Peer Reviewed Study: CO2 warming effect cut by 65%

[trbixler]

"Peer Reviewed Study: CO2 warming effect cut by 65%, climate sensitivity impossible to accurately determine"



"Any competent researcher involved with the science behind climate change will admit that CO2 is far from the only influence on global climate. It has long been known that short-lived greenhouse gases and black-carbon aerosols have contributed to past climate warming. Though the IPCC and their fellow travelers have tried to place the blame for global warming on human CO2 emissions, decades of lies and erroneous predictions have discredited that notion. For anyone still clinging to the CO2 hypothesis, a short perspective article on the uncertainty surrounding climate change in Nature Geoscience has put paid to that notion. It states that not only did other factors account for 65% of the radiative forcing usually attributed to carbon dioxide, but that it is impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity given the state of climate science. "

wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/12/peer-reviewed-study-co2-warming-effect-cut-by-65-climate-sensitivity-impossible-to-accurately-determine/

[steve]

The title of this thread is inaccurate as the 65% figure is not new. Add up the forcing from CH4, NOx, halocarbons, black carbon and water vapour from CH4 and you will get about 65% of the CO2 forcing:

[trbixler]

I realize that the pressure is immense at this time and I too questioned the title of the article, but in the interest of transparency I directly quoted it from the linked source. I am sorry if this has caused confusion for any one here but with the immense pressure of the issues of the day I feel that a direct quote is better than an adjusted statement.

[socold]

Thanks steve but I didn't really need another reason to not take We-Use-Wishful-Thinking seriously.

This is the "paper". It's a 2 page commentary::
xweb.geos.ed.ac.uk/~dstevens/publications/penner_ngeo10.pdf

First citation is to Hansen 2001. WUWT must love that.

The relevant part where the 65% has come from is:
"Of the short-lived species, methane, tropospheric ozone and black carbon are key contributors to global warming, augmenting the radiative forcing of carbon dioxide by 65%. Others — such as sulphate, nitrate and organic aerosols — cause a negative radiative forcing, offsetting a fraction of the warming owing to carbon dioxide [6]"

What's reference 6?

Forster, P. et al. in IPCC Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (eds Solomon, S. et al.) 129–234 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).

In other words the 65% claim is referenced as coming from Chapter 2 "Changes in Atmospheric Constituents
and in Radiative Forcing" of the 2007 IPCC report. Steve's image is from Page 136.

You really have to read the WUWT article in light of this information to see what complete toss it is. But then it does come from icecap.us.

[icefisher]

Oct 12, 2010 21:42:54 GMT socold said:

In other words the 65% claim is referenced as coming from Chapter 2 "Changes in Atmospheric Constituents
and in Radiative Forcing" of the 2007 IPCC report. Steve's image is from Page 136.

You really have to read the WUWT article in light of this information to see what complete toss it is. But then it does come from icecap.us.

Well its at least consistent with 65% of the warming your model takes away from the IPCC projections for the next couple of decades huh Socold?

[steve]

The problem is the title given by WUWT is so utterly misleading that no useful discussion then takes place.

The article is a commentary which is different from a peer review study.

The 65% number is, as said, taken from the IPCC report and is indeed cited as such.

And we already know about the difficulty of assessing climate sensitivity.

The interesting aspects of the commentary are completely lost by the way the article is presented.

[graywolf]

theresilientearth.com/?q=content/estimated-co2-warming-cut-65#comment-1719

"Mea culpa
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 16:58.
I may well have misinterpreted the authors' meaning and overestimated the reduction of CO2 driven forcing. Please note that I post two or three columns a week, reviewing data from dozens of papers—I'm bound to make an ocasional error in interpritation. Not that this error was a gross one, I had the impact correct and was within an order of magnitude :-) "

============================================

Hmmm, very interesting and very wrong. Strange he didn't change the 'title' once he'd been corrected? ....and that We Use Wishful Thinking also want to use it.....still.

[hunterson]

Oct 13, 2010 10:06:36 GMT graywolf said:

theresilientearth.com/?q=content/estimated-co2-warming-cut-65#comment-1719

"Mea culpa
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 16:58.
I may well have misinterpreted the authors' meaning and overestimated the reduction of CO2 driven forcing. Please note that I post two or three columns a week, reviewing data from dozens of papers—I'm bound to make an ocasional error in interpritation. Not that this error was a gross one, I had the impact correct and was within an order of magnitude :-) "

============================================

Hmmm, very interesting and very wrong. Strange he didn't change the 'title' once he'd been corrected? ....and that We Use Wishful Thinking also want to use it.....still.

If only an official org, like, say the IPCC, or Mann, or Hansen, would admit to errors as fast and honestly.

[steve]

He has only corrected one of his many errors which was an error I didn't actually notice as the first mention of the 65% number in the article has it correctly:

It states that not only did other factors account for 65% of the radiative forcing usually attributed to carbon dioxide...

He has corrected the quote that includes his second mention of this figure

If other species accounted for 65% of historical warming that leaves only 35% for carbon dioxide. This, strangely enough, is in line with calculations based strictly on known atmospheric physics, calculations not biased by the IPCC’s hypothetical and bastardized “feedbacks.”

But of course continues to ignore the fact that this is an IPCC figure and has absolutely nothing to do with feedbacks.

It's a sorry state of affairs when someone who is writing two or three articles a week and claims to read dozens of papers still completely misunderstands what he is arguing against.

[trbixler]

Oct 13, 2010 12:42:11 GMT hunterson said:

Oct 13, 2010 10:06:36 GMT graywolf said:

theresilientearth.com/?q=content/estimated-co2-warming-cut-65#comment-1719

"Mea culpa
Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman on Tue, 10/12/2010 - 16:58.
I may well have misinterpreted the authors' meaning and overestimated the reduction of CO2 driven forcing. Please note that I post two or three columns a week, reviewing data from dozens of papers—I'm bound to make an ocasional error in interpritation. Not that this error was a gross one, I had the impact correct and was within an order of magnitude :-) "

============================================

Hmmm, very interesting and very wrong. Strange he didn't change the 'title' once he'd been corrected? ....and that We Use Wishful Thinking also want to use it.....still.

If only an official org, like, say the IPCC, or Mann, or Hansen, would admit to errors as fast and honestly.

At least they left the article for you to debate unlike Wiki, remember no pressure here.

[trbixler]

Well now its that CO2 is the thermostat or is it? But what do you postulate when the "climate" does not respond to your model, of course increase the db on your weather pronouncements.

"Does CO2 Drive the Earth’s Climate System? Comments on the Latest NASA GISS Paper"

"OUR ASSUMPTIONS DETERMINE OUR CONCLUSIONS

From what I can tell reading the paper, their claim is that, since our primary greenhouse gas water vapor (and clouds, which constitute a portion of the greenhouse effect) respond quickly to temperature change, vapor and clouds should only be considered “feedbacks” upon temperature change — not “forcings” that cause the average surface temperature of the atmosphere to be what it is in the first place."

www.drroyspencer.com/2010/10/does-co2-drive-the-earths-climate-system-comments-on-the-latest-nasa-giss-paper/

[poitsplace]

The problem is that once again these "scientists" are too damned stupid to realist that if you remove the CO2 from a model that uses CO2 as a thermostat...it will show temperature changes. It is ALWAYS ASSUMED FIRST that CO2 is the driver. I have nothing but contempt for these useless "scientists".

[socold]

The problem is once again that the climate models are showing what our understanding of the physics shows. Thus it is not an assumption. There is no alternative physics that doesn't lead to the Earth freezing up if all the co2 is removed from the atmosphere.

[trbixler]

Something about conditioned response in the experiment. Pavlov knew that when he increased the CO2 that the dog would bark. He did not realize that one of his assistants would feed the dog just as he introduced the CO2. In fact he sometimes just said the word. Of course we 'know' the response of the model. Of course Pavlov was doing a real experiment and I am sure that he did not fiddle with the CO2.

oops
"Such a result is not unexpected for the GISS model. But while this is indeed an interesting theoretical exercise, we must be very careful about what we deduce from it about the central question we are ultimately interested in: “How much will the climate system warm from humanity adding carbon dioxide to it?” We can’t lose sight of why we are discussing all of this in the first place.

As I have already pointed out, the authors have predetermined what they would find. They assert water vapor (as well as cloud cover) is a passive follower of a climate system driven by CO2. They run a model experiment that then “proves” what they already assumed at the outset.

But we also need to recognize that their experiment (model adjustment) is misleading in other ways, too. '

[ZL4DH]

They just don't get it do they and only one error in the IPPC report what a laugh.

www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/oct/15/climate-change-bias-debate

* Climate change scepticism
How fear of bias dominates the climate change debate

Climate sceptics say they want science free of politics, yet their campaigning frames discussion


Climate change science has had a turbulent year. The media and blogosphere feeding-frenzy after the release of researchers' emails, dubbed "climategate", and the revelation of an embarrassing error in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, unnerved many. Yet, as official investigations concluded that there is no conspiracy by researchers, the published results are robust, and the IPCC sometimes struggles because it employs only a handful of people, controversy has receded. So, responses to the first major post-climategate science story, that a weaker sun may actually warm the Earth's surface, the opposite of what has been accepted until now, can help us understand the legacy of the attacks on climate science.