After all the ‘happenings’ last month, Jim and I decided to take a vacation. He’d long deferred visiting his cousins (two of whom have cancer). We decided now was the time.
I hadn’t wanted to post an announcement saying “My house is empty. Come help yourself.” So… there just were no posts. I’ll be catching up tomorrow.
For now: Open Thread.
Ooops. This title was a ‘bad uri’. Most of you should be unbanned!
oppsss
Something that I would like further information on but can’t do myself is a further look at the ocean heat uptake papers with the new one by Wunsch seeming to be outside the consensus position. My naive take (perhaps wrong) is that if Wunsch’s estimate is right a lot of the missing heat is going out to space and the energy equation doesn’t balance unless something is missing in models.
My take is that Wunsch thinks the ocean heat data is more uncertain than usually considered, and that there is a least some reason to believe it is lower than most recent estimates. I think the implication is that sensitivity may be lower, but I don’t think Wunsch makes that statement with any confidence.
My back of the envelope calculations show that if you agree with the IPCC that there exists a 1.5W/m2 net anthropogenic forcing, if you put all of it into the deep ocean, which has an average depth of about 4000m and a coefficient of thermal expansion of 150-300ppm, depending on pressure, temperature, and salinity, it will warm by about 0.005C/year, and the thermosteric expansion will raise sea level about 2mm/year, which is in fact close to the recent average rate, but leaves almost no room for melting land-based ice.
Good luck measuring 0.005C/year of warming in the deep ocean.
UCMD,
The AR5 total forcing (best estimate) is 2.29 watts/m^2. There is some uncertainty in the heat uptake, but a globally averaged value is about 0.6 watt/m^2, leaving about 1.7 watts/m^2 going to space. The expansion coefficient is a function of both temperature and pressure, so the overall expansion will depend on where most of the accumulated heat goes. My recollection is that recent estimates are closer to 1 – 1.5 mm thermal expansion and the balance land supported ice melt plus groundwater pumping.
Steve F
Drivers of Climate Change AR5 IPCC
Radiative forcing (RF) quantifies the change in energy fluxes caused by changes in these drivers for 2011 relative to 1750.
Positive RF leads to surface warming, negative RF leads to surface cooling. RF is estimated based
ie it is not measured, purely an educated guess ignoring all the known and unknown unknowns.
They use in-situ and remote observations, properties of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and calculations using numerical models
They do not take in to account changes in water vapor, the biggest greenhouse gas, and focus only on smaller greenhouse gases like CO2. Aerosols are given a figure plucked from the air.
The total anthropogenic RF for 2011 relative to 1750 is 2.29 [1.13 to 3.33] W m
ie it could be as low as 1.13 and note it is a massive range.
The total anthropogenic RF best estimate for 2011 is 43% higher than that reported in AR4 for the year 2005.
Yet the earth temperature “paused totally during that time.
43% higher over 6 years and no rise in temperature.
The estimate is seriously flawed.
One is left to argue that energy in as usual equals energy out, That the natural mechanism of coming out of an ice age is still occurring and that the variations in decadal and centennial temperatures are purely due to the mechanics and variation of cloud formation, currents, volcanoes and biomass changes occurring in response to the first three.
angech, since it rains, water vapor is not considered in RF.
Rain isn’t water vapor.
Re: Bob Koss (Aug 11 14:02),
A comment like that might make you a ‘worthy’ successor to Bryan at Science of Doom.
Bryan has been relegated to his own personal thread at SoD, much like someone else, who shall remain nameless to avoid moderation, did here.
Dear Eli,
water vapour is, nonetheless, the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Would you care to agree with this and having agreed,explain what stops it being included in radiative forcing?
The fact that it varies due to rain and evaporation cannot be an excuse for ignoring such a major player.
Perplexed.
De Witt,
also perplexed , Eli and Bob seem to be saying the same thing?
Forcings are exogenous variables. They affect climate, but are determined outside the scope of modelling. CO2 depends on humans, volcanoes on whatever, etc.
The supply of water is fixed (sea) and its transport (evaporation, advection, condensation) is determined within the model. Nothing done externally can change it significantly. Boil a kettle? Somewhere, not far away, within a few days it will rain a little more.
Forcings for the future need to be postulated by scenario. Not wv.
I am rather perplexed at the lack of attention in climate science that seems to be paid to moist enthalpy, which surely is a much better metric of changes to the climate than temperature alone. There are two papers dating back to 2011, Peterson et al and Fall et al, but I haven’t seen anything published since. The HadCRUH humidity series ends in 2003, and I’ve asked the Met Office why, and if they plan a replacement, but I’m yet to get an answer.
Do people shy away from moist enthalpy simply because the required data isn’t available, or am I missing something and it isn’t as good a metric to use as I assume?
Nick re “Forcings are exogenous variables.”
An [?the] experts
V. Ramanathan and Anand Inamdar
wrote a whole set of papers on
“The radiative forcing due to clouds and water vapor”
excerpt follows
Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), yielded a global and regional perspective of the radiative forcing due to clouds
1990) revealed cloud feedback to be the major source of model differences in climate sensitivity and established cloud feedback as a major focus of research.
This seems at extreme odds with your claim that water vapor is not a exogenous variable as it is described as radiative forcing.
Perhaps you were up the back throwing paper planes at Uni with me and missed this in science class.
Nick, so a cooling or warming ocean has no influence on CO2? Land changes due to climate have no influence on CO2?
If the behavior of H2O while it is being transported/carried around is not accounted for properly, that is a big deal I think.
Water in the atmosphere exists in all three phases. Do the GCM’s account for this?
Endogenous [Feedbacks] and Exogenous [Forcings] are a bit user defined.
To my way of thinking turning the light up or down, ie the sun increasing or decreasing output or moving towards or away from the earth is an obvious exogenous forcing.
Having an eclipse of the earth during the day turns off 100 million Hiroshima atomic bombs of heat during a typical 3 minute eclipse. enough eclipses [21.3] and we would solve our purported energy imbalance.
Other exogenous sources are harder to understand eg background radiation from the Universe.
One might allow volcanoes grudgingly along with the fact that the earth gives some small radiative forcing from its core heat.
The rest is all endogenous as far as I am concerned.
The soots, methane, water come from natural sources and variations as does CO2.
Plants absorb the most CO2 but also produce the most CO2 when they rot or are burnt as coal. Humans producing CO2 is as natural as cows producing methane. The earth has a great inbuilt capacity to stay normal despite the minute efforts of humans.
The sea has been the same alkalinity for over a billion years. It is kept that way by the relatively infinite constant amounts of water and minerals. Why is the Ph where it is? Because it cannot go anywhere else given the substrate composition
Re: angech (Aug 11 21:02),
Not the way I read it. Bob’s comment seems to me to be critical of Eli’s comment.
One more time: the turnover time of water in the atmosphere in whatever form is about two weeks. Atmospheric water content therefore is an emergent property of the system. That makes it an endogenous feedback, not an exogenous forcing.
Ocean temperature does have an effect on CO2, but it’s small compared to fossil fuel burning, cement manufacture and land use/land cover changes. The large change in CO2 from glacial to interglacial epochs, for example, cannot be explained from the temperature change of the ocean alone.
Re: angech (Aug 12 06:21),
It’s pH. And tell that to the benthic foraminifera that went extinct during the PETM.
DeWitt,
Isn’t the fact that you had to go back to the PETM, some 58 *million* years ago sort of proving the point that the oceans have been this way long, long time.
And as for endogenous feedback vs. exogenous forcing, is not the physical response identical? CO2 from a volcano or land use change is the same physics and chemistry as CO2 from oil or coal.
And my question stnds: is averaging water in the atmosphere as ‘vapor’ adequate in a three phase system?
DeWitt
There is no reason to think that the benthic foraminifera went extinct during the PETM due to pH changes. It was almost certainly due to the temperature of the deep ocean going up about 10 degrees in geologically brief period. Also note that there were no extinctions in surface waters where you would expect pH changes to be greatest, and as a matter of fact very few extinctions of any kind, except for benthic foraminifera.
On the contrary the PETM was a period of quite remarkable expansion and proliferation of biota.
There’s a line of reasoning for remote sensing that goes like:
‘the more remote the phenomenon, the less reliable the measurement’.
I’m pretty sure the same applies to time, such as proxies of ancient events ( PETM ) as well.
Re: hunter (Aug 12 09:56) and Climate Weenie,
Did you read the Wikipedia article? Apparently not:
shoaling
Calcite compensation depth
tty,
Benthic foraminifera mostly have calcium carbonate shells. Only the species living below the CCD in the deepest trenches have organic shells or tests. Thus a large decrease in the CCD would be expected to have a drastic effect.
The ocean sedimentary layer formed during the PETM is carbonate free and has a distinctive color.
angech (Comment #131535) August 12th, 2014 at 6:21 am
“The rest is all endogenous as far as I am concerned.”
No, you have that all wrong. It’s endogenous to the model, not to the earth.
Standard school math problem:
A body is released 100 m above earth. How long will it take to fall?
The 100 m, value of g etc are exogenous. You need to be told. You can’t predict that those events will happen. But the velocity, time of descent etc are endogenous. You can work them out.
DeWitt,
Your response is interesting but does not appear to be topical.
I merely pointed out that warming oceans will release more CO2 and cooling will absorb more CO2.
Your excursion into shell formations in the deeps is fascinating, however.
As to my other points, I look forward to your thoughts on them.
Nick Stokes (Comment #131542)August 12th, 2014 at 4:54 pm
angech (Comment #131535) August 12th, 2014 at 6:21 am
The rest is all endogenous as far as I am concerned.
“No, you have that all wrong. It’s endogenous to the model, not to the earth.”
A bit lost again, sorry, “It is endogenous to the model” is as far as “I and most people are concerned”.
The water vapor, soot and CO2 are naturally formed by fires, engines and biomatter breakdown from the surface substrate which is part of the climate we are talking about.
Now if you want exogenous CO2 or water or soot you would have to bring them in from outer or inner space.
I think you are agreeing with me and V. Ramanathan without saying so directly that endogenous substances such as water vapor do cause radiative forcing.
Which is why I am saying it is extremely neglectful to leave water vapor out of discussions of radiative forcing.
Re: hunter (Aug 12 21:38),
The original reply was in reference to a comment that ocean pH hadn’t changed in a billion years. 58 million years is indeed a long time, but it’s far less than 1,000,000,000 years.
De Witt
“: (1) the mass extinction event at the K T boundary was abrupt and concentrated among surface dwelling species, I attributed the extinction events to: (1) a bolide impact for the K T event,” Kunio Kaiho in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
Not acidity!
In fact There is other evidence to suggest that warming predated the δ13C excursion by some 3,000 years.
In other words those 1.0 to 0.1 mm benthic foraminifera that went extinct during the PETM died because of a meteoric impact 3000 years before the seas went slightly less alkaline due to the large increase in heat of unknown cause that delineates the PETM.
Another cause postulated to my surprise was that the meteorite was a gigantic ball of CO2 , talk about a theoretical exogenous cause of CO2 increase and your reference supplies one for Nick Stokes.
What a stroke or Stoke of serendipity, two arguments disposed of in one by your reference.
Perhaps Ron Hubbard meant 58,000,000 years ago instead of 75,000,000 years ago and there is a correspondence between Elmo, Thetans and the Thanetian event, only joking of course.
De Witt,
To be clear, I would never say “Ocean pH has not changed in X years”. Ocean pH is dynamic from credible data based reports. It can change seasonally, even daily by tide, changes in ocean currents upwelling deep waters, or sinking surface waters, mineral leeching and atmospheric interactions. Ocean life seems to adapt to that pretty well. What I do assert is that within that dynamic range ocean pH has changed very little over very long periods of time, with all due respect to forminifera.
To rephrase larger question was regarding the atmosphere dynamics: how does the atmosphere tell the difference to imposed changes in composition rather to emergent changes, if the physics of the change species (so to speak)is similar/identical?
Is it a good idea posting vacation plans online?
Let us put it another way. The pH [thanks De Witt] of the oceans
Between 1751 and 1994 decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14,[5] representing an increase of almost 30% in H+ ion concentration in the world’s oceans
Although the pH of pure water is 7, drinking water and natural water exhibits a pH range because it contains dissolved minerals and gases. Surface waters typically range from pH 6.5 to 8.5 while groundwater ranges from pH 6 to 8.5.
4.0 10.1 Limits for the most resistant fish species
4.1 9.5 Range tolerated by trout
5.0 9.0 Tolerable range for most fish
So we can survive a reasonable pH range, The actual change in pH has been minuscule and is unlikely to move outside the range life survives in over the next billion years no matter how much CO2 one can realistically put into the air.
I said “The sea has been the same alkalinity for over a billion years. It is kept that way by the relatively infinite constant amounts of water and minerals.”
That is in a range supporting life.
I cannot think of any way that the ocean [salt water], with an atmosphere of Oxygen and Nitrogen, all of them the left over gaseous and liquid parts of the minerals that the surface of our world is composed of, could ever turn acidic in 10 billion years given stable other conditions eg orbit and heat of the sun. We do not have an acid substrate, We cannot make acid out of a slightly alkaline geological matrix, or it would not be a slightly alkaline geological matrix.
I am talking in nature, not a laboratory.
OK, I do like hyperbole, but the gist of the argument is there and clear and I hope.
Shub,
No. That’s why I didn’t. I’m home now… just feeling unmotivated to post for various reasons.
Lucia,
Welcome back. Take all the time you need. Loving well means one has earned the right to take their time after a tough loss. It is clear from your writing that you have loved those around you very well.
Sincerely,
hunter
angech,
There is no reason to accept De Witt’s quoting of estimates of historical pH. If he is quoting the studies that have been offered so far, the error bands make the studies useless and the claims simply yet more climate fear mongering.
Biomineralization is often mediated by the living organism itself, controlling local and intracellular pH and and ion concentrations. What happens to the dead skeletons afterwards is probably of secondary importance.
e.g. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-matsci-062910-095803 (paywalled unfortunately).
I have a question for those more scientifically skilled than I am. Is Murray Salby’s work as summarized in this article good science or is it flimsy or based on cherry picking? http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_3_global-warming.html Not asking whether it is conclusively true, but whether it is good preliminary science.
JD
Re: JD Ohio (Aug 19 13:26),
Not true and bad science.
JD Ohio,
Seconding DeWitt: Salby’s work is utter rubbish. It is not bad science, it is not even related to science. The University he worked for in Australia fired him, and although they did not handle it very gracefully, they had good reason to get rid of him… he seems to me quite confused and disconnected from reality.
Odd for rubbish non-science work to be replicated by other scientists. Perhaps sweeping generalizations and dismissals are rather hasty.
JD Ohio,
My advice is to discontinue asking what is good preliminary science. You are going to get political/non-scientific answers.
There is only one way to approach this scientifically and that is to evaluate what is presented as evidence for yourself.
I’ve been waiting for years to see actual evidence presented, so my conclusion thus far is that there isn’t any.
Squiggly lines – that’s teeth whitening toothpaste commercial stuff.
Andrew
Please tell me in detail, using actual data and references, why Salby is right and Ferdinand Englebeen, for example is wrong about the source of increasing atmospheric CO2.
If you can’t do that, then you have no legitimate reason to criticize SteveF’s and my opinion about Salby’s work.
DeWitt,
Had I the patience of St Ferdinand, or perhaps an unlimited amount of time to waste, I would engage folks like hunter and Andrew KY on foolish subjects like the validity of Salby’s silly CO2 theories. I have neither.
JD Ohio,
DeWitt and I are old scientists who are skeptical of the projections of climate science…. with, I think, good cause. But we are still scientists. Salby is IMO not 5% as credible as the waco projections of main stream climate science, which gives some perspective on just how technically bad he is. Really, in terms of science, he’s bizarre. Of course, sky dragon slayers and their friends are no different, as is amply evident on many blog threads.
DeWitt and SteveF,
Thanks a lot for your help. Having the benefit of your expertise, I will not spend any additional time dealing with Sally’s work.
JD
JD, I would say that within the observational uncertainties, there is plenty of scope for everybody to be wrong, including Salby. Many people have their own favourite pieces of evidence. A new satellite, OCO-2, was launched last month to get better data.
Similar to Andrew_KY, I don’t see evidence (compelling enough) to decide.
What gives with the maps on Wuwt at the moment? Antarctic one today has small black holes all through the ice like a macula detachment. Two of the sea ice extent maps have little drippy lines.
I am irked as I was was wrong about record Antarctic Ice extent of course.
Re: angech (Aug 23 17:09),
I wouldn’t give up on a new record for Antarctic ice area or extent yet. We’re still a few weeks away from the average maximum. 2010 area peaked early, on 8/24, but other years were well into September and 2013 peaked on October 9. There’s always a lot of fluctuation near the peak for Antarctica. A lot depends on whether storms break up the ice edge or not.
Dunno about the maps at WUWT. Probably just some glitchy data or problems with the land mask. I presume you’re referring to the NSIDC map with the black areas around the edge of the continent. I don’t think they’re real.
Thanks, De Witt, I get a bit frustrated in my semi retirement and do too much map watching.
angech,
I noticed the other day that the usual suspects are still trying to hand wave away the increase in Antarctic sea ice. One theory is that runoff from the melting ice cap has lowered the salinity of the surrounding ocean enough to raise the freezing point. I haven’t seen the data, but I have serious doubts about that hypothesis. If the salinity has indeed decreased, it would seem more likely that it’s because the ocean currents that bring high salinity, warm surface water to high Southern latitudes have weakened. IMO, the opposite is true for the Arctic.
The other is that albedo hasn’t been affected because there’s no significant trend in the minimum area. The problem with that is that very little energy is deposited by sunlight at the minimum because the sun is low in the sky at that point. The area at the winter solstice when the sun is at its highest would seem to be a more appropriate measure.
That does have a significant positive trend, at least for a linear fit. The trend line for CT Antarctic ice area on December 21 is 0.8 Mm2 or 13% higher in 2013 than it was in 1979. And, of course, it’s going to be higher for the three months the sun is coming up as well as for most of the three months while the sun is going down.