Is 400 just the number after 399, or are we doomed, so we can stop arguing

400 ppm does what it does, 500 ppm is 50 years away, or less if the big burn continues. Who cares? We have COP 21 non binding agreements to keep future +T to less than 0.5 oC more. Won't mean diddly unless something big happens.

Watch grounded ice, and watch global crop production. Until/unless one of those changes, we remain in free-for-all burn mode.

 

Sea level helps too.

Bob Wilson

 

Agree on global crop yields-->most countries have 0 food reserves, so if production falls below consumption, result will be hungry, desperate people.
By "grounded ice", did you mean the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, or something else? I have read that the total melt of the Greenland ice cap raises sea level 20-4o feet, and total melt of the Antarctic ice cap raises sea level by about 200 feet. Have not personally done those calculations, however. Making large swaths of low-lying land uninhabitable would result in huge population shifts, with predictable negative effects, IMO.
Since I have grandchildren and am invested in the future, I do care, and hence the Prius and other life-style changes.

 

Grounded ice is all that not floating on water. So, the places Holt mentions, and other glaciers and ice fields. I think that seasonal snow that melts is not included.

The Greenland and Antarctic SLR equivalent numbers may be a tad high. I don't think they are precisely known, because neither is the topography under ice of those places.

But all of that is quite far in the future. The population, crops, and economic infrastructure within 1 (3) m of current SL is a better focus. Side issue is saline water intrusion into groundwater near current SL can get you, even if your crop land is not flooded and you use groundwater for that.

 

December is now posted:


Global Analysis - Annual 2015 | 2015 year-to-date temperatures versus previous years | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

That coming Ice Age, lurking just around the corner, seems to keep receding fast enough to remain completely out of sight.

 

I agree we need to realize this is an El Nino year. But if 2016/2017 stay here that's another thing. Just for the heck of it, I hope 2016 is cooler. I bet the press will fall silent on proclaiming 2016 is cooler.

 

2014 NASA warmest ever statement was "38% confident".I wonder if they have improved their confidence for 2015.BTW satellites show 2015 was 3rd warmest.
Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest but we're only 38% sure | Daily Mail Online

 

BTW most of the past 10,000 years were warmer than 2015.While CO2 was lower.

 

The year-old article you link puts a 0.1C margin of error on each year's figure, much larger than the indicated 2014-2010 gap.

How much gap do you see between 2015 and 2014 on the chart above? That should answer your question.

 

True Gavin Schmidt is no dummy.He fabricates the world temps, so this year he made sure to fabricate above the margin of error.
Now how to get rid of those pesky satellites calibrated to radiosondes?

 

"most of the past 10,000 years were warmer than 2015" @29. This of course is based on proxy temperatures (oxygen isotopes) from a narrowly chosen subset of polar ice cores. Other proxies tell very different storied. It also requires 'Deus Ex Machina' to explain away lower sea levels when the air was ostensibly warmer.

Such unskeptical approaches work for some folks, but I am much more interested in seeing what might be concluded from considering the concordance of evidence from various fields.

 

Oh Gawd it is such pain. Few or none here are willing to put in the (relatively minor) effort to understand stable-isotope temperature proxies just a bit better.

O16/O18 in ice/snow/rain tells something about the temperature in the place where that water evaporated into the atmosphere. Not where it fell. Get it? We'd generally suppose that source to be somewhere in the ocean, but we'd not know where, and we'd not presume that it were always the same place, through long time.

Speleothems in caves record (by way of stable isotopes) the temperature in the place where some little bit of calcium carbonate went from dissolved-in-water to a persistent localized solid. IN THE CAVE. They don't give a flip about where the water came from. Just T in the cave. GET IT?

Calcium (strontium) isotope ratios n marine carbonate shells are probably like that, it recording (seafloor) temperatures. But maybe not exactly, because good or bad food years might change isotopes a bit. I think we don't know. It would not be such a difficult experiment...

Alkenones incorporated into seafloor sediments are proxies for phytoplankton which live(d) on the sea surface but are now down in the sediment. They should tell us something about sea-surface T, sometime in the past,with age determinations done in other ways.

Trees (tree rings) are a whole 'nother thing. Mostly we look at rings widths, but BIG TROUBLE, trees being living organisms respond to EVERYTHING around them in deciding how wide to make this year's growth ring. HUNDREDS of papers have been published about how to extract 'T' from those noisy signals.

What we have here is a complicated landscape of different proxies/sources with different 'messages'. Put them together with paleo sea levels, and try your best to sort it out. It is what some climate scientists do. The concordance of evidence (certainly incomplete) does not support that notion that most of 10k years had higher T than now. Such a conclusion requires a degree of twisting and turning that only few (in fact) are unskeptical enough to undertake.

For those into data and analysis for its own sake, the picture has changed a lot over 20 years and may very well get changed again. That is OK. That is fine. If a later, improved concordance of evidence and analysis suggests "dang it must have been hotter way back when", it will trouble me not at all.

 

In Which I Go Spelunking … | Watts Up With That?

 

I opened link@34 and found a description of methods and figure captions, but not the attached figure. I assume this is the source of mojo’s figure, but it does not appear for me for unknown reasons. Sometimes I can’t open wordpress sites at all.

This figure combines speleothem oxygen isotope data from 20 studies, and converts those to temperature anomalies as

Temperature = ∂18O/-0.36.
Just above, in the text, it says ∂18O/0.36. These have opposite signs and I’m sure only one of them was used. I might even guess which one, but I’d prefer not to.

As is so often the case I was stimulated to deeper study by thought-provoking posts here. So I looked for evidence of a ‘universal conversion factor’ between ‘del’ oxygen and temperature. Here is one very comprehensive treatment:

Climatic and environmental controls on speleothem oxygen-isotope values
Matthew S. Lachniet
Quaternary Science Reviews 28 (2009) 412–432.
doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.10.021

If any of you get interested in the topic (one among the several paleo T proxies in wide use), by all means read this paper. Do not base your thinking on what I wrote @33.

Now, having read Lachniet, you get the idea that there is not a universal conversion factor. For me, this means that no aligning approach for oxygen isotope data will lead to a meaningful global paleo T record. Kind of a shame, really. Each cave does tell its own story, and where they were assembled, it has been done in ways that I cannot now describe. But I think it was not as described in WUWT by post 34.

There was transparency at WUWT, and that is always s a wonderful thing. We see where the data came from and yes, I got the original data as well. There are 60 studies included, and as Eschenbach says, most of them do not extend to ‘the present’. He included 20. I was more permissive, including 24 with most recent reported ages of 50 years or less. But I also saw an interesting thing that Eschenbach did not mention. 14 (of 24) studies included negative ages, in the future, of up to 56 years.

What does that mean? Speleothem ages come from uranium/thorium isotope dating, and we’d have to go to the original studies to see what they did. But for now, it seems unwise to assume that every ‘age zero’ in the compiled data corresponds to 2010, or any other particular year.

Frankly I don’t know how speleothems in general can be used to illuminate 20th century climate, unless their most recent dates can be well defended. Bumps and wiggles in older times, well sure.

So, in my analysis of 24, I am rather more vague than Eschenbach. Constrained by Lachniet, I could not convert to temperature; I only report visible trends in reported oxygen isotope ratio data.

Of the 24,
9 had ‘least negative’ oxygen isotope ratios at ages much older than 8000 years
7 appeared flat through time (usually because of very noisy records)
5 had ‘least negative’ oxygen isotope ratios at ages about 8000 years (which seems to be Eschenbach’s point)
3 had had ‘least negative’ oxygen isotope ratios at their youngest ages.

Eschenbach said at WUWT “So, what does all this mean? Heck, I don’t know…”. I would echo that statement. Readers ought to examine multiple-paleo-proxy records (published, or otherwise if you prefer), and decide what most closely shows reality.

Posted graph @34 at face value suggests earth surface T has been slowly going down for thousands of years. I honestly don’t know of any suggestions (climate-change exploding or denying) saying so.

I think that connecting any paleo-T records with current (instrumental) increases remains troublesome. If you happen to want more fossil C burned, that is a wonderful thing. If instead you are concerned that later climates might not support the human enterprise so well, it might be a problem.

 

Do you have another proxy thats more accurate for 10,000 years? Both Polar Ice cores(from opposite ends of he Earth) and worldwide caves confirm and reinforce each other , that the Earth was warmer for the past 10,000 years.

 

I admire your effort to make sense of the entrails:

There is a good reason for using data from the modern era which also coincides with a sharp increase in fossil fuel burning. Thanks to El Nino, the 'cherry picking' of the UAH record is rapidly fading into obscurity. Too bad for them, there just aren't many glaciers and ice packs in the troposphere to hold frozen water.

A week ago, Jason-3, the next sea level mission, has reached orbit. So we'll have a continuous record that pretty well nails what is happening with the glaciers and ice caps.

Bob Wilson

 

As usual, these fulminations lead me back to the literature, and I learn something. I recommend a close reading of

DOI: 10.1126/science.1228026
Science 339, 1198 (2013);
Shaun A. Marcott et al.
A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years

It caused fury at the time of publication, which I believe could have been entirely avoided if people had read it closely at the time. It does attempt to put paleo T proxies into a common framework, and relate them to modern instrumental measurements.

It presents a message quite unlike the original hockey stick, and that is the first thing to know. Millenia of proxies no longer are flat before the blade. There is a large and long-lasting hump from about 10 to 5 thousand years BC. So Hockeystick 1.0 is dead and on behalf of that departed horse I’d ask AustinG to stop with that beating.

Allow me to quote just one sentence: “Our results indicate that global mean temperature for the decade 2000–2009 has not yet exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene (5000 to 10,000 yr B.P.).” Please read that twice.


Somehow I imagine our mojo to attack Marcott, while in reality they ought to be the best of friends. Marcott et al. does not say (with mojo) that most of 10K years were warmer than now, but hey, they said a lot. During long times when CO2 was 280 ppm (or below) earth was not cooler than until very recently.


What of mechanisms? We need them. Marcott et al. invoke Milankovich orbital parameters, and long-term changes in ocean circulation (not PDO, ENSO, or other such short wiggles). Those matters that deserve attention, but give me a moment please. The message here is that those mechanisms have been at least as strong as increasing CO2 from sub-280 to almost 400 ppm.


Mojo, send this guy a Christmas card at least!


Milankovich cycles (in case y’all don’t know) are going ‘cold’. Ocean changes remain beyond ‘model skill’ (which is to say they remain unpredictable). But now we have decades of increasing T and increasing CO2, and no other mechanisms have been proposed for this current odd pattern. It is a most important pattern for us, because we live here now. We all want human enterprise to do well in this century, even with CO2 rising to 500 ppm or above.


I reckon it is time to stop thinking about CO2 as ‘the only thing’. Marcott et al. fixed that for me, and I am happy to give secondary thanks to mojo. But high CO2 is also a thing, and the PETM climate of 55 MYa is not where we’d want to go. Really.


It is my view that neither ‘pure CO2’ or ‘no CO2’ thinking will help us. I propose an immediate truce between warring factions, accept what Marcott et al. taught, and let’s thoroughly examine potential benefits and risks of higher CO2. Neither extreme appears to have the high ground. Continuing the war benefits fossil-C burners, because renewable-energy alternatives are at hand, awaiting further application.


I believe that mojo is closer to the truth than many here could comfortably accept. Also that he is further from the truth than he could accept. Finally it won’t matter how we spar here. The human enterprise will be planned elsewhere, by folks how know or do not know how to steer a good course.

 

I appreciate efforts to get a dialog going but I'll have to pass. Discussion, yes, and empirical data points are always appreciated. But it has to be based on empirical data, not ad hominem.

Now I would add one data point that one model suggests the heat of combustion equals the greenhouse heat in a couple months. But the persistence of greenhouse gases are measured in centuries. Worse, the energy loss, the inefficiency of two completing energy models is abysmally weighted:

• solar->plant->geological encasement->fuel->useful work - talk about an inefficient process, earth isn't making replacement fossil fuels at the rate we find and burn them up.
  
• solar->[solar cell or wind or wave]->useful work - the efficiency gains are orders of magnitude greater and longer lasting.

The largest creatures have the shortest path between solar energy and their food by consuming the smallest flora and fauna. They are more efficiently 'plugged into the Sun' and that is the lesson for a future earth population. More people means we need greater efficiency converting the Sun's energy into useful things like well fed and educated offspring.

Bob Wilson