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The Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these changes are attributed to very small changes in the Earth’s orbit changing the amount of solar energy the Earth receives.
The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. Studying these climate data collected over many years reveal the signals of a changing climate.
Certain facts about Earths climate are not in dispute:
* The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century. Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
* Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.
No matter what.. I’d prefer to live in a cleaner world. It’s just a better living environment.
when are we going to stop this bullshit? why do we want to mortgage our children and grandchildren’s futures? they have the right to live as we did, period, I tell my students in my science class:
‘if cold, get a jacket’ ‘if warm wear shorts’
H.neanderthalensis survived for thousands of years a very cold climate, and we coexisted with them for a few of those years, and we are still around, so uncle dave stop posting S**T in your blog! go for something more meaningful man! thinking of me going from one library to another to get the last PC magazine issue just to read your column 20 years ago! you are losing your way.
for the rest of the readers, oppose any legislation meant to control your life and tax you to death! Bums our of Capitol Hill on November 2.
How about showing the graph with an origin for Carbon dioxide concentration that starts at zero instead of 160 ppm? It unfairly emphasizes the deviations in the data relative to the actual values of the data.
Showing graphs that have an apparent origin that does not correspond to zero is a disceptive technique described in the classic book “How to Lie with Statistics”.
A great book, actually a short and easy read that will open anyone’s eyes to the deceptive practices used so often when presenting scientific results. Well worth the few hours reading time.
Whenever I see these kinds of techniques used in presenting data it automatically makes me suspicious. If the author’s data are so compelling, why did the author need to use these techniques to enhance the effect?
Somehow, I no longer care what NASA has to say about the climate.
It’s documented on the NASA website that the sensors reading atmosphere have been failing for years and are making the readings higher than other sensors looking at the same area. NASA and NOAA are keeping the bad temperatures because it meets their agenda (with funding) of ACC.
Took a look at the nasa web site and here’s the quote under the graph.
“This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Source: NOAA)”
Another nice deceptive practice, combining different types of data into one set without accounting for potential bias between the methods used to produce them. Let’s look at where the graphed data have come from.
Presumably all the data in the graph from about 1960 to today have been collected using modern spectroscopic methods from sats. These would provide highly reliable measurements made in real time. They have also been able to make measurements over a larger portion of earth than ever before possible. These measurements are the gold standard from an analytical point. We can reasonably expect these data reflect the true concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time they are made.
There may also be a few reasonably accurate direct measurements that go back about 150 years. Assuming they were made on fresh samples using reliable chemical techniques available at the time, they are also probably fairly reliable estimates of the conditions of the atmosphere at the time. They would not be quite as reliable as NASA’s current standards and would have no where near the kind of global coverage NASA has.
All the measurements for times much before 150 years ago are probably from recent measurements of ice core samples. These measure the carbon dioxide concentrations of the air that has been trapped as bubbles in the ice core since the time the ice froze solid. The chemical measurements that are made today are pretty reliable. But do the measurements which are made show the true concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at that time? What if all the carbon di in the sample doesn’t get incorporated into the ice core air bubbles? What happens if the snow doesn’t freeze immediately? What happens if snow thaws and refreezes a little before freezing solid?
There are oppurtunities for carbon di to be lost before the sample is “preserved”. If that happens, we’d get a measurement that relects a minimum possible value because we don’t know how much carbon di might have been lost before the ice crystals became dense enough to “preserve” air bubbles in the sample. If we don’t know how this is working on the measurements we take, we have to accept that there’s a non ignorable chance our results could reflect something less than the true concentraion we hoped to measure. And again the global coverage is no where close to NASA standards.
Even if the numbers are lower than “true” values,it could still be possible that the ice core data could give us some kind of useful ideas on how the CO2 levels have changed relative to each other over time.
Is it fair to combine all these data of different reliablity into one picture? What would a picture of just the ice core data look like? Do ice core data from 50 year old ice agree with NASA’s 1960 sat data? How well do the 150 year old direct data compare to the ice core data? What if the ice core data are biased low?
If 25% of the CO2 in the snow entrapped air failed to make it into the ice core air bubbles, the ice core numbers we get could be 40 or 50 ppm lower than true atmospheric conditions at the time the snow fell. Imagine the graph if all the ice core data had 40 ppm added to them and then the graph been drawn. Would that give you a very different impression?
These are the kind of questions you have to ask when you see data graphed for you. Is the picture the graph produces in your head a fair one? Have little tricks been used to make it look more persuasive? Unfortunately, that’s the kind of world we live in.
By the way How to Lie with Stats was written by Darrel Huff.
And I do think the data show that CO2 levels have risen in the last 150 years.
There is such a thing as carbon cycle. It is a fact that we have been burning fossil fuels and the rate of burning has been increasing in direct proportion to the use of vehicles, machinery, furnaces and other human activity that produces CO2. These human activities are on the emission side of the cycle.
There is the absorption side of the cycle that is performed by the biosphere, the flora and fauna. Trees, planktons, animals, bacteria all these sequester carbon dioxide. Even humans who are growing fat have retained carbon by eating carbohydrates and oils and having these stored in the bodies. A growing human population means also a growing amount of carbon in the bodies of humans. When people build homes made of wood, they have permanently kept carbon from the cycle as they keep their homes in good condition. So as more and more homes are built, more and more carbon are also permanently stored out of the cycle. Since the volume of human made structures are increasing, accordingly, the amount of carbon kept away from the cycle have accordingly increased.
And so, it is not simply that we are emitting CO2 we are also absorbing CO2 together with the rest of the biosphere. The question here is whether this CO2 absorption capacity has been impaired with the 80% deforestation (or the loss of the forests). And so the increase in CO2 may not necessarily be due to the increase in emission but more so due to the loss of capacity in the absorption side of the carbon cycle.
Why is there not much talk about the absorption side of the carbon cycle? If we have lost capacity should we not focus on restoring the absorption capacity or even possibly increasing it so as to attain a balancing of the emission side with the absorption side of the cycle?
And I also agree with the comment that it may not be right to compare NASA measurements of CO2 levels with the measurements obtained from ice cores, considering the high possibility of CO2 gas escape rates just before freezing and ice layer compressing. As in a bottle of soda, CO2 can be seen as quickly rising. Ice core levels do not correlate directly with atmospheric levels.
There is a need to corroborate CO2 retention rates in new ice with that of the NASA determined CO2 levels.
It is amazing the con job of global warming
The earth has gone through cycles before
Yet these Sierra Club types jetting around as well as the EPA cronies – have they changed their life and lifestyles on iota
Carbon credit – what a con job and during a recession too
Have you heard one China – the new dirty air industrial power or India cutting back on emissions ?
It would be interesting to do a correlational study between age and views on climate change.
Unless your graph starts at zero, it’s biased.
A couple of small observations. According to the saner people running the numbers even if the US did everything cap and trade called far the impact on the climate would be so near zero as not to matter. You may not have noticed but our economy is stagnant. It is other people who have growing economies.
The out come of cap and trade would be hugely negative on the US economy but some of the proponents of cap and trade would get filthy rich at the expense of everybody else.
Since the science is in and cap and trade won’t cool off the planet according to the modals being put forward I’m afraid I consider proponents of cap and trade to be either con artist running a scam or a political incorrect term.
1/4 of the about 1 ft of sea level rise over the last century was due to water being pumped out of aquifers which is an entirely different problem or that is what the only study to address this issue came up with. Perhaps as much is due to ocean warming better called hydro expansion. That gets you down to maybe six inches of melting.
Weather and climate are incredibly complex. It has been known for decades that even tiny changes in the numbers can cause wild swings in outcomes even over fairly short time spans and many of those factors such as cosmic rays and solar output are not under human control.
If a mega volcano goes off anywhere human civilization will collapse in months and at a guess 1/2 or more of all humans will die.
We keep making major discoveries that invalidate older ideas about weather and climate and much of the data we have on closer examination is not to be trusted which results in the data being adjusted which gets you down to guessing. When what you really need is at least a thousand years of data that is precise and what we have is at best only to within a degree of two don’t place major bets on it.
Example: Scotland and Germany have made huge investments in wind power. The wind mills are there but they are only getting a fraction of the wind power climatologist said they would get.
This is the worst of both worlds. They are spending a fortune building and maintaining wind farms that aren’t providing a reasonable payback on the investment while having to continue to support and maintain their fossil fuel power systems some of which are aging and need work done…
As more than one power generation expert has noted, Just because you want something to work doesn’t mean it will and we still have a lot to learn about wind, solar, geothermal, and other power sources.
I’m for using alternative power where we can get payback but what’s the point of building wind mills if the wind isn’t going to blow enough make the investment pay off and what do you do if you build these systems and we get what Scotland got?
I think burning wood to heat our homes is going to have negative impacts assuming we could get the wood and freezing to death is not all that attractive to me.
The option at least for now seems to be fossil fuels with natural gas which is now abundant being the best option.
Of course if most of the people living in the Boston/New York/Washington corridor and the major cities in CA will agree to move to the wind belt states maybe we can actually work something out. If you want to go green and live off wind power you are going to have to live where the wind mills can be counted on to work most of the time.
Maybe the dinosaurs died out and went extinct from all the hot air of the dinosaur politicians
– AlGoreBrontasaurus and their Cap & Trade policies. Wonder how our politicians are going to package & try to resell carbon credit taxes ?
#41 you raise an interesting point about the amount of water that has been transported from underground aquifers back to the earth’s service in the last several decades.
Water vapor is another very potent greenhouse gas.
Shit, acid rain, I forgot all about that. What ever happened to all those dead lakes and seas?
So, satellites (the first of which was launched 53 years ago) allow us to get the big picture of 400,000 years of climate history? That’s a bold statement.
# 41 deowll said, “…they are only getting a fraction of the wind power climatologist said they would get.”
Yet, Scotland is proceeding with plans to build even more!
You know, the first time I ever saw a wind farm (in Southern California) many years ago, the first thing I thought of was the old saw about a butterfly wings eventually causing a tornado. When we stick up these huge farms we are swiping energy from the atmosphere. What we take is minuscule compared to the total energy involved but, then, so is that butterfly’s…
When politics and money get involved in an issue, even science can’t be trusted…
“Have you heard one China – the new dirty air industrial power or India cutting back on emissions ?”
No, and you won’t. China is the biggest emitter of filth in the air, while Denmark is the biggest emitter of CO2. Facts that the enviro-fascists don’t want to address because such facts will cut into their lucrative grant money.
Bzzzzzt!
/fraud 101 for the win
Well, at least we now know without a doubt, NASA (and it’s so called science) was always the official hand puppet of election campaign statisticians, Ideologues -and of course, Mathematical Deception 101. Oldest political trick in the book..when you want to make your tax(cut), budget (and now C02) graphs look impressive (or not)..
never start your graph’s Y axis at zero
-and people wonder why we still use WWII era V2 rocket technology to launch stuff into space. Nice try NASA. I hope they gave you some K-Y when they bent you over to publish this load of “science” crap.
you people should be ashamed.
-s
Does anybody know the ratio of CO2 eating oceans versus land vegetation?
I recall a number like 99 per cent is ocean.
I really do hate repeating myself, but when no new issues are presented, just more confusion, what is one to do?
A most excellent issue on which everyone can examine for themselves how they know what they know, and how we change out minds, when we do?
Ha, ha. Stroke my ego when the linked article starts off with “How do we know” and first issue is ocean rise.
Does ANYONE here have a theory as to the mechanism, sensitivities, tipping points, as to how much CO2 can be pumped into the atmosphere with no negative effects at all?
Anyone?
Is anyone here actually an expert in all the fields necessary to really have an expert opinion on the subject?
Anyone?
Some of the comments above are excellent and on their face seem like they need an explanation. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas or not? Does it have a saturation point above which the amount makes not difference? Are these valid issues or pure nonsense?
Here’s one I know enough about to opine: the graph has to start at zero. Thats a presentational issue regarding the accuracy of our eyes the sensitivity of the subject being presented to the scale chosen. This has nothing to do with its validity, just its presentational clarity as when all graphs are shown with black solid lines, or presented with colors or dots. The information is the same, just easier to see. Gotta be entirely ignorant to parrot otherwise.
Yes, the epistemology of what we really don’t know. A beautiful layered cake.
Not defending the presented graph but no axis need start at zero. It is perfectly good science to start at “baseline”. Since there is no situation in which the atmosphere is devoid of CO2 there is no need to start the graph at zero. It is, however, necessary to define the baseline and explain why it is valid.
Animby–not to quibble but if chart axis’s are shown then it is “valid.” Define the baseline? You mean besides what its value is???? Explain its validity? What does that even mean?
Ha, ha. Worst post you have made to date. I might even summarize it as: poop.
# 18 and # 44
This is sometimes brought in conjunction with global warming as examples of alleged anthropogenic environmental changes, which have disappeared all on their own. I don’t know about the US, but in europe all those freon gases used for refrigerators and deodorants where outlawed, and thus the emission stopped.
The acid rain did a lot of damage in Sweden where i am a frequent visitor, and dead lakes where result of this. Less acid rain – Dropping chalk into the lakes to neutralize the acid, and so forth have reduced the damage. The point is: if we accept that there is a problem, thne we can discuss how to fix, and maybe even do something about it.
#52 Bobbo
Greenhouse gas simply means a gas which is transparent to visible light but will absorb infrared light.
Visible light passes thru the gas, hits a solid object (like the surface of the earth) and warms it up. The warmed object emits infrared light which instead of radiating out to space gets trapped by the greenhouse gas above the object and in turn warms it. It’s a sort of insulating effect which slows down the loss of the object’s heat and keeps it warmer longer.
CO2 has this ability as do many other gases, most notably water vapor. Without the greenhouse gas effect of earth’s atmosphere, average temps on earth would be significantly lower than what we experience.
Another potent greenhouse gas is freon. Gram for gram far more potent than CO2. We started to eliminate freon use back around 1990 because of it’s impact on atmospheric ozone. The chemicals which have been substituted are also less potent greenhouse gases. In this area we have reduced greenhouse gas emissions as a by product of attempts to protect the ozone.
Yes the issue is complex and it can be difficult to tease out the various things at work. All the more reason why presenting information in a neutral way is critical.
#54 Bobbing for road apples – You didn’t contradict a single thing I said. In fact you only confirmed what I have said previously: many of your posts are simply trolling for an argument.
poopin’ hooman
#56–BS==you really should be responding to dismal at #5. He says there is Nasa proof that co2 is NOT a greenhouse gas. My statement was to the point of is this a “new” issue or is it pure nonsense? In its best view, I take the question to be whether or not at higher concentrations the co2/heat forms more water vapor and reflects more light/heat than is radiated from the earth, ie a net heat loss at certain elevated levels. I don’t know the IPCC Climate Model well enough, or at all really, to know if this issue has been incorporated, or if there is error in the NASA data. Arguments with the uninformed like myself are easy: just lie. And dismal and his ilk are pro’s at that.
Here’s a news flash: scientists have just discovered that the output of the sun has been mismeasured for the last 30 years do to the thermometers being filled with porridge rather than mercury. Turns out, we would currently be 50 feet below glaciers without the warming effect of co2 and more importantly, the hot air of climate deniers. Doesn’t “sound” right, be who can dispute it?
Please make your reply as neutral as possible.
Animby, arguing like a Palin==if you don’t think I contradicted you, then its no wonder you think you are never wrong. Ha, ha.
The only issue on the validity of a chart is whether or not it correctly presents the data set it represents. Is that what you meant by “It is, however, necessary to define the baseline and explain why it is valid.”
Maybe you could chart your analysis for us and define what your baseline is and explain why it is valid?”
Animby–its not that hard to see where you are wrong and accept it gracefully rather than try to bill for it as followup visit.
Hee, hee. Positive correlation between smarts and refusal to admit a mistake. Only stupid people make progress.
You asked if CO2 is a greenhouse gas and I tried to explain why it was.
Without an atmosphere and its greenhouse effect, earth’s surface temperatures would be similar to what we observe on the moon. About 200F in the sun and about -200F in the shade.
What change we will see in earth’s temp if we add enough CO2 to the atmosphere to raise the concentration another 50 ppm, is a not so easily answered question.
Blind: here’s your third chance. If co2 is a green house gas, how do you explain the NASA data provide at Post #5? My question goes to how you know it is or isn’t, not whether it is or isn’t.
Epistemology vs Ontology (sic) – or, an anti-dismal screed as you choose.