Looks like the world didn't get the AGW memo...

[Schneibster]

A warmed gas expands. A cooled one contracts. (Volumes staying more or less equal.) If the atmosphere is warming, then it should be expanding. If it's warming due to heating, we should be seeing that in increased orbital decay rates... which I can't find any reference to.

The atmosphere is not homogenous, neither in composition nor heat content. In fact, for there to be global warming, less heat has to make it to space. So the lower atmosphere might expand, but the upper atmosphere won't; in fact it will get cooler and contract, since it's being heated less by the lower atmosphere and Earth surface. And it's not like there'll be more air.

1.watts is cherry picking one glacier (there are others in Norway and New Zealand that are not shrinking/growing)
what is the global trend for glacial ice? is there a net gain, net loss or equilibrium of the volume of glacial ice?
The map shows the average annual rate of thinning since 1970 for the 173 glaciers that have been measured at least 5 times between 1970 and 2004 (Dyurgerov and Meier 2005)

Since what he was referring to was this year's ice cover in the Antarctic, I'm not sure glacier coverage from 2005 would be applicable. I could be wrong, though.

I answered this. The coverage is increasing as the ice spreads out, as it gets warmer, and more pliable. But it's getting a lot thinner. As should be obvious to any thinking human being given the fact the Arctic melted.

2.are they also measuring the ice thickness and density or just area coverage? if the coverage is the same but half as thick and half as dense? Just asking since Watts' info doesn't say. One would think that ice volume would be a better indicator.

I'd think you'd need coverage before you'd get thickness. Coverage is WAY above the norm for the Antarctic, which makes me think it's cold down there, which means the thickness will definitely increase by next year.

No, if it were just more snow it would pile up on top of the ice that's already there; it's miles deep. A season's snow compresses to a pretty thin layer after it's been lying there with more getting piled on it for a few decades. For it to be spreading out it has to be getting warmer, and more pliant. And in fact, the volume is going down; not much yet, but enough. The satellites can see the thickness going down with radar.

3. perverts never reach for testicles aka PV=nRT
interesting idea. certainly worth looking at.

A major cause of orbital decay for satellites in low Earth orbit is the drag of Earth’s atmosphere. During solar maxima the Earth's atmosphere causes significant drag up to a hundred kilometers higher than during solar minima.

If this is accurate, then would the deltaT required to melt the glaciers even make a measurable difference of the atmospheric volume?

Good question - I tossed that out because I'm wondering also. It certainly seems like a reasonable assumption.

I hope I answered above. LMK if not.

[Schneibster]

On the orbital drag thing , if there was more CO2 in the upper atmo, There would be less drag as CO2 should shed heat collisions and break down into carbon monoxide and O2 due to the action of ultraviolet light. It should take a huge increases in temp before that become a factor to the satellites. So the upper reaches of our atmosphere should be colder if more CO2 is present. Radiating more heat than what is in the system the upper layers should contract and less orbital disruption.

The atmosphere up there is almost all ions, almost all nitrogen and oxygen; that's why it's called the ionosphere. I wouldn't expect to find much if any carbon, much less whole CO2 molecules, above the stratosphere.

I wouldn't expect CO2 to make any difference in low earth orbit satellite atmospheric drag. It is, however, correct that during periods of high solar activity the magnetic field causes the ionosphere to expand, but not due to heating. And in addition it is also correct that LEO satellites have been damaged or even lost because they were dragged down by it, and experienced friction heating and consequent mechanical damage.

For there to be global warming the Earth must lose less heat to space; therefore, its upper atmosphere experiences cooling, because less heat comes up from the surface. This is simple arithmetic.

[Schneibster]

On the orbital drag thing , if there was more CO2 in the upper atmo, There would be less drag as CO2 should shed heat collisions and break down into carbon monoxide and O2 due to the action of ultraviolet light. It should take a huge increases in temp before that become a factor to the satellites. So the upper reaches of our atmosphere should be colder if more CO2 is present. Radiating more heat than what is in the system the upper layers should contract and less orbital disruption.

But even then, we're only talking 100 PPM or so. If the entire atmosphere warms, the volume should increase - and so should the drag.

If drag lessens, then you're faced with a rather odd situation.

Not really. The lower atmosphere got warmer so the upper atmosphere had to get cooler as a result. It's getting less heat. It's simple arithmetic.

Heat doesn't come from nowhere. The accounts all balance. There's no way to cheat.

[Schneibster]

True but it is a factor that's being studied not the only cause.
Most heating of the upper atmosphere comes in the form of solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) create large currents and associated magnetic fields in our upper atmosphere, and much like running a current through a curling iron, the upper atmosphere heats up.
Where your going to get your another increases is from bottom heating but not as predominantly so. The upper and lower atmosphere behave differently to the same situations. For the lack of a better descriptor they are two different climates. Most of the orbital drag is by upper atmosphere heating up from CME and pushing the upper atmosphere into the paths of the satellites.
of course there is a lot more to this but this is the layman explanation. and I am just a layman when it comes to this.

You're very close. Just one thing: you forgot the ionosphere is charged and so are CMEs. It's not so much heating as an electrical interaction. There is heating also, but it's the minority effect, not the majority.

And it gets even more complicated than that because there's also interaction with the magnetosphere. And what happens there is after the CME cloud has already gone by; it's called "magnetic reconnection" and is responsible for most of the havoc CMEs cause in Earth orbit, as well as most of the country- or continent-wide radio outages or power blackouts. These accompany "waves" in the upper atmosphere that have actually been implicated in "swatting satellites out of the sky," more or less.

You will find that older texts (20th century) will refer to it entirely as "heating;" we are only getting good and started exploring the magnetosphere. This year for the first time we actually had a satellite in position to examine a reconnection event; we were ready a few years back, but it was solar minimum so there wasn't much to look at. Now it's starting to get active again.

[Schneibster]

Oh, and one more thing: remember that the atmosphere above the stratosphere is pretty much space. You wouldn't die appreciably more slowly there exposed in the open than in space. There's very, very little of it. It's spread very wide. The only reason it affects satellites is because they're going eleven thousand miles an hour.

Over ninety percent of the atmosphere is below 50,000 feet (17 km), which is the troposphere. The official definition of "in space," and "astronaut," as defined by the UN for space treaties, has its boundary at 100 km (62 miles, or a bit over 300,000 feet). 99.9999 some-odd percent of the atmosphere is below 100 km. But that means less than ten percent of it is between 50,000 and 300,000 feet, between 17 km and 100 km. You should keep in mind that specific heat must be measured by mass, not by volume. This is the reason that the PV=nRT argument doesn't work. The other, of course, is because of the electromagnetic effects on the ionosphere.

Of interest in global warming discussions is the mesopause, the top of the mesosphere, the layer above the stratosphere. The mesopause is the coldest place on or around Earth. It gets as cold as -100°C there. This is the highest layer of the atmosphere with enough pressure that water can exist as an aerosol, and because they're often visible hours after sunset and before sunrise, clouds that form there are called "noctilucent clouds." The water in them is in a curious state; a frozen aerosol. This layer becomes colder the more global warming there is from gases in the atmosphere. Everything below it is heated both by the Sun and by the Earth; and is in conduction and convection contact with the Earth and lower atmosphere system. Above it the atmosphere is heated overwhelmingly by the Sun, because heat can only pass out of it by radiation, and the Sun's radiation is greater by many orders of magnitude. The atmosphere above this is too thin and too electrically charged to support either conduction or convection. When a satellite measures "the temperature of Earth" this is the layer it measures. Below this the atmosphere is partly opaque to thermal radiation; above it, the atmosphere is transparent to thermal radiation. Global warming occurs entirely below this layer. In fact, above this layer, the meaning of "temperature" gets a little difficult to define. Matter gets a bit too rare to have things like "temperature" as we ordinarily think of it.

[choff]

Found this about a researcher named Ernst Beck, he did a meticulous study of CO2 air samples by various researchers from the early 19th century to present. Apparently their are prior measurements from the past just as high if not higher than today.

http://drtimball.com/2011/ernst-georg-b ... deceivers/

I've always been concerned that CO2 counts were based on one measurement on the top of an active volcano in the hands of one scientist and his family who won't reveal his techniques and refuses to license his equipment so that his measurements are repeatable. That has always struck me as the wrong way to do science. The fact that the chart always shows that nice curve fit parabola has always bothered the hell out of me because large co2 releasing event like significant volcanic eruptions and huge wild fires don't seem to show up in the data curve like you would expect.

and what would be the better data to trust, global direct measurements from the air from a variety of scientists, some nobel winners, or ice core samples subject to CO2 loss and contamination. Becks data would explain why there has been no appreciable warming in spite of rising CO2 levels, the latest rise being typical of multidecade fluctuations within the last 200 years of records.

[Schneibster]

Found this about a researcher named Ernst Beck, he did a meticulous study of CO2 air samples by various researchers from the early 19th century to present. Apparently their are prior measurements from the past just as high if not higher than today.

http://drtimball.com/2011/ernst-georg-b ... deceivers/

I've always been concerned that CO2 counts were based on one measurement on the top of an active volcano in the hands of one scientist and his family who won't reveal his techniques and refuses to license his equipment so that his measurements are repeatable. That has always struck me as the wrong way to do science. The fact that the chart always shows that nice curve fit parabola has always bothered the hell out of me because large co2 releasing event like significant volcanic eruptions and huge wild fires don't seem to show up in the data curve like you would expect.

and what would be the better data to trust, global direct measurements from the air from a variety of scientists, some nobel winners, or ice core samples subject to CO2 loss and contamination. Becks data would explain why there has been no appreciable warming in spite of rising CO2 levels, the latest rise being typical of multidecade fluctuations within the last 200 years of records.

You've forgotten the Japanese Air Lines donation of space on their trans-Pacific aircraft, particularly valuable because they fly at some of the highest commercial altitudes, which have been measuring the CO2 for decades.

Also, here are 350 plus CO2 records worldwide which are publicly searchable:

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/data/in ... %2BDioxide

You know, if there were two or three you might have a point.

Unfortunately there are 350.

[Schneibster]

Meanwhile here's the data from Mauna Loa:



That's pretty unequivocal.

[Schneibster]

there has been no appreciable warming

I'm sorry, you've been corrected multiple times on this. You need to stop pretending now.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/23/gl ... -on-record

Global warming has not "stopped." Now is the hottest decade on record.

For the fifth time.

[choff]

You always have an excuse.


Sorry Schnieb's, but JAL didn't fly jumbos in the 19th century, and the studies I saw listed with start dates are no older that early 1970's. As for the hottest decade on record, we still aren't growing Barley on Greenland, Englands wine industry isn't going to knock off the French any time soon, and Desmogblog and Sourcewatch spend more time trying to dig up dirt on skeptics and deniers than critique their science. In fact the only criteria for getting listed is to question the "established" science of global warming.

If you really understood Hegel, you would appreciate that the oil industry funds both sides, and that who pays you is irrelevant to whether your science is correct or not.

[Schneibster]

You always have an excuse.

It's not an excuse. I'm pointing out you're repeating a lie that you know is a lie. It's already been proven to you five times, and now we're going on six. It's simply not true. That's not an "excuse," which I will characterize as a "fib" in addition to knowingly repeating a known lie.

Sorry Schnieb's, but JAL didn't fly jumbos in the 19th century,

350 CO2 monitoring stations, with continuous records from them all, all saying exactly the same thing, that nice straight line going up at about 40 degrees. Simple as that. No place to hide dude.

and the studies I saw listed with start dates are no older that early 1970's.

And that's all we need to validate the ice cores.

Are you claiming that the ice cores all suddenly started behaving differently than they had for six hundred thousand years, in 1970?

Really? How quaint. You sound just like a flat-earther, or one of those lunar landing deniers, or a Darwin-denying YEC. Maybe you think jebus fixed all the ice cores so the unfaithful would be deceived.

As for the hottest decade on record, we still aren't growing Barley on Greenland, Englands wine industry isn't going to knock off the French any time soon, and Desmogblog and Sourcewatch spend more time trying to dig up dirt on skeptics and deniers than critique their science. In fact the only criteria for getting listed is to question the "established" science of global warming.

40 points for claiming that the "scientific establishment" is engaged in a "conspiracy" to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame, or suchlike.

Baez Crackpot Index, number 34.

And it's still the hottest decade on record. Now that's climate.

If you really understood Hegel, you would appreciate that the oil industry funds both sides, and that who pays you is irrelevant to whether your science is correct or not.

I wouldn't care to understand Hegel; he's an outdated crank.

The oil companies aren't paying for science. They're paying for public relations. I'm interested in science, not their advertising flack fairy tales.

[choff]

I only have to look at what happened to Judith Curry, a believer in climate change who had the temerity to claim that if even 1% of skeptics claims were valid they shouldn't be ignored.

[Schneibster]

I only have to look at what happened to Judith Curry, a believer in climate change who had the temerity to claim that if even 1% of skeptics claims were valid they shouldn't be ignored.

"Evidence" is not the plural of "anecdote."

And you're changing the subject. I assume that means you have no answers.

[Schneibster]

Quick review: 1. 350 stations say CO2 is going steadily up. This has been supplemented with data from commercial jet aircraft collected as a public service. (You should know JAL is not the only one. I always keep a spare in my hip pocket.)

2. This data has been used to calibrate ice cores. These cores come from deep in the ice, miles in some cases. These environments are extremely stable over very long periods of time. Variations leave traces which can easily be seen in the cores. Later modifications create traces as well, but these are of known and recognizable and differentiable character.

Let me correct a possible misapprehension: these are not single three-inch wide miles-long cylinders of ice. It is, instead, hundreds of them, taken in a pattern over a wide area, to ensure that local variations will show up and can be eliminated from the data. When they talk about "the" Vostok Core, they mean an entire collection of cores taken together over a period of time and analyzed as a whole. Some cores get damaged, and are discarded. There are compensatory cores taken from near the failed sites to ensure that if there is an anomaly they see it.

3. The ice cores go back over half a million years.

Ice did not suddenly grow new behavior in 1958. Reality does not behave like that.

Oh and also

4. Coring works fine for finding oil. But not for climate? Why not?

5. The best new data is from seabottom cores. It confirms everything the ice cores say, and a lot more; it's a much more stable matrix over million-year horizons. Ice is fine for a million years or so and then there's nothing older. We can go back a very great deal farther with seabottom cores.

6. Here's the best one: many of the places the oldest cores were taken from no longer exist; the ice all melted. We were lucky to get cores before they were gone. If that doesn't make you nervous you're not very bright. They have the cores stored in refrigerators so they can check the work later if there are questions.

[Jccarlton]

You always have an excuse.


Sorry Schnieb's, but JAL didn't fly jumbos in the 19th century, and the studies I saw listed with start dates are no older that early 1970's. As for the hottest decade on record, we still aren't growing Barley on Greenland, Englands wine industry isn't going to knock off the French any time soon, and Desmogblog and Sourcewatch spend more time trying to dig up dirt on skeptics and deniers than critique their science. In fact the only criteria for getting listed is to question the "established" science of global warming.

If you really understood Hegel, you would appreciate that the oil industry funds both sides, and that who pays you is irrelevant to whether your science is correct or not.

Is the Commenter STILL waving that desmog page around after I totally destroyed it?
Here we go again, or where's the data II.
Now that the shutdown is over I took a look at our commenter's favorite desmogblog post and frankly I feel like that old lady in the Wendy's hamburger commercial. Where's the data? lets compare:
Here's desmog:
http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/09/23/gl ... -on-record
And the text for the first little bit:
With the release of a major climate science report by the United Nations coming this week, the self-proclaimed climate "skeptics," better referred to as the climate deniers or flat-earthers, are kicking it into high gear for their fossil fuel clients and right wing ringleaders.
What report? Now I think that most of us here know that this referring to the IPCC AR5. The person who drops into the blog might not, but it sound official and scary. Those deniers and flat earth types must be really stupid if they are not scared by the official UN report.
The likes of Tom Harris, better known for his lobbying work on behalf of the Canadian energy industry, and Fred Singer, formally a tobacco company expert-for-hire, are trying to make headlines again claiming that the warming of our planet has significantly slowed down. As Harris, a man with absolutely no scientific background in climate change, reassures us like a bunch of schoolchildren, "don't be scared."
Who are these guys and why are they relevant? Oh, they are some of those terrible deniers


I wish it were the case that the rate of global warming has significantly slowed and that we don't have to "be scared" of more extreme weather events, droughts and flooding.

But according to the scientific community, the experts who have decades of training in the field of atmospheric and climactic study, our planet continues to warm. In fact, we just came through the hottest decade ever recorded. Not only was it the hottest decade recorded, it has occurred despite the presence of major cooling factors, like La Nina's and reduced solar activity. Such events should result in a significant dip in the earth's temperature, but they are only having a relatively slight cooling effect.

Ok now he's being really scary, but this is only his opinion. What experts, where is he referring to and why are there no quotes and citations. Finally there is a link to an Noaa page, there must be some real data there, right?: http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories201 ... imate.html
Nope nothing there but some scary pictures, and oh yes, the link is three years old. Maybe the current "state of the climate isn't so scary so desmog didn't want us to know about it. In the end this is nothing more than a cheap hit piece of the kind so loved by certain political type with no real content to trouble themselves with. Combined with the scary red map it's obvious that the page is intended to frighten and agitate rather than inform. No science there.
Now lets look at Watts on the same topic. Now this entry is a couple years old, but as an example it works since desmog was referring to a three year old Noaa page. Without further ado, lets take a look:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/05/n ... ng-colder/
See update below: New comparison graph of US temperatures in 1999 to present added – quite an eye opener – Anthony

There’s been a lot of buzz and conflicting reports over what the BEST data actually says, especially about the last decade where we have dueling opinions on a “slowing down”, “leveling off”, “standstill”, or “slight rise” (depending on whose pronouncements you read) of global warming.

Here’s some media quotes that have been thrown about recently about the BEST preliminary data and preliminary results:


“‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’.” – Dr. Richard Muller

In The Sunday Mail Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties:


‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’ - Dr. Judith Curry in The Sunday Mail

Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels in an essay at The GWPF wrote:


“The last ten years of the BEST data indeed show no statistically significant warming trend, no matter how you slice and dice them”. He adds: “Both records are in reasonable agreement about the length of time without a significant warming trend. In the CRU record it is 15.0 years. In the University of Alabama MSU it is 13.9, and in the Remote Sensing Systems version of the MSU it is 15.6 years. “

In the middle of all those quotes being bandied about, I get an email from Burt Rutan (yes THAT Burt Rutan) with a PDF slideshow titled Winter Trends in the United States in the Last Decade citing NCDC’s “climate at a glance” data. This is using the USHCN2 data, which we are told is the “best”, no pun intended. It had this interesting map of the USA for Winter Temperatures (December-February) by climate region on the first slide:

What do we see here? Data, lots of it, all of it sourced. No name calling. Quotes from opposing viewpoints. This is a page that's intended to inform you, not scare you. It keeps to the point. It doesn't hit people, it gives them a platform and opens discussion. That is the way science is supposed to work. That is why Watt's is the top science blog. That's why it's good place to get informed. Whatever Tony Watts may have done in the past, or his credentials were, doesn't change the attitude and the professionalism that his blog reflects every day. That goes for the people who contribute as well, many of whom, regardless of their positions are geophysicists with degrees. Not that that matters. The important thing is access to the facts and to have some fun on the journey. That's what science is about. Even if desmog had any actual data, the hottest measured decade in history wouldn't be what we should be looking at. The important thing, which our commenter and desmog are ignoring is the trend. Which is downward. The Climate team knows that and that's why their worried that their gravy train might be coming to an end. The temperature trend is not a positive slope and hasn't been for a long time, as even James Hansen has acknowledged and no amount of waving the "hottest decade around, over and over is not going to change that. Waving that lying deceptive piece of crap over and over doesn't prove anything other than it's a lying piece of crap. Maybe the commenter could find real climate websites and do some real research to make his points. I would say that the sidebar of Watts is a good place to start but he's said that he isn't going there because he's afraid that his closed mind might get opened or something.