Hurricanes and climate change

[seer]

You might get a bit frustrated when I say, but that article was talking specifically and exclusively about Greenland. I know there's another line in there talking about 'the variability of Earth's climate', but at no point in the article did it talk about the global temperature going up. It was only a discussion about an entirely local phenomenon, and local phenomonens like this are harder to understand because they depend on upon understanding weather. The global average temperature isn't as affected by weather as some local part is, but by is determined by the total energy content of the atmosphere, and the total content can't just disappear somewhere else.

That isn't quite right:

in ice cores recovered from Greenland glaciers. Each successively deeper ice layer represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history from the past

They are claiming, not me, that Greenland represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history.

There are cycle that explain the Ice Age. There's a big one about the wobble of the Earth's rotation which is more than ten thousand year long called the Milankovich Cycle. It explains a very slow, periodic temperature variation. It can't however explain the sudden rise in temperature since the seventies. CO2 driving a greenhouse effect can however.

No Leonhard, evidence for these D-O climate cycles have been found world wide according to the link, and they can not explain them at this point.

[seer]

Check this graph of CO2, notice the yearly oscilations? But notice how its all trending upwards. We're the cause of that.

And how much has the earth's temperature risen from 1955 to present with all this extra CO2?

[Roy]

Did you read my quote? Obviously we have had greater fluctuations, greater rise in heat, in less time, that what we see today.

I've read your quote. It describes the fluctuations as being "abrupt, millennial-scale climate shifts". That's in more time than we're seeing today, not less time.

[Leonhard]

And how much has the earth's temperature risen from 1955 to present with all this extra CO2?

With the water-vapor feedback, the extra heat trapped by a doubling of CO2 is 5.37 W/m^2, which translates roughly to 3C per doubling of CO2. The relationship between partial pressure and temperature increase is logarithmic, so going from 310ppm to 400ppm represents just about 1C as per the models, which is exactly what we find.



In other words, the temperature increase is mostly driven by the increase of CO2, which is mostly caused by us.

[Sparko]

And how much has the earth's temperature risen from 1955 to present with all this extra CO2?

This was the average summer temperature in Hawaii in 1955:


ec23fc9d0a48d1178e1200eb1064e360--hurley-south-wales.jpg

and today:

hula-girl.jpg

[seer]

I've read your quote. It describes the fluctuations as being "abrupt, millennial-scale climate shifts". That's in more time than we're seeing today, not less time.

That was from the Greenland sample: One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals (Huber et al. 2006).

And they claim:Each successively deeper ice layer (in Greenland) represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history from the past...

[TheLurch]

OK... and? Nobody is saying that CO₂ doesn't exist in our atmosphere. What we are saying, and what credible peer-reviewed studies have shown, is that it has a negligible affect on the global climate.

Could you point to a credible peer reviewed study? The NIPCC is an aggregator of other studies, so wouldn't actually count even if it were credible.

Also: the fact that these wavelengths don't make it through the atmosphere means that all the energy in those wavelengths is being retained in the atmosphere. That's not a negligible effect. And is quite impressive for a gas you keep dismissing as "trace."

Could it have an effect? Sure, it's possible. But whatever impact it has is impossible to separate from the much more significant sources causing climatic fluctuations. The fact that the planets in the solar system are warming and cooling more or less in sync with the earth should tell you that it's not the CO₂. This suggests that the sun is the biggest contributor to climate change.

One, that's false. Two, even if it were true, it wouldn't be very informative. The outer planets aren't heated significantly by the sun; their climates are dominated by the residual heat of their gravitational collapse. Venus' carbon dioxide rich atmosphere has caused a runaway greenhouse that keeps it at a near constant temperature (there's no day/night difference). So, the only places solar radiation matters significantly are the daytime side of Mercury, Earth, and Mars.

EDITED: clarified a point.

[TheLurch]

They are claiming, not me, that Greenland represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history.

You're treating that quote as if it definitively says that the data from Greenland is representative of the entire earth. To do so, you have to interpret "snapshot" as capturing a complete picture of everything relevant. It doesn't mean that.

If you're going to get bogged down in semantics, try to make sure your semantics are right.

[TheLurch]

This was the average summer temperature in Hawaii in 1955:


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and today:

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Conclusion? We're all idiots for not living in Hawaii.

[seer]

You're treating that quote as if it definitively says that the data from Greenland is representative of the entire earth. To do so, you have to interpret "snapshot" as capturing a complete picture of everything relevant. It doesn't mean that.

If you're going to get bogged down in semantics, try to make sure your semantics are right.

Hey it wasn't me who said that Greenland represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history. And they also said that they had global evidence of these D-O cycles, with some pretty significant warming. And the fact that at this point we really don't know what caused them.

[TheLurch]

Well in the past, when the earth was much warmer, was that because it was all out of balance? And was the continual warming from the ice age on caused by Co2 imbalance?

The warming from the ice age has not been continual. As the graph i posted earlier showed, global temperatures had been declining for over 4,000 years prior to their recent turn upwards. That said, CO2 was involved. As Sparko noted, orbital changes control the entry/exit from glacial periods. But the changes in incoming sunlight aren't enough to cause the large swings of temperature we see. That comes about because the solar changes cause a feedback in CO2 levels that enhances the trend. So yes, CO2 contributed to the warming from the last ice age.

As for the earth having been warmer in the past, plate tectonics helps set the overall CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It just happens on incredibly long timescales - long enough to be irrelevant to our planning and infrastructure.

[TheLurch]

Hey it wasn't me who said that Greenland represents a snapshot of Earth's climate history.

Right, but you're using that quote to repeatedly argue that what we see in Greenland means that they were significant globally. The quote doesn't mean that.

[Juvenal]

Could you point to a credible peer reviewed study? The NIPCC is an aggregator of other studies, so wouldn't actually count even if it were credible.

A while back, spurred on by discussions elsewhere, I went to the trouble of reading through the NIPCC reports. They are relatively credible in the narrow range they define for themselves. But that range deliberately, and quite openly, excludes the majority of climate science. Says so in the forewords and prefaces. The NIPCC is a response to the IPCC featuring studies excluded by the IPCC. It's not an overall assessment, or an independent assessment, and doesn't pretend to be.

Before the Heartland Institute added their funding for this latest NIPCC report, and even since to a large extent, they were concentrating on publicizing a remarkably unprofessional document, switching authors and endorsers between versions. Yes, the papers, if it's fair to call them that, like the NIPCC reports themselves, began with a list of endorsers. They also looked to have been put together in Word before being converted to PDF so poorly that footnotes bled over onto the tops of following pages, though that was fixed in the last version I've seen.

Working through the papers, I found they could be summarized quite easily as an attempt to discredit thermometer data in favor of satellite data, disregarding the need to calibrate the latter with the former. The original version was a response to fuel economy regulations put in by the Obama administration following the 2008 economic crisis, seven or so years after they were put in place, and, hence, the same number of years after submissions were closed.

It was still useful in a sense. I learned a lot about the satellite constellations measuring climate today. But I had to do all the work myself because it was clear the NIPCC folks were engaged in the academic equivalent of phoning it in.

[shunyadragon]

Found this as an ok explanation for the global relationship between hurricanes and global warming that I previously described.

There is a reasonable table in the article that describes the differences in the relationship of the hurricanes in the different regions.

[shunyadragon]

The following highly technical summary of research primarily addressing the trends of Atlantic hurricanes concludes that there is no measurable influence of Global Warming on the intensity and frequency. It does address the possible influence of Global Warming on West Pacific Hurricanes.

https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-war...nd-hurricanes/