-year behind 2017 would require Oct-Dec to average less than +0.54ºC while 2nd place above 2015 again looks beyond reach as it would require Oct-Dec to average higher than +0.88ºC. (In NOAA & GISTEMP 2019-to-date sits in 2nd place.)
The table is ordered by Jan-Sept averages.
…….. Jan-Sept Ave … Annual Ave ..Annual ranking
2016 .. +0.89ºC … … … +0.80ºC … … … 1st
2017 .. +0.73ºC … … … +0.68ºC … … … 3rd
2019 .. +0.73ºC
2015 .. +0.71ºC … … … +0.76ºC … … … 2nd
2010 .. +0.61ºC … … … +0.56ºC … … … 6th
2018 .. +0.58ºC … … … +0.60ºC … … … 4th
2014 .. +0.57ºC … … … +0.58ºC … … … 5th
2002 .. +0.54ºC … … … +0.50ºC … … … 12th
2005 .. +0.53ºC … … … +0.55ºC … … … 7th
2007 .. +0.53ºC … … … +0.49ºC … … … 13th
2009 .. +0.49ºC … … … +0.51ºC … … … 11th
Terry Haskey@176 wrote:
“Believers” is the wrong term for scientists who accept the theory of AGW. Belief can’t be changed by evidence; acceptance can.
He also wrote
It’s been done. The URL “https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C6&q=venus+climate+model&btnG=”, for example, shows more than 70,000 papers.
Al@171 “Cuz H2O can’t function as a driver.” – ???? Why? because you say so?
and the clanger… ” If you try to increase relative humidity, rain happens”
really??? I thought rain came from clouds, not humidity. There is a huge difference between water vapour and clouds.
You summed up my question though and no-one has answered it
” absolute humidity increases with temperature” which therefore increases temperature… which therefore increases absolute humidity etc etc
Re 147 where Keith Woollard says:
“So Mal and Ray, if H2O has a self driven positive feedback, and it has the greatest greenhouse affect, what negative feedback counters this pre-man?”
and 182 where Keith Woollard says:
“You summed up my question though and no-one has answered it.”
Keith,
Was 147 the unanswered question? If so the answer is that when water vapour increases so do the clouds, although not in a directly linear fashion. However, the clouds act as a negative feedback countering the positive feedback from the water vapour.
Note the positive feedback factors from both water vapour and ice-albedo increase as the surface temperature rises. Water vapour feedback is related to the Clausis-Claperon effect, which causes an almost exponential rise in humidity, and the ice-albedo effect is related to the ice-free area which also increases almost exponentially. (The ice is almost circular around the pole. As the radius of the ice decreases linearly with temperature, the area decreases with the square of the forcing.) I suggest that this led to the runway warmings which happened in the northern hemisphere at the end of the last glaciation (i.e. entry to the Bolling-Allerod interstadial) and at the end of the Younger Dryas stadial (i.e. entry into the Holocene inter-glacial).
Keith Woollard,
OK, think about it. Because the temperature on Earth is below the boiling point of water, there is a limit to how much water the atmosphere can hold at a given temperature. For this reason, the amount of warming water vapor can supply is limited by the amount of warming it could supply when the atmosphere was saturated. In reality, the atmosphere is usually not saturated, but that still means there’s a limit, and that limit is driven by temperature.
No such limit exists for CO2. You can pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as you want, regardless of temperature. As such CO2 content drives temperature (to first order). Temperature drives H2O content. For this reason, the effect of H2O on temperature is best modeled as a feedback, not a driver.
Further to my post re 147 & 182
I should have written “Clausius-Clapeyron relation”. Thanks Barton for the correct spelling.
Because the positive feedback is increasing, it is possible for it to pass from being a converging series to a non-converging series and a runaway to happen. The runaway will be terminated when the global climate changes to create additional clouds to offset the decrease in the area of sea-ice. A runaway cannot continue forever, e.g. Venus which now has a stable climate.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
New research with serious implications: “New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding” (open access)
I’m sure it’s nothing.
https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/first-pictures-and-video-of-the-largest-methane-fountain-so-far-discovered-in-the-arctic-ocean/
Al Bundy:
Maybe to kids and animals. His investment strategy has non-nice goals:
MRDA: he owes his and his family’s wealth to their freedom to socialize the climate-change costs of their business, especially after they began reinvesting a fraction of their revenues on weakening democracy’s ability to avert the Tragedy of the Climate Commons.
Also from that Forbes.com (!) article:
Who said these guys weren’t smart?
Okay, bleak pessimism is back. It’s hardly a conspiracy when the master-mind is so forthcoming about it, backed up in detail by the public record. And it’s all legal and proper: the expected ROI for the strategy, even if not every purchase paid off. Am I bitter? IMHO, this is the rot hollowing out American democracy before our eyes. What shall we do?
It’s happening now. It’s been increasing since 1990. The feedbacks are real and they will be difficult to slow/reverse.
Globally rising soil heterotrophic respiration over recent decades
“Here we use an updated global soil respiration database9 to show that the observed soil surface RH:RS ratio increased significantly, from 0.54 to 0.63, between 1990 and 2014 (P = 0.009). Three additional lines of evidence provide support for this finding. By analysing two separate global gross primary production datasets10,11, we find that the ratios of both RH and RS to gross primary production have increased over time.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0358-x
CO2? How are we doing?
October 20 – 26, 2019 408.71 ppm 2.1 ppm increase from this week last year
October 20 – 26, 2018 406.61 ppm 23.97 ppm increase from the week in 2009
October 20 – 26, 2009 384.74 ppm
Skyrockety? No, just steady increase.
warm regards,
Mike
187 – Killian
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Dang, I was up there making some BBQ on deck and my propane tank fell overboard – it was tied to an anvil to keep it from being washed over board! They fount it! Can they retrieve it for me? Just joking, K!
;)
Seriously though, the article does not have enough information to determine if this CH4 seep was caused by AGW. We’d have to know the depth of the water at that location, and around it for say 1/4 mile radius, to determine if it was shallow enough for warmer water to have melted the permafrost there. How far from land was it? Latitude/longitude?
Can researchers spot the CH4 from a satellite, or from drones, or planes to determine about how many of them exist? If they haven’t been looking for them in the past, then we can’t say if it’s something new, right? Maybe they just never noticed it before. One data point does not make a trend, so K may be correct – it may be nothing.
;)
#188–
Q: “What shall we do?”
A: Organize.
#162 et seq.–
Very interesting, thanks! Particularly as White Pond, where Dr. Moore took his sediment core samples, is maybe 30 miles from my house…
Re methane fountain
74.50N, 147.70E near Bennett Island, water is about 30 meters deep.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a5bd/cca82a8dda6bb8eee31e4ec2ef55e3909778.pdf
The daily NOAA MLO CO2 reading for October are now complete yielding a prelimenary value for the 12-month CO2 rise Oct-to-Oct of 2.53ppm/yr.
So how are my grand projections of MLO CO2 increases stacking up? After three projected months have passed, it’s still not showing any signs of being unsuccessful, so far.
The projections (with preceding data) are graphed out here (usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’) and tabulated below. (Model explained in August’s UV thread.)
12-Month MLO CO2 ppm increase.
… … … … …Modelled… … … … ..Actual… … … .. ..Actual
… … … .[Original,Smoothed]… ..[Unsmoothed]… ..[Smoothed]
Jan 19 … … … 2.74 … … … … … … 2.87 … … … … 2.85
Feb 19 … … … 2.92 … … … … … … 3.43 … … … … 2.95
Mar19 … … … 3.13 … … … … … … 2.56 … … … … 3.02
Apr19 … … … 3.10 … … … … … … 3.08 … … … … 3.02
May19 … … … 3.16 … … … … … … 3.42 … … … … 3.21
Jun19 … … … 3.24 … … … … … … 3.13 … … … … 3.20
Jul19 … … … 3.07 … … … … … … 3.06 … … … … 3.05
Aug19 … … … 2.94 … … … … … … 2.96 … … … … 3.02
Sep19 … … … 2.78 … … … … … … 3.03 … … … … 2.84
Oct19 … … … 2.66 … … … … … … 2.53
Nov19 … … … 2.44
Dec19 … … … 2.13
Jan20 … … … 2.07
Feb20 … … … 2.06
Mar20 … … … 1.87
The Kochs are (were) lying hypocrites. They were all for small government and low taxation and no regulations–until wind power came to Oklahoma, and then suddenly they were for regulations and taxes to restrict wind power. Believe me, their god is the almighty dollar and they couldn’t care less about Libertarian principles. They’re only Libertarian when it suits them. Him, now that one’s gone.