blizzard1024

This is counter intuitive to me. We had two major volcanic eruptions one in 1982 (El Chicon) and Pinatubo in 1991 early in these records and we have had three intense El NInos 1983, 1998 and 2015. How can removing all this lead to a strong warmer trend? Volcanos cool the atmosphere and strong El Ninos warm the atmosphere. I will read in more detail. Thanks.

What you are forgetting here skier is that it doesn't cause an automatic response in the Earth's temperature OHC there is a lag too.... to be truthful we need more data from the Argo floats to make any conclusions. This easily could be a cyclical trends in OHC.

Okay....follow my logic. Argo floats deployed in 2003. Very reliable much higher resolution dataset. Data for deep oceans before this is suspect. So using this new dataset which is the most comprehensive we see ONI or a tendency for more El Ninos, and, indeed OHC from the Argo floats has increased. Before 2003, one can say the data is of lower quality. Before the satellite era of the 1970s the data was even poorer in quality. Hence starting in 1970 (satellite era) or starting in 2003 (Argo data) makes sense and is not cherry picking. The tendency for more El Ninos leading to a warmer planet makes sense meteorologically and climatologically. Maybe CO2 causes more El Ninos? I know that has been stated (of course). But whatever the cause the increase in El Ninos likely is a major player in the warmth of the planet recently.

I told you I started when the argo floats were deployed in 2003 so you can assume much better OHC data. it wasn't a random date. if the data showed negative I still would have posted it.

I don't know much about biology I will give you that. How many times does a drug end up causing unknown side affects or other problems? anyway, I have been using atmospheric models for more than 30 years and I know the inherent problems with them. The atmosphere is a high non-linear system very hard to model.

But we are talking about OHC since the 1970s. We don't have a good handle on OHC really before the Argo floats but I will let that go. Let's try 2003-present after the Argo floats are active and you will see a tendency toward more El Nino ish conditions which is known to warm the planet.

Okay. First the top 5 you have are pretty basic science and not as complex as the climate system. Number 6 hurricane tracks several days out...now you are pushing it. There is tremendous uncertainty several days out and the hurricane center uses probabilities to determine risk. If the probability is greater than 10% of death and destruction, i.e the consequence is very high people evacuate. Rapid intensification, interaction with mid-latitude waves and extratropical transition are not well modelled. Number 7 you are pushing even way more. There are many instances where severe weather outbreaks don't materialize. we don't have a full understanding of CAPE vs shear and the balances needs plus dry air and other variables. There have been many busts here. Number 8 climate models are extremely uncertain.

The ONI actually has a positive trend since the 1970s... data source https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php

Yes you are correct. But more El Ninos lead to more tropical convection. This leads to more water vapor at high altitudes increasing the Earth's temperature and indeed an imbalance.

Yes the argo floats begin in 2003, the satellite data for ice begins during the late 70s a known cool period of the 20th century. Of course there easily can be a cyclical imbalance. Again I am not being disrespectful. I just don't agree. That's all. All of you are obviously passionate and smart people.

ENSO cycles. Since the late 1970s we have had stronger El Ninos vs La Ninas. This would easily increase OHC in a cyclical fashion. The 1970s had predominately strong La Ninas. Now we are seeing stronger El Ninos. Also there hasn't been a major volcanic eruption in almost 30 years. The 1960s, 80s and early 90s had major eruptions. Plus the clean air act has reduced soot and other pollution in many western societies which thermometer data is dense. This had led to warming. Regional changes in forest cover. Ocean current changes. The Sun. The sun reached a grand maximum in the 20th century and it is waning now. There is a lag since the sun heats the oceans significantly vs IR radiation. Cooling could be on the way this century. There is so much more to natural variability that is understudied because the tail wags the dog in climate science. It is assumed CO2 is the thermostat so all papers and studies have to show this or show how today's warming is unprecedented. They even adjust temperatures upward recently and downward in the past. Anything that proves CO2 is the driver of the climate. They have a conclusion so now the research is done to back it up. This is backwards IMO. Respectively- Blizzard1024

So you know what the Earth's climate has been like for the Holocene? last 2000 years? Proxy data is coarse and can't be stitched to high resolution real measurements with accuracy. You can invoke statistics but you can get what you want when playing with stats. How do you know today's climate is unusual? We don't have enough data to understand ocean temperatures or land temperatures more than 100 years and really more than 60 years ago.

When the Earth's OLR is around 239 W/m2 explain to me how .87 w/m2 is significant? especially if the oceans are absorbing most of it?

You can't say this unless you invoke a climate model. Maybe you trust models, I don't.

Where do you get "right wing" lies from? I am not a right winger by no means. I am a realist on the climate system and its inherent uncertainties and complexities. It is NOT all figured out like many seem to think. Even the Earth's heat imbalance, .87 W/m2? We have a very hard time measuring with any certainty the solar constant and other heat flows. This could easily be in error. The Ocean heat uptake is not a problem at all. If you do the math it shows that the increase in OHC equals a whooping .04C! That means that the oceans can continue to take up heat and stabilize the climate system. Anyway I could go on here but I won't.

I will be reporting you to the MODs. This is uncalled for.

That is very interesting. Pielke has a lot of research on how changes in land-use can alter regional temperatures. I wonder what the net change in climate for the northeast U.S is related to the large scale abandonment of farms and the resurgence of forests. If you look at a visible satellite image in the midwest and plains in winter, snow leads to almost complete whiteness and very high albedo. In the northeast, after a snowstorm you still see a lot of forests which are very efficient at absorbing solar radiation. 100 -120 years ago much of the northeast was farmland and fields so after a snowstorm the albedo was higher. Did this lead to colder winters? Once the forest returned, like present day, our albedo is lower and theoretically we should have warmer winters. This would be an excellent research project for a PhD candidate.

okay! That is what I thought. thank you.

I will agree to disagree. It is not even close to being settled. We don't know enough about natural climatic forcings. You can't hide behind literature or IPCC. The literature or peer reviewed papers do not cover anything else because they use models to determine whether the forcing is natural or not. When you have an incomplete knowledge of natural forcings and cycles how can you make models that cover this? There is nothing convincing (except for models) that points to CO2 as the main driver of climate. We are in a warming trend now. It is pretty small. 1-2C/century if it continues. That is pretty small considering the rapid changes that occured during the glacial-interglacial cycles, younger dryas and the 8.2 ky cooling event. These were drastic changes. What we are seeing now is benign warming. Of course coastal communities will continue to see sea level rise so living on the coast is a problem. But for most of us, any warming is beneficial. Once the oceans go back to a cooling cycle we will see a drop in temperature.

Wait a minute. 87 w/m2? It was around .6w/m2. Now its 87? that's dramatic. where is this paper? that has to be a mistake. do you mean .87?

Nothing is atmospheric science is a settled one. Science is NOT settled especially for a highly non-linear chaotic system. There is no way anyone can say "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant driver of the ongoing observed warming. " with certainty. CO2 has one small absorption band between 13 and 17 microns in the IR. It is a small part of the Earth's greenhouse effect. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas by far as it has a much wider absorption signature in the IR. The warmth we are seeing now could be do to a variety of natural effects as well as CO2 increases. What about the amazingly high record temperatures in the 1930s when many states broke all-time record highs around 110-120 degrees F? Places in NY, PA, OH and NJ hit around 110F or even into the low 110s. That probably is a once in a millenium event too and this occurred without CO2 increases like we see today. There are other factors that affect our climate that we don't understand. For CO2 to be driving the climate now, you need strong positive feedbacks related to increasing water vapor in the upper troposphere where it counts. We just don't know enough about how water vapor is changing at these high levels. Desser and Soden have tried to show this. But Soden's work basically correlates well with ENSO. He showed that after Pinatubo global temperatures declined and global high level water vapor declined too. BUT what he failed to do was look at ENSO. After Pinatubo there was an El Nino which correlates to more water vapor high up from increased tropical convection. His analysis ended a few years later in La Nina conditions. So in effect you can't rule out that the changes in water vapor occurred because of ENSO. Desser comes from Texas A and M. This is the institution that makes faculty sign a document that states that climate change is a certainty. Not good science here when you shut down creative thinking. https://atmo.tamu.edu/about/faculty-statement-climate-change/index.html This leads to more group think and academic fraud. Texas A and M meteorology department is pretty much toast now... Then this brings me to cloud cover. Cloud cover variations modulate the climate dramatically. There is an inverse relationship between cloud fraction and temperatures. This is well known. GCMs do NOT handle cloud cover explicitly. Cloud fraction is added in to stabilize a GCMs output. That is faulty and unrealistic. Then we get to convection which is a major factor in the global energy balance. GCMs also do not handle convection explicitly either. Without convection the global average temperature would be 71C instead of around 15C. The greenhouse effect is typically stated to be +33C since the Earth's black body temperature is 255K or -18C. But this is WITH convection. Without convection the Greenhouse effect is 89C!! So convective overturning of the atmosphere is critical in maintaining the Earth's energy balance. So if we increase CO2 and add 1.5K to the Greenhouse effect how can you prove that convective overturning won't compensate for that? Furthermore, the TOA outgoing long wave radiation is around 239 W/m2. A doubling of CO2 leads to an decrease of 3.7 W/m2 which is only 1.5%. Since we have not reached a doubling, you can say we probably have increased the Greenhouse effect by 1%. 1%? That is very small and it is hard to imagine that such small changes would be unstable enough to spiral the Earth's climate out of control. If the climate was that sensitive life on earth would not exist as it does today. Plus there was a time 6000 to 8000 year agos where the Earth was warmer than present by as much as 2-4C in the Arctic. This was with far less CO2. The plant and animal species we have today survived this. Humans flourished. This also was natural. So to make a statement that CO2 is the dominant force in the climate system is not on solid ground unless you fully believe that climate scientists have figured out how to model the Earth's climate with precision. I don't think they can. That is my scientific opinion. And yes it is my opinion based on 30 years of using atmospheric models and studying weather and climate. I do appreciate the passion many of you bring to make for a better planet. I agree with this. We shouldn't be polluting the atmosphere. We need to go to renewables at some point BUT it can't be forced. I would love to see solar panels on all buildings, not solar farms that take up a lot of land. I would like to see bird friendly wind turbines if that is possible. I would not like to see energy prices rise so much that poor people resort to deforestation and other environmental calamities that comes with poverty for basic survival. I would like to see climate accords that phase out fossil fuel use for ALL countries. What is the point if some countries are allowed to pollute? That is ridiculous. It also needs to be phased in slowly as technology advances. Anyway, it is my nature as a scientist to question everything.

What hubris. They have it all figured out. That's like a meteorologist who claims that they have it all figured out. Models, its all about models. Models help us understand but they aren't the be all end all in most sciences. Their GCMs don't even handle convection or cloud cover explicitly and they feel that they fully model the climate? I am skeptical of all atmospheric models. It is just my training and experience. I would like to see a real-time measure of the greenhouse effect with updates to high level water vapor monthly. Then you can calculate a real-time greenhouse effect. But only NCEP provides monthly vapor pressure at 300 mb. That shows a decline which goes against the mainstream climate science so we ignore that variable but we use NCEP for temperatures in papers all the time. smh

Yes the climate is warming. But how can you rule out that natural forces such an ENSO (stronger El Ninos since the late 1970s) doesn't play a big role? Yes CO2 has some role but paleorecords from the Pleistoscene suggest it is minor. The pliocene was a warmer epoch because the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were not seperate. The Isthmus of Panama was open. Once this closed around 2.6 million years ago we went into glacial-interglacial cycles because of the development of the AOMC. This led to more moisture reaching high latitudes and much more snowfall which in turn began the glaication process. The pliocene is a different epoch completely. We didn't have the moisture and snowcover/ice age cycles. This really suggests ocean currents are a major driver of the climate system. Not CO2.

When looking at the ice core data, any unbiased scientist would easily conclude the CO2 doesn't drive climate. There are many instances where temperatures fall in the ice core record for centuries with rising CO2 and vice versa. Since the long wave absorption effects of CO2 are logarithmic in nature it is these lower values of CO2 concentration, theoretically should have more of an effect than the rapid rises we see today. Even so, you see the ice core records CO2 level passively follows the temperature curves. The oceans outgas CO2 when it is warmer and suck CO2 in when the oceans are colder. CO2 didn't drive the climate in the past. So what changed? Why now? Changes in insolation around 65N is generally thought to kick off a glaciation. The insolation gets too weak up there to melt the winter's snow in the summer and there is sufficient land mass in the NH to lead to the building of glaciers. Once this begins, the albedo feedback likely becomes important further cooling the land. The oceans will lag due to thermal inertia. This explains the lag in CO2 levels. CO2 will remain the same as the temperatures plunge. As the glaciers build they pull out water vapor from the atmosphere which is the primary GHG. The Earth gets very dry and cold. The dryness means less of a Greenhouse effect so that is a feedback too. CO2 just follows along and eventually drops as the oceans finally cool. That should end the debate on whether CO2 drives the climate. Its doesn't. There is such a close correlation of CO2 and temperature with in these ice cores with a ~ 800-1000 year lag, that it is close to a linear relationship. The climate system is highly non-linear. This is because Henry's law is pretty much a linear temperature vs solubility. So if you believe CO2 is a control knob on the climate system you are basically believing the climate system is linear. We all know this is wrong.

Yay. These folks just re-discovered the Arctic oscillation. It was negative in the 1960s and 70s too... a cold global period. Papers are non-sense. Can't believe what gets published these days.