It is quite humorous, isn't it anteachtaire? 

 

Has anyone even answered my question of how can we not predict the weather for 2 weeks into the future, and yet we are so sure that the world will end it it goes up or down a degree?

 

Science is not religion... nor is it able to predict the future.  It can only take and prove or disprove a theory, at that point in time.  Humans need to stop trying to play God.

WTF. 

Your question is idiotic.  You base it on the notion of the world being destroyed by a change in heat content of 1 degree.  Who says this, and were does their certainty come from?   Regarding weather prediction.  That is a tough one.  I think it seems more accurate than the farmer's almanac.  Do a study.

Happy New Year!!!

Obvusly........lol

In the article titled AGW, Revisited Randi never stated: agw is likely true.

He wrote a followup and made the statement: agw is likely true.

There is nothing ambigious about that. 

It is strongly suggested that in AGW, Revisited his opinion is that agw is possible but not worth being concerned about.  Going from this position to 'agw is likely true' is not clarification.  From possible to likely. 

 

 

 

 

 

Link.  Nothing to see here, move along.

I didn't 'wish it' to say anything, numbnutz.

Oh, and Happy New Year.

When I read that article, that wasn't the impression I got.  The absorbtion rate is increasing as the level of CO2 does.  This conflicts with the idea that it will take the ecosystem thousands of years to balance out with the new level, a major factor in the mythical tipping point where everything goes to hell in a hand basket and the earth becomes a desolate wasteland...

 

You know they're still pimping that bullshit at the climate summits right?

Then you better read it again. Also read the additional links I gave as well.

Even the study that was being hyped said "the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, i.e. close to and not significantly different from zero." In other words the trend was a 0.7% per decade increase in the airborne fraction which is a decrease in the sequestered fraction. Of course since the error range of ±1.4% per decade is greater than the trend then that is statistically zero but once the corrections are made for the El Nino La Nina cycle (ENSO) and volcanic perturbations then even the hyped study shows a small but statistically relevant increase in the airborne fraction of emitted carbon dioxide.

There is no study that claims that the absolute absorption rate is increasing. While it is true that warming ocean waters can indeed absorb more carbon dioxide than cooler ocean waters it is clear that this is not keeping up with the temperature increase associated with the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. At best we're breaking even and it's likely that we will continue to keep falling behind. As you well know even breaking even is essentially the status quo where 45% or so of all emitted carbon dioxide simply stays in the atmosphere. If we do ever get to the point of saturation and the ability of the oceans and plant life to absorb carbon dioxide begins to decline then that will in fact be a "tipping point".

Also listed in those papers are about a quarter of the CO2 emitted that they can't account for. They have their calculation of what we emit, a calculation of how much is absorbed and direct measurements of what is retained in the atmosphere - and the numbers just don't add up. By nearly 25%. Almost a quarter of what we emit, they can't account for. It's clearly going somewhere, but damned if they know where.

The ocean will never get to the actual "saturation" point, where the CO2 content reaches the solubility limit in water. There is obviously a rate limiting factor in how fast it can take up carbon, but the total volume needed to saturate it is well beyond anything we could put out. Cold water under pressure can hold a LOT of gas. Even warm water can hold quite a bit; current estimates are that the oceans hold fifty times as much CO2 disolved as the atmosphere does, with or without any contribution from us.

And yes, most of the IPCC models assume a severe reduction in biological and oceanic carbon uptake to allow for emitted carbon to get us to 600 ppm or more for the doomsday scenarios. At least one assumes we get to 1000 ppm, which we simply cannot do if the ocean keeps absorbing more than half of what we put out. The point this paper seems to be pointing out that we haven't reached the point where the oceans are showing any significant decline in uptake ability.

Oh OK. You could be a little more verbose about it. I would assume that is something that only the gullible (or someone desperate for an ideologically desirable article) would really believe but that did seem to be the impression that the original article was trying to make.

I did not know that. However that implies that the potential feedback is positive, not negative, which seems to me to give more credence to the pro AGW position over the anti AGW position.

However perhaps it is a transport issue and not a capacity issue as Willy suggests. If the deep cold water capacity is as Willy suggests then perhaps the slight positive feedback of warming shallow waters is not important. Like I've said many times I make no claims to being a climatologist, I'm picking up all of this as I go along.

I'm not aware of this either. Do you happen to have any source (preferably peer reviewed reputably published) that backs up that claim?

Also while I'm at it do you have any reputable links that support the oceans CO2 capacity argument as well?

The two papers that I referenced (once the first is corrected for ENSO and volcanoes) seemed to imply a decline on the order of 1% per decade. I don't know if you'd consider that significant or not.

But that 25% you mentioned is troubling me, I will indeed chase that but if you can give me a reference I'd appreciate it.

I have stated that I am at least somewhat incredulous of doomsday scenarios. I'm not sure where that boundary really is. I can buy a temperature increase of 2-3°C and a sea level rise of 2-3 meters but I don't see that as wiping us off the planet. Annoying (and costly) but not catastrophic.

That's not climatology, that's basic chemistry. Nearly all gases are more soluble in cooler solvents, and nearly all solids are more soluble in warmer solvents. All gases are more soluble at higher pressure.

If even assuming 25 C as a mean ocean temperature, CO2 is soluble at 1.45 g/L of water at atmospheric pressure. Total ocean volume is ~1.3 billion cubic kilometers, which translates to ~1.3 x 10^21 liters. This in turn can disolve ~1.9 x 10^21 grams, or 1.9 x 10^18 kilograms of CO2. For reference, total CO2 in the atmophere today is about 3.0 x 10^15 kilograms. All numbers courtesy of Wikipedia.

Obviously this is a back of an envelope type calculation. I picked room temperature, rather than the 10-15 C that the actual ocean mean temperature would fall. This would boost solubility 35-60%. I also ignored salinity, which would decrease solubility by a factor I couldn't easily find (there are papers on it, but I'm not a subscriber).

I also ignored pressure. Again, all the papers I've found were inaccessible*. More importantly, it would be a disaster of estimates, as pressure changes vastly over the depth of the water column (every ~34ft of water adds another atmosphere of pressure). Then estimate how much area of the ocean is what particular depth, etc. Better to ignore pressure and actual temp, especially given that the intentionally-lowballed estimate shows the ocean can absorb the entire atmosphere's carbon content nearly 500 times.

*found a reference in a paper to the solubility of CO2 at depth. At 2000 meters, CO2 solubility is in the range of 140 g/L. Of course, that drops pH to below 3.5, but the point is that solubility at depth is 100 times my lowballed assumption of solubility.

That's not to say it will, of course. It's an equilibrium. When you add to one side of it, the other side absorbs it until they reach equilibrium again. To get the oceans to saturation would require the atmosphere to be all CO2. But the point is that there is effectively no upper limit on how much the ocean can absorb, just on how fast it can absorb.

That came from one of your links in #633. I'll admit I put the numbers together myself, but they list fossil fuel CO2 output at 8.7 +/- 0.5 Pg per year and the uncertainty in the global carbon budget at +/- 2.1 Pg per year. Land use change contributed 1.5 +/- 0.7 Pg which I didn't consider, so it's closer to 20% than 25%

It's not likely there is a huge totally unknown process responsible, just that they haven't measured known processes accurately enough to have their contributions correctly calculated. Check the section listed as "Filling the gaps in the global CO2 budget".

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n12/full/ngeo689.html

As for references for the total solubility, there are none. That is a complete hypothetical on my part, as no one is seriously looking into the maximum possible solubility of CO2. People are looking into deep ocean solubility as a means of preventing emissions from entering the atmosphere, though. This link is an example, although they calculate how much could be dumped (effectively bypassing the absorbsion-rate issue I pointed out, getting the carbon into the ocean manually) without sinificant disruption of the water chemistry. As they point out, this would be highly dependant on carbonate reactions with the CO2 after it is in the ocean, so this is a minimum, not a maximum.

http://www.terrapub.co.jp/e-library/dod/pdf/0143.pdf

It's at least plausible, although it is far more likely the land component is responsible for any decline than the ocean system.

Depends. In an absolute sense, the ocean *is* absorbing more. It is absorbing less as a fraction of what we emit because our emmissions are scaling up faster than the absorbsion is. That is why they are discussing it in terms of absorbed fraction rather than absolute absorbed tonnage. What this means is if we reduced emmissions to a certain point the absorbed fraction would go up, until the atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial fractions are in relative balance again.

That was always a given. Any time you get into a "tipping point" argument, it requires you to assume the climate is an unstable equilibrium system, which there is no evidence to support.

Mostly the doomsday scenarios require massive changes in Antarctica. Simple thermal expansion can't account for even a single meter of sea level rise. Estimates of current sea level rise are about 3 mm a year for the past few decades, or 1.8 mm/y for the last century. Other data shows we are in a continuous sea level rising trend for the last few hundred to couple thousand years. Note those are specific locations not global mean.

http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_hist_few_hundred.html

On another note, here is more evidence that the MWP and LIA actually did exist, and were not just local phenomena. In actual peer-reviewed research papers, no less (some only have abstracts available).

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2001GL014580.shtml

http://earth.usc.edu/~stott/stott%20papers/Newton%20et%20al.,%202006.pdf

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g15qv13t1v12np00/

Also, there is http://www.co2science.org/. While it is clearly ideologically slanted toward the skeptic/denier side, it does list an impressive number of scientific papers that support the claim that MWP/LIA were not simply regional phenomena, and that the hockey stick's handle is not as straight as we are expected to believe.

We've increased CO2 production by about 20%, the oceans have warmed slightly, and the tropical rain forests are almost gone.  I'd say 1% per decade over the last fifty years is showing a remarkable lack of effect.  The 20% increase in uptake requirements, in combination with less soluble water and a lot fewer forests is supposed to have done more damage, thus the missing 25%.