[PassedOut]

Warming’s ‘vicious cycle:’ Permafrost thaws, vents lots of greenhouse gases, speeds up warming

Quote

Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.

And the problems being shunted to our kids and grandkids get bigger and bigger.

[Winstonm]

Former skeptic admits he was wrong to deny global warming data

[Al_U_Card]

 PassedOut, on 2011-November-30, 17:27, said:

Warming’s ‘vicious cycle:’ Permafrost thaws, vents lots of greenhouse gases, speeds up warming


And the problems being shunted to our kids and grandkids get bigger and bigger.

Certainly an area of concern. Water vapor is the big ghg. CO2 much less so and much less present. Methane OTOH is much more a ghg but in ever tinier amounts. the supposition being that methane clathrates might bubble up from undersea or permafrost deposits as temperatures warm. The planet has been warming gently for some time now, without incident. We are entering the cool phase of the PDO (Alaska warmed by 5 deg. F when the warm phase took over 30 years ago. It is expected to return to its previous values over the next decade.) The AMO is ending its warm phase and that will also cool the northern hemisphere as well.

Either way, it's models all the way down but despite using IPCC numbers...some (eg. Koven) recently found:

Their findings run counter to predictions included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 fourth assessment report. This said found that climate change will spark a growth in high-latitude vegetation, pulling in more carbon from the atmosphere than thawing permafrost will release.

But, unlike earlier models, the new model includes detailed processes of how carbon accumulates in high-latitude soil over millennia, and how it’s released as permafrost thaws.

As a result, the new model found that the increase in carbon uptake by more vegetation will be overshadowed by a much larger amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.

"Previous models tended to dramatically underestimate the amount of soil carbon at high latitudes because they lacked the processes of how carbon builds up in soil," says Berkeley Lab’s Charles Koven.

"Our model starts off with more carbon in the soil, so there is much more to lose with global warming."

On the up side, the simulation found only a slight increase in methane release, contrary to previous predictions.

"People have this idea that permafrost thaw will release methane," says Koven. "But whether carbon comes out as carbon dioxide or methane is dependent on hydrology and other fine-scale processes that models have a poor ability to resolve. It’s possible that warming at high latitudes leads to drying in many regions, and thus less methane emissions, and in fact this is what we found."

Koven says his team is working to address large uncertainties that still remain in the model, such as the role of nitrogen feedbacks, which affect plant growth.

So, worth keeping track of as we determine just what is going on, climatically.

[Al_U_Card]

 Winstonm, on 2011-November-30, 17:42, said:

Former skeptic admits he was wrong to deny global warming data

Dr. Muller is not your garden variety skeptic. (google will provide his bona fides) He and his coworkers decided to try to analyze the data provided by GISS and UEA. His findings included no warming over the last decade and agreed with the 0.7 C rise over the last century. Interestingly, his paper has not yet passed peer-review (the conclusions were released into the media prior to submission). His co-author Judith Curry has cautioned that the data, analyses and conclusions must await peer-review before being used for anything else. The method of chopping data series is new and, as yet, unproven.

Once again, these numbers do not lead to any correlation with rising [CO2].

[Al_U_Card]

 onoway, on 2011-November-30, 17:26, said:

What would seem to be a major issue looming is the ability to harvest clean water.

Land use and its impact is always a concern. Warmer is wetter and a cooling world will lock away water at the poles. Man made effects on local water supplies is a big concern especially in the desert regions that are seeing an influx of population.

Harvest is a good choice of words, as recycling may be the key to maintaining our society, as we know it. Desalination takes time and money and most of all energy and we know where that comes from....

[Al_U_Card]

The heat is missing, or it just isn't there...

From the peer-reviewed literature (and the thousands of Argo buoys that use real measurements).

Knox and Douglass — Abstract:
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.

[hrothgar]

 Al_U_Card, on 2011-December-01, 11:27, said:

The heat is missing, or it just isn't there...

From the peer-reviewed literature (and the thousands of Argo buoys that use real measurements).

Knox and Douglass — Abstract:
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.

Three simple questions

1. Is it a good idea to forecast long term cycles based on five years worth of data?
2. What happens to your regression lines if you extend your data set to include earlier data?
3. What should we conclude about someone who gets something this basic this wrong:

(a) They are sufficiently stupid/incompetent that we can safely discount anything that they say
(b) They are deliberately misrepresenting data

[Al_U_Card]

And if you are interested in how the blogs managed to stop the "team" from silencing the rebuttal of their settled science, just read this from K Trenberth and Knox and Douglass concerning the above paper and where the facts really are...

Glad they can no longer hide.

Just a reminder of Trenberth...

Kevin Trenberth explains how to respond to skeptics:

“but the response should try to somehow label these guys and lazy and incompetent and unable to do the huge amount of work it takes to construct such a database. Indeed technology and data handling capabilities have evolved and not everything was saved. So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labeling them as lazy with nothng better to do seems like a good thing to do.”

As well as this gem about Chris Landsea's peer-reviewed work on how CAGW had no effect on hurricane frequency or intensity...(he resigned from the IPCC in disgust with their "tinkering" of how the information was presented.


I responded to [Chris Landsea's] earlier message in a fairly low key fashion. I think he has behaved irresponsibly and ought to be fired by NOAA for not have an open enough mind to even consider that climate change might be affecting hurricanes. I am quickly becoming outraged by this and I hope it backfires on him!!!!
Kevin [Trenberth]

[hrothgar]

Delete

[phil_20686]

 hrothgar, on 2011-December-01, 11:34, said:

Three simple questions

1. Is it a good idea to forecast long term cycles based on five years worth of data?
2. What happens to your regression lines if you extend your data set to include earlier data?
3. What should we conclude about someone who gets some thing this basic this wrong:

(a) They are sufficiently stupid/incompetent that we can safely discount anything that they say
(b) They are deliberately misrepresenting data

There are more significant questions than that - for example, it is not at all clear to me, and I do theoretical physics for a living- that increased radiative heating will warm the oceans. There are three counterflows to imagine

(1) Warming the ocean by radiative forcing may lead to a much warmer surface layer without much affecting the layer below, this might lead to much greater evaporation.
(2) Warmer surface temperatures might break up the convection currents which bring cold water to the surface, resulting again in much greater evaporation and lower overall temperatures.
(3) Much of the energy might bleed into the atmosphere resulting in higher average wind speeds - even a small amount of wind can lead to much greater evaporative cooling.

If any of these effects seem implausible, I refer you to the Mpemba effect. Essentially, hot water can sometimes freeze faster the cold. The most convincing experiment yet done suggests that the reason is that the momentum of the convection current keeps mixing it more and leading to more efficient cooling than is possible for the cold water.

Finally, it is not clear to me what depths these measurements were taken - as I understand it the argo buoys measure a compete temperature profile from about 1km down. Also don't forget that ocean currents vary the temperature on 20 year cycles by dredging up cold water from teh bottom (reduced cooling greater average temp, lower surface temp), and by putting it back.

[Al_U_Card]

The issue was one of "missing" heat. With the models predicting temperature rises that weren't happening and a hot spot in the upper troposhere that didn't exist, the hand-wavers called in ocean heat content to cover the difference. (The models couldn't possibly be wrong as they even count on them to "represent" the "true" value of climate change...)

If the excess heat was accumulating, where was it? Deep ocean warming was not found by the deep-diving ARGO buoys, as was the flattening ocean surface temperatures not a place for the heat to reside before diving to the depths, so to speak. So, again the models proved wrong and real measurements indicated the natural variation of global warming and cooling cycles. Certainly the overall warming in the 30s and 40s was as rapid as in the 80s and 90s...sans [CO2] as the models were programmed to indicate. (None of the GCMs handle that either.)

It is looking more and more like the "forcing" provided by water vapor (clouds, models don`t do clouds, according to Prof. Wigley et al, in camera.) provides a governor to the other parameters in the climate equation and not a multiplier of [CO2] forcing. As climate sensitivity (temperature rise for a doubling of [CO2]) becomes better understood, carbon can go back to being a food source for plants and not a scourge of humanity or a source of revenue for scurrilous scammers.

[phil_20686]

 Al_U_Card, on 2011-December-01, 17:33, said:

The issue was one of "missing" heat. With the models predicting temperature rises that weren't happening and a hot spot in the upper troposhere that didn't exist, the hand-wavers called in ocean heat content to cover the difference. (The models couldn't possibly be wrong as they even count on them to "represent" the "true" value of climate change...)

If the excess heat was accumulating, where was it? Deep ocean warming was not found by the deep-diving ARGO buoys, as was the flattening ocean surface temperatures not a place for the heat to reside before diving to the depths, so to speak. So, again the models proved wrong and real measurements indicated the natural variation of global warming and cooling cycles. Certainly the overall warming in the 30s and 40s was as rapid as in the 80s and 90s...sans [CO2] as the models were programmed to indicate. (None of the GCMs handle that either.)

It is looking more and more like the "forcing" provided by water vapor (clouds, models don`t do clouds, according to Prof. Wigley et al, in camera.) provides a governor to the other parameters in the climate equation and not a multiplier of [CO2] forcing. As climate sensitivity (temperature rise for a doubling of [CO2]) becomes better understood, carbon can go back to being a food source for plants and not a scourge of humanity or a source of revenue for scurrilous scammers.

You really seem not to understand how these models work. The whole point of an ensemble model is that it is not necessarily necessary to understand every detail of a complex system. Its only important to paramaterise what you don't know. Ocean currents are poorly understood, they are by far the largest uncertainly in climate models. However, by making plausible assumptions about the interplay between the oceans and the atmosphere, we can see what assumptions and couplings accurately simulate past data, and how much uncertainty there is. Different assumptions lead to different climate models, thats why there are a range of forecasts. They are essentially identical to weather forecasting - to we understand everything about the climate so as to predict the exact path of a storm - no, does that stop us making predictions of a corridor that are right 80% of the time - no.

Arguments about past data are important because they ground the model in the real world. Arguments that x doesn't show up in the ocean currents despite showing up in the models is faulty reasoning. The model of the ocean currents could be completely wrong, and the model still trustworthy it it has the right interplay between the atmosphere and the oceans. This is the great thing about ensemble models - they are largely insensitive to our ignorance of the details of complex system. If the ensemble model correctly predicts the past when run in reverse, there is a very high expectation that it will predict the future, even if the details of the model are completely wrong. These types of model are widely used in economics, and in physical applications as diverse as the simulations of nuclear fusion to the simulations of galaxy formation. They have been very successful in all fields.

Essentially the only ways the ensemble model can be `wrong' is if the past data is wrong, or if there is some sort of emergent phenomenon captured in the "right" models, but not the wrong ones. Some models have occasionally displayed emergent phenomena not in other models. The most common is a complete flipping of the ocean circulation. These generally have catastrophically huge changes in the climate over given regions. However, they could easily be the results of poor modelling. Research is ongoing as to why they happen in some models and not others, but hey, thats science. The chance that there is a catastrophic possibility we don't well understand should not cheer up anyone.

[Al_U_Card]

Thanks for the reasoned reply. Indeed models are complex and complicated. My understanding of them is certainly rudimentary at best but I am not responsible for their maintenance or results. That they work is key and an economist that relied on a model that failed to predict accurately would end up costing someone a lot of money, right?

The issue is, technically (or at least for the technical merits of any model or given ensemble of models) that the result be able to demonstrate the "skill" of the model and its reconstructions of past and future values derived from its parameters. (I gather that that is a term used generally to describe accuracy as well as precision.) The fact is that the models do a bad job on past fitting and future predictions, based on analysis of the data available. That they are relied upon to create the need for drastic measures to alleviate the object of their projections seems to belie their efficacy.

That much I do understand and it seems to be adequate to refute the results of the models upon which this entire charade is based. I can appreciate that weak cycling of global temperatures is hardly useful in generating grants or taxes so I understand the adamant stance of the climate alarmists that rely on them so much.

[Al_U_Card]

From a comment at Bishop Hill, relating the Tyndall Centre's influence on public policy to what we saw over the last few years.

The Tyndall Centre then began to become a propaganda outlet, witness their 2004 paper 'The Social Simulation of the Public Perception of Weather Events and their Effect upon the Development of Belief in Anthropogenic Climate Change', which sets out how the grand experiment of belief formation can be formulated, assessed and tweaked, and how the effectiveness of the propaganda in ‘belief formation’ and the ‘social construction of quasi-reality’ can be measured. The paper presents a "model of the social construction of a quasi-reality. By quasi-reality we mean a reality that thus far is defined by expert knowledge and is surrounded by uncertainty. One should keep in mind, that although we are dealing with a public construction of reality, the reality per se has not yet manifest…In effect, it is the social construction of quasi-reality."

"We suggest that, in the realm of the public, forces act to maintain or denounce a perceived reality which has already been constructed. That is, an issue introduced by science (or media for that matter) needs continual expression of confirmation if it is to be maintained as an issue."

" In this paper, we explore under what conditions belief in global warming or climate change, as identified and defined by experience, science and the media, can be maintained in the public’s perception."

"As the science itself is contested, needless to say, so are the potential policy changes. So how then do people make sense or construct a reality of something that they can never experience in its totality (climate) and a reality that has not yet manifest (i.e. climate change)?"

"To endorse policy change people must ‘believe’ that global warming will become a reality some time in the future."

"Only the experience of positive temperature anomalies will be registered as indication of change if the issue is framed as global warming."

"Both positive and negative temperature anomalies will be registered in experience as indication of change if the issue is framed as climate change."

"We propose that in those countries where climate change has become the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate change/global warming."

http://www.tyndall.a.../files/wp58.pdf

[luke warm]

 Al_U_Card, on 2011-December-04, 08:09, said:

"We propose that in those countries where climate change has become the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate change/global warming."

to even say otherwise would be doubleplus ungood crimethink...

[Daniel1960]

The concept of the "missing heat" has been the subject of intense debate recently. Kevin Trenberth contends that the heat has sunk into the deep oceans. James Hanson claims that there is no "missing heat", but that aerosols emitted by coal-burning in China have reflecting incoming solar radiation. Jean-Paul Vernier attributes the aerososol-led cooling to volcanic eruptions, not coal-burning. Susan Soloman attributes the recent warming hiatus to decadal variability tied to ENSO (El Nino/La Nina cycles). Judith Lean attributes the stalled warming to solar cycles. All these theories could explain the decade-long temperature flattening individually, or in some combination. What they do tell us that the Earth's cliamte is a lot more complex than can be modelled effectively. Which factors are the greatest contributors may unravel as we monitor their changes in the coming years.

[blackshoe]

What we don't want to do is anything drastic to try to "fix" the climate until we're sure we understand what is going on, and what our "fixes" will do.

[PassedOut]

 blackshoe, on 2011-December-05, 12:36, said:

What we don't want to do is anything drastic to try to "fix" the climate until we're sure we understand what is going on, and what our "fixes" will do.

Who knows what will happen if we start to cut back on the billions of tons of CO2 mankind spews into the atmosphere each year? We'd have to look at how the weather was way back in the 20th century. I wonder if the records for that time still exist.

[Gerben42]

You are all worrying too much. Do you really think that there is going to be any chance in the human CO2 production in the near future? Every ton of CO2 that is saved in Europe is met by five new ones in Asia. We are kidding ourselves when we think we can go cold turkey on the drug of consumption. If we do, Asia will simply take over. So we don't and what is REALLY our target is to mitigate the consequences and adapt to the new situation of a warmer Earth.

Having said that, I will still contribute to a world with a lower CO2-production with my work, which involves building safe nuclear power plants in sensible places. At least in countries who are serious about doing something for the environment. Germany's government, apparently, is more interested in winning the next election. Who cares about CO2 anyway?

Sorry for my sarcastic view, but I would be interested in any bets that CO2 production will be down even by 20% in 2050. You must be kidding me.

[onoway]

 Gerben42, on 2011-December-05, 15:41, said:

You are all worrying too much....... building safe nuclear power plants in sensible places.

I haven't been following this issue for some time. Have the reported statistics of such things as cancers, birth defects and other problems stopped being more of an issue in more or less direct relationship with the proximity of homes to the power plants? And have people figured out what to do with nuclear waste? Every time I hear about the places that are "safe" to dispose of it I think of things like the Titanic and the BP Oil spill and people moving to the Faukland Islands as the place least likely to be involved in a war and other such ... "oops".