Climate change debate: CO2 not responsible for wild weather

10 Comments

1. Mr. Forbes relationship with the fossil fuel and mining industry is wide and deep. He has relied on doubter sources to back up his view which are also just as biased as he is on the truth about global warming.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report

   The fifth ipcc uses 9200 peer reviewed science papers and Viv Forbes uses no peer reviewed science.

   The fifth IPCC basically says the quicker we stop emitting co2 the better. Very simple. Not a very convenient message for Mr. Forbes.

   This kind of thinking only puts a ball and chain on our future generations in dealing with a much different climate than we will have.

   http://www.desmogblog.com/viv-forbes

   Degree in Applied Science Geology, and Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. [1]

   Background

   Viv Forbes is the Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition, which was created to “defend the role of carbon on earth and in the atmosphere,” and which describes Forbes as a “pasture manager, soil scientist and geologist from Rosevale in Queensland.” [2]

   Forbes has also had a long association with the coal industry. According to his biography at Stanmore Coal where he acts as director, Forbes has over 40 years of coal industry experience and has worked with Burton Coal, Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal, South Blackwater Coal Mine, Tahmoor Coal Mine, Newlands/Collinsville Coal Mines, MIM, Utah Goonyella/Saraji and Gold Fields.

   He is also associated with other skeptical organizations including the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) and the Australian Climate Science Coalition (ACSC).

   According to Forbes, the “Green Elite” has a “long-term agenda . . . to destroy human industry and reduce human population. Thus they are opposed to farming, mining, fishing, forestry, exploration and cheap power.” [3]

2. Thanks, this is very reasonable commentary

3. As per usual, Global Warming Deniers fabricate stories and invent their own “facts”.

   The statement
   “There has been no measurable “global warming” for 16 years”
   is not true.

   Despite the fantasies of Global Warming Deniers, the earth continues to warm at the rate of 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs per second – running 24/7 – including the years from 1998 to present.
   http://www.skepticalscience.com/4-Hiroshima-bombs-worth-of-heat-per-second.html
   Earth’s Rate Of Global Warming Is 400,000 Hiroshima Bombs A Day
   http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/22/3089711/global-warming-hiroshima-bombs/#
   Four Hiroshima bombs a second: How we imagine climate change
   http://phys.org/news/2013-08-hiroshima-climate.html
   This measured/observed warming rate is via the Argo buoy system. http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/About_Argo.html

   2005 was warmer than any previous year. Then 2010 broke the 2005 record. Data at:
   NOAA/National Climate Data Center
   https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/anomalies.php

   2012 was the warmest year on record for the United States.
   http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-announces-warmest-year-record-contiguous-us

   Sea level continues to rise due to thermal expansion and glacial melting. The current rate of sea level rise has quadrupled since the 1870 to 1924 period.
   Columbia University
   http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/SeaLevel/

   Glaciers continue to melt, and the rate of melting has accelerated since 1998.
   World Glacier Monitoring Service
   http://www.wgms.ch/mbb/sum12.html

   Ocean heating has accelerated sharply since 1998. Graph at:
   http://www.durangobill.com/GwdLiars/GwdOceanHeat.jpg
   Full peer reviewed paper at:
   http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50382/full
   Up to date info at:
   NOAA/National Oceanographic Data Center
   http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/ (click on “2”)

   And finally, November 2013 just set a record for the warmest November in history.
   NOAA/National Climate Data Center
   http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2013/11/

   More at:
   http://www.durangobill.com/GwdLiars/GwdGlobalWarmingStoppedIn1998.html

4. Bill…I only have time to tackle a couple of your most egregious claims, as I’m on a deadline. However, your claim about rate of sea level rise quadrupling is debunked in a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters this month:

   Thursday, February 13, 2014
   New paper finds 20th century sea level rise was only 4.3 inches in S Hemisphere, 7.9 inches N Hemisphere
   A paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters “challenges the widely accepted value of global sea level rise for the 20th century” and finds sea levels rose in the southern hemisphere at only about half the rate of the northern hemisphere. According to the authors, sea levels rose [relative to land] only 7.9 inches in the northern hemisphere and 4.3 inches over the entire 20th century.

   This implies relative sea level change is primarily a localized phenomenon related to subsidence or post-glacial rebound [land height changes] rather than melting ice or steric sea level changes [thermal expansion from warming].

   Evidence for a differential sea level rise between hemispheres over the 20th century

   Your comment about no measurable warming for 16 years is also bunkum, as evidenced from this recent study in Nature by Kosaka et al…they state:

   “Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty first century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming…Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability.”

   Yawn.

5. See my response to Bill above….the fifth IPCC report acknowledged in draft that warming had stopped..and it’s methodology on statistical analysis was described by a peer reviewed study in Nature Climate Change (Katz et al doi:10.1038/nclimate1980 published 28 Aug 2013) as ten years out of date.

   A further study by Fyfe et al (same issue of Nature Climate Change) is entitled “Overestimated global warming over the past twenty years” and basically says the computer models and IPCC got it horribly wrong.

   You can keep nailing your credibility to the mast of a sinking ship if you wish, but climate scientists disillusioned with how science has become a religion are starting to call foul.

6. Most of the people who agree that burning of fossil fuels is responsible for 80% of the anthropogenic contribution to global warming do not appreciate the FACT that fuels are burned primarily for the heat they release, and it is HEAT that causes temperatures to rise and glaciers to melt. The heat emitted by our energy consumption is four times the amount that can be attributed to the measured rise in atmospheric temperature. Where does the rest of the heat go? Possibly to heat the oceans and land mass, but what is the real heat contributed by CO2 if all that we see can be explained by heat emissions alone? You might ask “what difference does it make if we agree that fossil fuels are the major cause and should be curtailed?” By blaming the wrong component we tacitly give our blessing to nuclear power, which emits more than twice the total heat as its electrical output, and new plants have been licensed. Further, we propose on an international scale CCS, carbon capture and sequestration. This is a waste of time and money, particularly if CO2’s impact is as small as it must be. To lower the concentration by 1ppm requires the removal of 9,000,000 tons. At what cost and for what measurable benefit? The only answer is to move as rapidly as possible to renewable energy such as solar, wind, hydroelectric,etc. It may be expensive but not as compared to building walls around all the coastal communities.

7. http://www.realclimate.org/

   There really has been no slow down in the earth gaining energy. It just may not show up in the atmosphere.

   Cowtan and Way with a hybrid temperature data set of Hadcrut4 and Satellite data, show that the uncovered areas of the earth by surface temperature stations show we are warming faster than just the Hadcrut4 data set.

   Just in this month is a new study showing the trade winds have been burying energy in the pacific ocean from trade winds being stronger than normal. When these trade winds decrease, the earth will pick up speed in warming.

8. “Carbon pollution puts the weather on steroids. It greatly increases our risk of extreme weather like heavy storms, droughts, and heat waves.” http://clmtr.lt/c/Dhs0bU0cMJ

9. I think you will find there was a peer reviewed study a couple of years back blaming AGW for a big drop in Pacific trade winds…so which is it: if global warming is making trade winds weaker, does that mean a cooling planet for the last 16 years has allowed stronger trade winds? IE, the winds are symptomatic of heat/cooling, not causative?

   This makes sense a la thermodynamics, because turning on a fan does not make a room cooler, it just redistributes the latent heat. Trade winds cannot “make” the globe cooler, then can only shuffle the existing heat around. On paper they should have no impact on globally averaged temperatures.

10. iwishart

    http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/02/going-with-the-wind/

    I don’t know about the claim of lower trade winds by another paper. I do know of this one that makes a very clear correlation of higher trade winds and energy being buried in the pacific ocean.

Comments are closed.