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I have put ecto 3 on my labtop and I am syncing the tags, etc.

[Listening to: You Don't Even Know Me from the album "Al Stewart: Greatest Hits" by Al Stewart]

Getting it wrong

by dhruvaraj
New dimensions in earth science uncovered by NZ blogger:
[Via Hot Topic]

Exciting new concepts in earth systems science are emerging from the fertile intellect of one of Hot Topic’s most diligent readers, Ian Wishart. Either that, or he’s demonstrated (again) that he doesn’t understand what he’s writing about. In this astonishing post, published yesterday, he considers something he calls the “feedback warming effect”, and attempts to use a new paper on carbon cycle feedbacks to support Monckton’s nonsense on climate sensitivity.

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It is so interesting watching commentators simply get things wrong. They often try so hard to make the facts fit their predetermined box that they completely lose track of just what is being discussed.

A paper comes out that provides some new numbers regarding how much CO2 is released from the planet (i.e. from the oceans, tundra, etc.) as the global temperatures rise. Previously there was a wide range of possible values. They simply narrowed the range of possible values, making the likely value lower than some had thought. But they also showed that the chances of tis positive feedback actually being negative is pretty small. There will be no “pleasant surprises in the form of more efficient uptake of carbon by oceans and land… that would limit the amplitude of future climate change.”

This is not the same thing as saying that the temperatures of the world will go up a certain amount if CO2 doubles; its sensitivity to CO2. The paper reflects natural processes that release CO2 with temperature rises. They are part of the normal carbon cycle.

The second can reflect the addition of CO2 from anthropogenic sectors, which are not part of the natural carbon cycle. The former discusses the CO2 release that is dependent on temperature. sensitivity describes how temperature is dependent on CO2 content.

As an author of the paper stated:

He said that if the results his paper were widely accepted, the overall effect on climate projections would be neutral.

“It might lead to a downward mean revision of those (climate) models which already include the carbon cycle, but an upward revision in those which do not include the carbon cycle.

“That’ll probably even itself out to signify no real change in the temperature projections overall,” he said.

This is because many of the models that have been included in reports do not use an added carbon-cycle feedback. So, if they now include this feedback, which has been shown to be positive, then those models will now show increased rates of temperature rise, an upward revision.

And one big thing to worry about – their work was really based on determining small CO2 amounts from small temperature changes. What happens if those results are not directly comparable to a world where there are large temperature changes? Are there new processes, such a release of large amounts of methane from the tundra or the oceans, that would appear that were not present in the data examined in this paper?

For me, the worry is that we enter a new regime, one that is not linearly comparable to extrapolating from previous trends but one where there is a step function UP to a new curve altogether. One where massive amounts of methane are released, vastly enhancing the positive feedback of CO2.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science, Sustainability

His piece of s*%t writing reminds me of Emily Litella

Is Ed Wallace’s Business Week column a “Crock of S*%t”?:
[Via Climate Progress]

The status quo media has a new anti-science columnist, Ed Wallace. He had a column yesterday in Business Week, “Is Global Warming a ‘Crock of S*%t?’ “ Here is a typical pearl of disinformation:

“Then, on the last day of 2009, Wolfgang Knorr of the Earth Sciences Dept. at the University of Bristol released new research showing the possibility that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has not risen in the past 160 years. Maybe he’s wrong, but at least he published his views for peer review in the Geophysical Research Letters.”

Not even close. As anyone with access to Google knows, that is not what Knorr said at all (see “Yes, the atmospheric CO2 fraction has risen at a dangerously fast rate in the past 160 years, reaching levels not seen in millions of years“). See also the single most famous chart of observational data in the entire climate arena (above), the Keeling Curve of “Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2).”

Knorr’s study merely suggested the fraction of human-emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere may have stayed flat for 160 years. It had a bad headline and confused many folks for a few days, but it was pretty quickly straightened out for anyone paying attention.

To write this piece and not even bother using Google for 30 seconds to fact-check it is a sign of utter disdain for the truth.

That Business Week doesn’t bother to fact check their columns puts them dangerously close to the non-existent standards of the Washington Post op-ed page, which has become a laughingstock (see “Will the Washington Post ever fact check a George Will column? and WashPost goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months).

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Denialists, and those who write for them, keep repeating the same misleading fabrications and outright lies long after they have politely been told the facts. The paper that is quoted showed that the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere that human processes has caused has not increased. NOT that CO2 has not increased.

It is obvious to anyone who has half a brain that CO2 in the atmosphere has increased. The question was what percentage of that increase was due to humans and if that percentage changed over time. The paper indicated that the percentage of the increase due to humans had not changed.

NOT that there had been no increase to begin with. Yet these guys keep writing the same crap. They are not interested in spending any time at all to get their facts correct. Because correct facts are not necessary at all for their arguments.

That is the easiest way to tell when someone is writing for denialists. They are like some bizarro Emily Litella, who when informed that the word is “violence” not “violins”, react by starting over again rather than saying “Nevermind.”.

Think this exchange on constant repeat:

Over and over again they start back jabbering about violins, no matter how often they are corrected. It becomes obvious that they are not speaking to the average person out there but to all the other Emily Litellas that ‘hear’ the world incorrectly just like them.

‘And they won’t drink milk.’ Facts be damned.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science, Sustainability