NASA Is Still Making Blunt Climate Change Statements (Update)
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Keith’s note: Despite fears that NASA will be muzzled when it comes to climate change – as has been observed at other agencies – NASA seems to be staying the course – for now.
Keith’s update: More silencing of climate scientists at EPA.
EPA yanks scientists’ conference presentations, including on climate change, Washington Post
“The Environmental Protection Agency has instructed two of its scientists and one contractor not to speak as planned at a scientific conference Monday in Providence, R.I., sparking criticism from some academics and congressional Democrats. The conference marks the culmination of a three-year report on the status of Narragansett Bay, New England’s largest estuary, and the challenges it faces. Climate change features as a significant factor in the 500-page report, which evaluates 24 aspects of the bay and its larger watershed. The organizers intend to present a 28-page summary report of their findings in a news conference Monday.”
Glad to see NASA posting the latest data.
There is data–and projected impacts. While NASA admin. is acting, consider that the EPA “instructed two scientists and one contractor not to speak at a conference. It’s eerie this occurs with the 1st Amend. and may be illegal if its to limit climate change liability. At stake: 3.5 to 9F, 1 to 9 feet sea level rise.
What’s scary is the facts being presented by scientists. The politicians are not just playing with fire. The draft of the Climate Change Report : global climate change is projected to continue to change over this century and beyond.
With SIGNIFICANT reductions in greenhouse emissions, the avg. increase is limited to 3.5F. WITHOUT major reductions, the increase in the global avg. temps relative to pre-industrial times could reach 9F or more by the end of the century. 9F !
The emerging science regarding Antarctic ice ice sheet stability suggests that for high emissions scenarios, GMSL rise exceeding 8ft by 2100 is physically possible. 8ft !
Global mean sea level (GMSL) has risen by about 7-8 inches since 1900, with about 3 of those inches occurring since 1993 (high confidence). GMSL is very likely to rise 0.3 to 0.6 ft by 2030, 1.5 to 1.2 ft by 2050, and 1-4 ft by 2100 (very high confidence in the lower bounds).
Arctic sea ice has decreased in extent from 3.5% to 4.1% per decade and is very likely nearly sea-ice free late summers by the 2040s (very high confidence).
Human-caused c.c. has made substantial contributions to GMSL since 1900, contributing to a rate of rise that is greater than during any century in at least 2,000 years (med. confidence).
The First Amendment only applies to private citizens, to protect them from the government. These are government employees and contractors and so it doesn’t apply. They are part of government or work for it.
This is the bargain scientists make when they go to work for the government or take government funding, namely they must then follow government orders.
Whether or not they are government employees, they can go to the meeting and say whatever they like. They can not, however, bill the trip to the government, imply they are there in any official capacity, or even use government resources to prepare their presentation.
A few years ago, when NASA had instituted some very restrictive rules about travel to international conferences, I know someone who had agreed to give an invited talk at the EGU. Instead of canceling, he went at his own expense, with his time billed as vacation, and even so, couldn’t say he was a JPL employee. The session chair simply said that the talk by so-and-so from JPL was canceled, the session would end fifteen minutes early, and, if anyone wanted to hang around, there was some guy from Arcadia, California, who had a few things to say about Uranus. If they go that far to distance themselves from the government, I think that’s about where stopping them would be a freedom of speech issue.
You forget, they are presenting about a formal research report the government paid for. It’s not about a ban based on the government not wanting to spend its money to send them.
Also they are going to the conference on the government’s dime. They are just not allowed to make the presentation since the government appears to have changed its mine on releasing the report.
But your argument undermines government employees and those who receive grants withholding information so they are able to publish in academic journals. In theory anyone with access to the research should be able to release it without the researcher’s or government’s permission. Or do you believe academic journals, many foreign, have more rights than government administators over government funded research results?
No, I didn’t forget that. The report is published, so a private citizen can attend a conference about it and express their personal opinions about its contents. If those people happened to be authors of the report, while paid by the EPA to work on it, that could create an awkward and delicate situation. But, with care, attending and expressing their personal views would be protected as freedom of speech. That would require massive attention to separating their views from their government-funded research. But that is difficult not impossible.
Yes, I think the issue here is that as invited presenters they would be representing the agency, not acting in a personal capacity.
Who knows, it may be as simple as them neglecting to ask for permission to make a presentation and some clerk just noticed it. And in the present Washington climate folks are spinnning it.
I know when I was organizing speaking tracks for the ASCE the government folks on the committee always reminded us to set the deadlines for announcing speakers late enough so they had time to get supervisor approval for the presentations, especially if they were speaking as representatives of their agency. These were mostly DOD and NASA employees, but I imagine it’s the same for all government agencies.
You get a down-arrow, Thomas. Those of us in Federal service have a duty first to those we work for – the American people. And that means communicating results of research et al to affected parties in the country – as is their job, and their duty. The US Federal government is not a private company.
It will be a very interesting court case to see, especially as it’s about presenting a report that the government paid them to write. I suppose they could claim “whistle blower” protection. But it will be hard for them to do so when the EPA links to the full report posted on the program’s website.
https://www.epa.gov/nep/loc…
Select the Narragansett Bay Program to go to its website
http://nbep.org/the-state-o…
Then download the summary report they were to speak on and the full report.
State of Narragansett Bay and Its Watershed Summary Report (PDF)
State of Narragansett Bay and Its Watershed – Technical Report (High resolution PDF)
Which would be a odd thing to do if they were actually trying to hide it from the public as folks are arguing.
But I guess folks are so busy complaining about the report being kept from the public they didn’t bother to look to see if it was actually being kept secret. 🙂
It is also interesting how many researchers are willing to ignore that responsibility to the people of the nation you speak of if it means publication in a respected journal for personal gain. (Remember Ceres and Pluto?) Kinda of a double standard 🙂
The Supreme Court has long held that public employees do not surrender all their First Amend. rights by reason of their employment.
1. Does the employee’s speech touch upon a matter of public concern? YES. The speech may be entitled to First Amendment protection.
2. Adequate justification? none given. 😉
The first question beyond public concern is whether the speech was made pursuant to the public employees job duties and through the official approval process. < ==
The First Amendment protects a public employee’s right, in certain circumstances, to speak as a citizen addressing matters of public concern. Presenting the facts does not interfere with job performance 😉 but suppressing the public presentation of material and allowing questions to be addressed in an open forum its an attempt to limit c.c. liability– It’s way more than ‘interesting’.
Except they were NOT invited to speak as private citizens but as representatives of the EPA. BIG difference.
I wonder what would happen if the conference organizers withdrew the invitations (since they people in question have been told not to speak as EPA representatives) and then issued new invitations to fill the time slot. That sounds perfectly legal and appropriate. Small conferences are organized informally enough to do that on short notice. And then, what if the organizers invited the same individuals, but as private citizens not EPA representatives?
The research work they did was funded by the tax payer and intended to be presented in public.
That’s a curious, and interesting, distinction that you are making.
My employees aren’t allowed to represent my company to clients on matters that clients bring to my company. Very straightforward.
After work, employees say whatever they want.
I can see to a point that working for the government might, at least in some cases, be differentiated from working in my company.
If I get your point correctly, you might have a supervisor; but you aren’t employed by her. Your boss is the American people; this frees you from responsibility if your supervisor instructs you in some way that is interpreted as contrary to the interests of the people. This position is based on your rights of free speech, or? This seems foggy to me.
Except in the case of whistle-blowers (reporting criminal activities even if the boss doesn’t want an employee to do so), that’s an incredibly narrow sort of protected speech. If your supervisor tells you to do (or not do) something, contrary to public interest, I suppose a government could technically disobey. But I don’t think they could get away with it based on their own judgement of public interest. In most cases, that sort of decision is technically part of the supervisor’s job description.
I could see this applying to someone given conflicting orders. If the immediate supervisor says to do one thing, and a higher-level official issues conflicting orders, or (especially when an organization uses both line and project management) someone might have two supervisors giving conflicting orders. In cases like that, I could see someone saying he acted as he thought best, and possibly getting away with it. But in general, government employees can’t simply blow off legal instructions from their supervisor based on their own, personal opinions of what is in the public’s interest.
This has generally been interpreted differently by the federal government for employees representing an agency on policy matters, and federal research scientists presenting externally peer-reviewed material in a scientific setting. At most agencies, the general pattern has been to not block scientists on the basis of the content of their findings.
E.g., were it NASA, it would be “normal” to stop someone from going a conference to brief current SLS plans, if the new leadership team thought they might change those plans or really for any reason.
It would be very not-normal if a political appointee at NASA HQ prevented a NASA-employed or NASA-funded scientist from presenting an astrophysics paper at AAS b/c that appointee doesn’t believe in gamma ray bursts and that’s the topic of the paper.
Shouldn’t be foggy. We don’t swear to a person, or an agency; in fact we’re required _ by law _ to subjugate those to;
“1. Put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department.
2. Uphold the Constitution, laws, and legal regulations of the United States and of all governments therein and never be a party to their evasion.‘
Etc.
Mr. Huntsman, Dr. Crary, and milprof:
Is my search for a direct correlation between an employee in private enterprise, and one in government service, a fool’s errand then?
I mean this with honest curiosity, and not disrespectfully.
Dr. Cray’s point about presenting papers would be analogous to an employee presenting a different design solution to a project.
I wouldn’t allow it. I could fire her, or I could give her the opportunity to shine in front of a client, or I could steal the idea. The point is that it’s my decision, not hers.
How is this different from a supervisor denying the presentation of a paper?
Maybe more to the point: what if I fudge an environmental report, benefitting a client? Does special knowledge confer special rights or responsibilities to my employee, or to a federal employee?
Depends on the employee, in the same way that a university public relations flack is entirely different than a member of the teaching & research faculty at that university.
Many federal agencies employ research scientists with either explicit policies or even statutory requirements that their research be conducted independently. A political appointee at the Interior Dept HQ isn’t supposed to tell a geologist at USGS to change the magma temperature assumptions in the model of when Mt St Helens will next blow up.
The Interior Dept exec could decide to cut off funding for the study of volcanoes altogether, though whether they could actually make it happen depends on whether Congress has mandated that money be spent on the subject or they agency has discretion on the matter.
In the case of the employee presenting a different solution to a project your company is working on (or bidding for), that would probably be something she could get fired for. But I think you would have to put up with it if she presented something on an approach to solving those sorts of problems in general. Or on designs which had no relevance to your current or planned business. As long as the work was done on her own time, or before you hired her, and was not proprietary. Of course, that depends on the relevant, local labor laws and the terms of her contract with your company.
In the case of a government scientist, the analogous situation would mean something like the status of a flight mission shouldn’t be discussed (even if the scientist is attending on his own and as a private citizen.) That’s information the person obtained by virtue of the job and which his superiors would specifically said they should decide how to distribute. But a scientist would be free to discuss his interpretation of publicly available data produced by a flight mission.
As for reporting fudged environmental reports, I don’t believe anyone (publicly or privately employed) can be fired for reporting a crime. But even that can get complicated. If you report something which you incorrectly thought was a crime, all sorts of other issues come in.
Tax payers pay my salary, and they are entitled to see my data and hear my scientific opinions.
The only bargain we make is having dismal procurement and travel…:)
I find their data presentation incomplete. One could increase the time line several million years based on ice core data and get an entirely different picture.
Yes, a completely different and inacurate one. Look: the problem is not that the Earth is hotter or cooler. The problem is how fast does it cool down or warm up. If you make the graph millions of years long, you’ll see the Earth was warmer before, but you won’t see differences in the timing of the changes, because the intervals will be all squeezed in the graph. And that’s the whole issue: the biosphere can adapt to very slow changes. It can’t adapt to very fast changes. The dinosaurs went from a warmer period to a nuclear winter in a matter of hours, and that didn’t end up well for them and for most of the biosphere. Evolution works with slow changes. Extinction deals with fast changes.
But Earth has had really fast changes in the last few million years many times and they don’t know exactly what triggered them all. So the biosphere isn’t experiencing anything new and everything we see around us managed to adapt and survive them or they wouldn’t be here.
Research on recent temperature changes is quite detailed, and although dozens of processes and interactions affect CO2 and climate, the changes of the past few million years are understood in considerable detail. The cyclic ice ages of the past half million years are the result of orbital forcing, producing temperature changes which are magnified by the resulting changes in CO2 and greenhouse warming. The present spike in CO2 is the immediate result of the burning of fossile fuels. This produces global warming which will be amplified by the temperature-dependent release of CO2 from the oceans and permafrost. Natural climate change, although slow, probably resullted in the extinction of the Neaderthals. Human-induced climate change is going to be a lot faster. That’s why we need more and better data on climate.
As far as I know, nothing, short of an asteroid impact, went as fast as a century. But you’re missing the point: if the graph had millions of years, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between fast and slow changes. Hence, inacurate.
For example?
Humans today are emitting prodigious quantities of CO2, at a rate faster than even the most destructive climate changes in earth’s past, so yes, quite a different, & troublesome picture indeed.
The climate has changed before humans, and in most cases scientists know why. Mother Earth takes a long time to recover as greenhouse gases do not magically disappear. Comparing past data to models allows scientists to help predict the future, rather than just guessing or wishing it was not so.
Gore showed that ice core CO2 data with the ice core temperature data laid on top and indeed there is an obvious and strong correlation between the two graphs. The problem is that one could be causing the other or the other way around. The big, obvious difference between the two graphs are that, when the atmospheric CO2 goes literally off the chart, there isn’t the corresponding, equivalent increase in temperatures. So, either warming causes CO2 release and not the other way around or there is such a delay in temperature response to CO2 that we would be inclined to conclude that we shouldn’t make any inference to the very rough correlation between rising CO2 in the 20th century and global surface temperatures. So, if anything, that large graph would place the CO2 theory of GW in doubt.
The ‘lag’ is something cc skeptics pick on, as well as mention Al Bore ;). CO2 lagging temperature does not tell the whole story. Temp is increasing and at a faster RATE!
To understand lag, consider how gas is trapped in ice.
At ~100m, the weight of the new/old snow sinters the ice crystals together creating an impenetrable seal. Before this depth, a ‘time lag’ can exist because ‘younger’ air can diffuse through the ‘older’ ice, so with smaller snowfall rate, 1000 yr differences can exist! How to reduce the uncertainty?
The almost unique feature of measuring the trapped gases in ice-cores is that its measured ‘directly’–its highly reliable — no process ‘model’ or “proxy” is required. When CO2 levels increase, so does temperature and ice cores play a key role in this relationship (along with factoring out volcanic, el nino, solar activity, global dimming) .
Scientists use a new method that measures the concentration of nitrogen 15 to determine the depth. A very simple model can then determine the offset in depth between the gas and ice and the time ‘lag’.
The video ‘splices” Mauna Loa CO2 to South Pole CO2 from 1958. The graph zooms out later to include ice core measurements back to the 19th Century…the CO2 hockey stick. The toe of the hockey stick is best explained by subtracting out solar, El Nino, and volcanic activity (See Fig 3) to arrive at the human contribution: temp. is increasing and at faster rate.
https://youtu.be/k7jvP7BqVi4
I wasn’t referring to any lag in the distant past. Rather, I’m referring to how the CO2 levels have gone up dramatically in recent years but that temperatures haven’t gone up the corresponding amount as much as the historic records would suggest if CO2 was the cause of warming and not the other way around. By “lag”, I was suggesting that CO2 could still be a major cause of warming if there was a lag between CO2 levels and surface temperatures. But if so, then the warming seen between 1970 – 2000 couldn’t be attributed to the increased CO2 around that time.
As I mentioned above, atmospheric temperature lags changes in energy balance because of the very large heat capacity of the oceans. Sea surface temperature is not a complete answer, but it is increasing. https://www.epa.gov/climate…
Surface temperatures increased substantially between 1910 and 1940 then the went essentially flat from there until about 1980. From 2000 until present surface temperatures have largely been flat. It’s difficult to explained n those trends from previous CO2 levels. But, if the increased temperatures from 1980 – 2000 can be attributed to a previous increased CO2 from previous years then why do the other time frames seem not to correlate with previous CO2 levels? And if natural variation is the cause for the times of poor correlation then how confident can we be that it does not explain also explain the timeframe which does correlate with previous increases CO2?
Sea surface temperature has been rising consistently for about 50 years:
https://www.epa.gov/climate…
Both occur. Warming driven by the Milanchovich cycles reduces the solubility of CO2 in sea water and dissolves clathrates, and decomposes permafrost, increasing atmospheric CO2 and magnifying the temperature increase. But in other eras the reduction of CO2 by the appearance of land plants in the Devonian led to a global ice age; ultimately the ice killed off the plants and prevented weathering of rocks, and slow decomposition of plant material, vulcanism, and continental drift reversed the situation:
http://ebme.marine.rutgers….
The present era is unique in two ways. First, we can directly observe the source of the CO2. Second, it is increasing at a rate which was never approached in the historical fluctuations.
Here’s the data I’m referring to:
http://www.hko.gov.hk/blog/…
Notice that the CO2 level at the end of the chart goes up dramatically but the temperature doesn’t.
Its well know that doubling the amount of CO2 does not double the greenhouse effect. Trends are therefore viewed over a longer time frame, not over short periods. The expected temperature increase, a global average, is between 2 and 4.5 degrees C for 2X the amount of CO2 from pre-industrial levels. It’s one of the reasons we need scientists, etc, to work out the physics and the impacts to guide the future.
The oceans don’t just store CO2, they store an enormous amount of heat energy, and that’s where most of the excess energy being absorbed by the Earth is going now. We need more complete computer models to accurately predict future changes, but as the oceans warm a tipping point will be reached and additional heat will begin to heat the atmosphere more rapidly.
Total energy balance measurements from space (including Goresat) are critical for this research since it is possible to measure the total heat entering and leaving the Earth with considerable precision. In terms of the immediate effects of global warming, energy balance is the most immediate and accurate measure, and reflects changes immediately regardless of where on Earth the heat is ending up.
Very good point. If (as the data indicate) more solar energy is coming in than the thermal radiation from Earth, that is by definition heating. The most intereting question is not how much heating, but where is the energy being stored and what will happen as more of it is released.
Sea surface temperature has been rising for the past 50 years, The larck of warming from 1945 to 1970 may be due to the increase in particulate pollution (aerosols) during this period.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/p…
https://wattsupwiththat.fil…
That’s antarctic temperature on the graph. Also, the temperature chart does not have the latest data, there has been a 2 degree spike in the last 40 years.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/s…
You are not showing global temperature data.
Maybe I’m more pessimistic, but the following email went out yesterday:
“ROSES-17 Amendment 40 announces that program element A.9, The ECOSTRESS Science Team will not be solicited in ROSES-2017. NASA anticipates that it will be included in ROSES-2018.
The ECOSTRESS instrument is a multispectral thermal radiometer with 5 spectral bands for research. The ECOSTRESS science objectives are:
1. Identify critical thresholds of water use and water stress in key climate sensitive biomes;
2. Detect the timing, location, and predictive factors leading to plant water uptake decline and/or cessation over the diurnal cycle; and,
3. Measure agricultural water consumptive use over the contiguous United States (CONUS) at spatiotemporal scales applicable to improve drought estimation accuracy.”
On the other hand, this sort of thing (moving an AO from one year to the next) happens all the time. So it probably doesn’t mean anything.
The most obvious error is in the caption, “For centuries, atmospheric carbon dioxide had never been above this line.” The time period depicted is not “centuries”, it is 400,000 years. Since before the first appearance of modern humans on Earth.
There have been periods when CO2 was higher, due to slow changes in geology and biology, but nothing approaching today’s precipitous increase. The explanations for ancient changes in CO2 are complex, and require careful reading and unbiased consideration.
http://ebme.marine.rutgers….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Which is why it is often pointed out that “99%(or something) of scientists” have concluded that the warming is in fact AGW.
It’s a complex subject.
Two important issues. For the CO2 graph, you have an instrumental record with daily resolution stapled onto a record based on air bubbles trapped in glaciers (either GISP-2 or Vostok, likely). The ice core records smooth data out over decades or even centuries. Plotting a a graph like that is pseudo-science at best. It’s very similar to “hide the decline”. The graph should be all proxy or all instrumental, but not both. It is very likely that we currently have CO2 levels not seen for a few Ma. But plants seem to like it and recent CO2 sensitivity estimates are now so low, the big questions is, so what?
As for the second graph, ask yourself what the real (and hopefully unadjusted) data coverage is that produces GISTEMP. How much of Africa and S America are covered and for how long? That information is available from NOAA. I’d be more impressed if they showed the RSS or UAH records, which at least have something approaching global coverage. Of course, they only go back to 1979, but the surface record is virtually non-existent outside of the US and to a lesser extent, western Europe. That is especially true in the first half of the 20th century.
However, the main point is that nobody is really being muzzled. They can still publish goofy graphs.
Are you saying that you do not “believe” that atmospheric
CO2 is increasing? You can measure it yourself.
Oh, I have. When I lived in a house that had NG heating and cooking, the level was typically ~500ppm. When dinner was being cooked, it was often >1000ppm. In the soil, it can be >10000 ppm. But if you mean is global CO2 rising now, yes, definitely. Do we really know pre-industrial CO2 levels? Not was well as we pretend. Is there a bias in ice core values relative to instrumental records? That’s being debated (getting gas compositions in ice can be a tricky business). The dishonesty is tacking an inherently high frequency record onto one that a) may be shifted in amount; b) most likely is somewhat shifted in time; and c) has definitely been low pass filtered. Here’s a thought experiment for you. What happens when you remove the instrumental record from the MBH98 (or related) Sticks and then complete the curves with updated proxy data? Hmm? The blades tend to droop quite a bit.
The uncertainty level in Ice Core Data is 1.2 ppm (1000 A.D.) to a few ppm (over 800,000 yrs), out of 300 to 400 ppm, rather than ‘pretend’.
The reason CO2 measurements are taken in Mauna Loa and the South Pole is that ( the dishonest?) Keeling and his group determined in 1960 that “at the South Pole the observed rate of increase is nearly that to be expected from the combustion of fossil fuel”. Mauna Loa is often used as an example of rising atmospheric CO2 levels as it reflects the Global CO2.
The famous hockey stick by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes 1998 became a focus of those who wanted to falsely spread climate change denial.
The toe of the hockey stick is best explained by subtracting out solar, El Nino, and volcanic activity (See Fig 3) to arrive at the human contribution: temp. is increasing and at faster rate. Notice the peak in 1998 (El Nino), where folks dishonestly took a 18 year average to justify ‘the pause’.
The real manipulation of the data occurred by Roy Spencer and John Christie, who altered the data using the wrong sign in the satellite drift rate to incorrectly show no warming, where comically tragic, the nighttime temperatures were warmer than the day violating all the physics, parroted by the politicians bought by the carbon industry, and a few shameless bloggers.
I won’t re-litigate the Stick. There’s a lot wrong with it and most reconstructions are quite different. But as to CO2 in ice cores, I think you are confusing precision with accuracy and you definitely have not addressed the time series low pass filtering aspects. I’ll believe the accuracy level of 1.2 ppm when you show me Mauna Loa data from 1000 AD. Heck, I’ll even go for 1800 AD.
“There’s a lot wrong with it and most reconstructions are quite different. “
Could you provide a reference to “most reconstructions”?
Are you disputing the fifty years of directly recorded atmospheric CO2 data? https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/g…
“”There’s a lot wrong with it and most reconstructions are quite different. “
Could you provide a reference to “most reconstructions”?
Of course, you realize that I was talking about the Hockey Stick and the assertion that there was virtually no temperature variation over the last millennium before the modern era. Here are just a few random selections:
Rosenthal, Y., Linsley, B.K. and Oppo, D.W. 2013. Pacific Ocean heat content during the past 10,000 years. Science 342: 617-621.
Orsi, A.J., Cornuelle, B.D. and Severinghaus, J.P. 2012. Little Ice Age cold interval in West Antarctica: Evidence from borehole temperature at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide. Geophysical Research Letters 39: 1-7.
Esper, J., Wilson, R.J.S., Frank, D.C., Moberg, A., Wanner, H. and Luterbacher, J. 2005. Climate: past ranges and future changes. Quaternary Science Reviews 24: 2164-2166.
{Esper references lots of stuff showing MWP and LIA}
Mayewski, P.A., Rohling, E.E., Stager, J.C., Karlen, W., Maasch, K.A., Meeker, L.D., Meyerson, E.A., Gasse, F., van Kreveld, S., Holmgren, K., Lee-Thorp, J., Rosqvist, G. Rack, F., Staubwasser, M., Schneider, R.R. and Steig, E.J. 2004. Holocene climate variability. Quaternary Research 62: 243-255.
Bond, G., Kromer, B., Beer, J., Muscheler, R., Evans, M.N., Showers, W., Hoffmann, S., Lotti-Bond, R., Hajdas, I. and Bonani, G. 2001. Persistent solar influence on North Atlantic climate during the Holocene. Science 294: 2130-2136.
Soon, W. and Baliunas, S. 2003. Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years. Climate Research 23: 89-110.
{I know alarmists hate Soon with a passion, but he’s got a ton of references to varios reconstructions}
Huang, S. and Pollack, H.N. 1997. Late Quaternary temperature changes seen in world-wide continental heat flow measurements. Geophysical Research Letters 24: 1947-1950.
There are literally scores and maybe hundreds more, but I just grabbed some from the global bin. Lots more regional studies, with regions around the world.
“Are you disputing the fifty years of directly recorded atmospheric CO2 data? https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/g…”
Of course not. I’m just saying that it should not be plotted with what is essentially a proxy. A good proxy, but one that hasn’t been calibrated with the same temporal resolution as the instrumental record. It’s deceptive and it’s just plain wrong. It’s not quite as bad as “Mike’s Nature Trick”, but it has a similar smell.
So far as I can tell, none of the authors you list mention Gore’s film at all. Gore’s principal graph of CO2 and temperature looks quite similar to those from other sources:
http://web.ncf.ca/jim/ref/i… As for litigation, the question was litigated in court, and the film was found to be scientifically quite accurate. https://www.skepticalscienc…
Your statement that I and others “hate” Soon is rather pejorative. I don’t hate people who disagree with me. The main criticism of Soon and Balunis was by the authors they referenced, many of whom complained quite vocally that thier work had been misquoted or misinterpreted. https://rationalwiki.org/wi… When I read the paper I cannot escape the impression that they almost never actually quote other authors or repeat their conclusions, rather they draw their own conclusions from other reports without actually stating the data from which they draw those conclusions. Nevertheless when they ask the question of whether the proxy data they report shows the twentieth century to be the warmest on record, for many areas they indicate “Yes? or No?” and for several the answer is “Yes”. Hardly a refutation of global warming.
A British court found 9 serious errors in the film.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/…
But of course the peer reviewed papers would not reference the silly movie. They’re not movie reviewers! As for Vostok or GISP-2 “temperature” records (actually delta 18O) correlated with entrapped CO2, yes there is an excellent correlation. Al made a big deal about that. Unfortunately for him, the causality is backwards, as T changes before CO2. CO2 lags T by a huge amount as we go into a glacial period. It’s easy to see why changes in T can cause big changes in CO2, but the other direction is relatively weak and does not show up in the paleoclimate record. To get heap big CO2 climate sensitivity, you have to postulate a lot of positive feedback, for which there is precious little evidence (other than adjustable parameters in climate models, which is not evidence at all). So we have a paleoclimate record that has natural temperature variations causing large CO2 variations, via a fully understood mechanism, but just in the last 50 years, CO2 now magically drives temperature. Yeah, right. Even in the Mauna Loa record, CO2 flux lags temperature. I am willing to be convinced, but the evidence is exceptionally weak. And I was not calling you an alarmist. Alarmists working in the climate biz have rather shockingly persecuted Soon, so yeah, they do hate him.
Perhaps you should read your own references:
“Mr Justice Burton said he had no complaint about Gore’s central thesis that climate change was happening and was being driven by emissions from humans. “
The film was approved for distribution to schools in Britain accompanied by clarifications of several minor points which in no way dispute the reality of global warming.
Gore does not present the retreat of the glacier on Mt. Kilimonjaro as “proof” of global warming, but rather as an example of the kind of change likely if warming continues, which is perfectly true. Indeed, Philip Mote, author of the study in Nature on the disappearance of the glaciers on Mt. Killimonjaro, states: “The fact that the loss of ice on Mount Kilimanjaro cannot be used as proof of global warming does not mean that the Earth is not warming. There is ample and conclusive evidence that Earth’s average temperature has increased in the past 100 years, and the decline of mid- and high-latitude glaciers is a major piece of evidence.“
https://www.skepticalscienc…
Similarly, the authors of the study reporting the first-ever observation of drowned polar bears floating in the Arctic Ocean reported accurately that this is a new phenomenon not previously observed in the Arctic. It’s perfectly true the species has a whole has survived ice-free periods, but many may well have drowned. Here is the first sentence of the paper climate change deniers website cites as proof that global warming does not exist:
“Today’s Arctic climate is warming faster than most other regions and losing summer sea-ice cover at historically unprecedented rates [27, 186].”
https://link.springer.com/a…
Interestingly, I think the plot of carbon dioxide levels versus time may actually weaken one point about anthropomorphic climate change. There is a pretty clear, ~100,000 year period cycle in those data. We’re currently near the time the plot implies there should be a peak. Equally clearly, the magnitude of the current carbon dioxide levels are much higher than in the past. But it really looks to me like a 220 ppm increase where I’d expect 80-100 ppm based on previous, non-anthropomorphic cycles. That makes me dubious about the claims that the current levels are entirely anthropomorphic. 50% or 75%, yes. But that plot doesn’t say 100% to me.
The periodic ice age cycles over the past 400,000 years are driven by orbital forcing, sometimes called Milanchovic cycles, which produce modest temperature changes that are amplified by temperature-induced capture or release of CO2 by the oceans and permafrost. The change in CO2 over the past 150 years is different in that the forcing function is coming from CO2 itself rather than temperature, but the positive feedback mechanism remains. The evidence for the antropogenic origen of the CO2 comes from both direct observation of releases and isotopic measurements: http://www.realclimate.org/…
Humans are generating much more CO2 than is accumulating in the atmosphere since the majority of it is still being removed by ocean capture, consequently ocean pH is dropping. At some point the increasing ocean temperature and decreasing pH will reduce the solubility of CO2, ocean damping will be lost, and anthropogenic releases will have a much greater effect on atmospheric concentration.
It would have been more comfortable if the industrial revolution had happened during an ice age, but unfortuantely it coincides with the interglacial warm period and the current CO2 increase is orders of magnitude faster than any historical fluctuation.
Whats the accuracy of that average temperature?
Most of the references to temperature in these comments seem to refer only to land and atmosphere temperatures, while it has been clear for some time that most of the excess heat is going into the ocean. Hence the value of alternate ways of tracking the excess heat, such as measurements of sea level increase from satellite altimetry.