Re: Global warming was Re: realistic aliens and the necessities of storytelling

Gerry Quinn wrote:


No, but just because the science has not been settled does not mean you can't draw some conclusions with reasonable confidence.

Here we will have to disagree. The science is so unsettled that I think every opinion is no better than handwaving, it is that badly constrained.

We've created X tonnes of CO2 by burning fossil fuels and certain other technologies, in a geochemically short timespan. Atmospheric CO2 was fairly flat for a long time before that, but has risen by a total of about 0.6X.

If you believe these figures, and they seem to be generally agreed, the obvious conclusion is that we caused the increase.

If the figures matched -- human in, atmospheric CO2 up by the same amount -- then I'd be more inclined to agree. It hasn't happened like that. Human in, a fraction of human output appears in the atmosphere, that's the story. Why? Why just that fraction? Explain where the rest has gone. Why is this molecule labelled 'made in Drax with two others which we've lost somewhere'? Don't tell me that you''ve worked out the Earth's CO2 budget and that fraction, and just that fraction, is just too much for the vast turnover to cope with.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, it's happened after we started producing lots of CO2, therefore it's our fault? Sorry, I cannot accept this line of argument. We have started producing lots of CO2, yes, but I bet you can find other and better correlations -- why does the isotope signature appear in 1850 and we'd hardly got into our stride then? Why does the temperature (unadjusted hadcru SST temps) start to rise in 1900 and rise at a steady .14 deg C per decade for a hundred years?


The figures don't suggest huge new non-anthropogenic outputs. The figures are in line with the anthropogenic outputs.

No, they don't match. 7 or 8 Gt in, increase of 2Gt per annum. This is not a match, not unless all you are looking for is which side of a trend line the figures are.


It seems unlikely that we've broken anything thus far; world temperatures haven't changed much.

And we know that the world is not a homeostatic system? Do we? Maybe it's a loosely homeostatic system. Maybe we hit a damaging level of forest clearance. Maybe we stopped using whale oil and started spilling lots of mineral oil in 1850.

I suppose it's possible that we are
simultaneous with a natural phase of glacial melting consequent on the Little Ice Age. Maybe this happens every so often and the polar seas open up and suck down a load of CO2.

Not if they're coated with oil and surfactants. 5ml of thin oil will still an acre. .25% of world oil production ends up in (the thick bits) and on (the thin stuff) the ocean. Even using pessimistic assumptions that lots of the spill is thick tar (it won't be, as much is coming down sewers and is already refined, stuff like crankcase oil spilled on roads etc) I make that enough to cover the entire ocean surface every two weeks. The calculation, involving hectares per fortnight, may not be robust.

Look at the uncorrected SST figures: you can see WII, which should, for the mathematically inclined, give us some idea about the warming signal from spilled oil.

An eminent global warmer wrote 'temperatures don't just change by themselves.' I can see no reason, in a system of such complicated checks and balances, why they can't. It's called, IIRC, chaos.

Do you know whether mankind has, by raising lots of dust, fed the silicaceous diatoms and reduced the calciferous planktons' CO2 pull down? I don't. What were the historical levels of CO2? Even the little data we have on that has been questioned. Do you know if we've disrupted cloud formation such that the albedo is dropping? I don't (although it is dropping). Do you know if increased cloud cover will offset the albedo drop of melting the Arctic ice? If the emissivity of ruffled water is lower than smooth, or greater? If methanophages are upping their productivity? If some natural oscillation of the deep sea currents doesn't lead to variation in atmospheric CO2 over the centuries?

Constraints, we need more constraints on the handwaving, tight enough to ensure that a bored nurseryman can't cobble together a toy theory which, on the face of it, explains much of the limited information. This whole affair is not science. It's pre-science. Worse still, it borders on anti-science.

Here's a little bit of fun research. Why does the hadcru sst graph 1850 to 2000* show a steady increase in temperature from 1910 except for a bulge during WWII which tails off in the '60s? Any explanation will do.

JF
*Google on buckets and 'climate audit' will find it in one incarnation.
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