Posts by Luke Silburn

Warmest Year

@AC, nice bingo snark but your credibility takes a hit when your snark is easily debunkable. The GISS correction which you claim moves the warmest year to 1934 was for the temperature of the continental US only - not the entire globe.

In any case GISS and NCDC cite 2005 as the top year for global temperature in their respective series - which rather undercuts the 'global warming stopped in 1998' talking point currently doing the rounds in the denialist echo chamber.

Regards

Luke

Nice Rhetorical Sidestep There

El Rupester said - "Prove me wrong: give me a fact or two."

To which Dodgy Geezer replied:

"Well, I suppose the most obvious fact would be the published world temperatures. These are now plunging quite sharply, as we seem to have gone over the top of this cycle and started heading downwards. Have you seen the latest June MSU figures? We will have more sea ice this year than last. We are colder than 1988, when Hansen began his scare stories."

And how exactly are these facts germane to the question of whether CO2 in our atmosphere has reached a saturation point for IR absorbtion? Which was the point under discussion after all.

Your claims of recent cooling are trumped by the multi-decadal warming trend in the observational record. Come back when they show up in the five-year mean and we can talk. Until then they are just a run of below trend observations - probably linked to the moderately strong La Nina that has been in force for the past year or so.

Saturation as your proposed mechanism for why additional CO2 is having no effect failed at the most preliminary reality check, so please try again. Why isn't the additional CO2 in our atmosphere absorbing the IR as predicted by physics? Or alternatively, where is the absorbed IR energy going if it isn't showing up in the temperature data?

Regards

Luke

Further Questions

I'd just like to second the comments that John Philip posed a few posts up and ask for some answers to the points raised. I'm late to this particular party, so his post pre-empted most of the problems I had with the article as I read it.

Further to his questions however, I would like to know:

1) Why did the author not use consistent axis scales for the four graphs at the head of the article?

2) In the eighth paragraph, the author mentions 'red below green' and 'red above green' in a couple of places. What is he referring to here? None of the graphics in the article seem to correspond with the description given in the text.

Beyond those minor queries, I'd like to mention one aspect of the wider issue which is being overlooked by many commentators but which is touched on by the reference to the recent Nature article in the first paragraph - namely that the various datasets (HadCRUT, NASA, the satellites etc) are all attempts at measuring average air temperatures at (or near) to the earth's surface. The surface air temperature (SAT) is a useful metric of course, primarily because it's the piece of the of the wider climate system where we humans live, but it is only a small piece of the overall system and while we can use the trends in the surface record as a shorthand for the total process this useage can be a false friend if we're not careful.

This is what seems to be happening with the reaction to the Keenlyside article, everyone seems to be fixated on the decadal projection they have made for SAT as though a decade of sideways-moving SAT means that warming is no longer happening, but this research does nothing to challenge the radiative model we have for the various GHGs (indeed the article's authors mention that they included GHG forcings in their model runs) so the authors think the warming effect will still occur, it's just that they don't expect the heat to show up in the SAT for a few years.

All the stuff about 'Global Warming On Hold For A Decade' only makes sense if you conflate the surface record with the whole system (which is where the false friend takes you), but of course the air temperature isn't the whole system and anyone who has a passing acquaintance with thermodynamics will spot that for the air to be cooled then the excess heat has to have warmed something else up. In this case the 'something else' is almost certainly the ocean - which constitutes something like 90% of the total heat sink for the climate system and, incidentally, is something that we don't measure at all well.

If the heat moves from something that is relatively well monitored to something that is barely monitored at all then to state that 'global warming has stopped' is really very badly mis-stating the actual situation - in reality the warming is still happening but now it's dropped out of sight.

Regards

Luke

Clearing The Confusion

From the GLA website:

"The highest CO2 emitting cars, which will be charged £25 to drive in the zone are those in Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) Band G and equivalent (including cars registered pre 2001 with engines over 3,000 cc). These are the vehicles that emit over 225g of CO2 per kilometre."

So no, Livingstone hasn't stabbed the banger-driving poor in the back and about 30 seconds of googling would have turned that up, but of course it's so much more *satisfying* to rant isn't it?

@sundry 'London transport is broken' posts

In many ways I agree, but you can't blame Livingstone for that - he's only been in post for a few years and London's transportation woes have been decades in the making. When it comes to funding infrastructure renewal his hands are tied by the Treasury, so it's hardly surprising that he's pulling as hard as he is on those levers that *are* available to him.

@James

If your commute takes 2+ hours by public transport and only 25 minutes by car then I suggest that you take a taxi until your eye injury is healed.

Regards

Luke

It's Not About Responsibility It's About Consequences

"Since when is the US responsible for feeding the world? Seriously."

Seriously? The US isn't responsible (as in 'obliged') but they are *responsible* (as in, 'foreigners have imported a lot of US-grown food in the past').

If the US has less food to trade to foreigners (because it's being brewed up into SUV-juice) then it follows that foreigners will have to grow their own to make up the difference (or starve, but that's generally not a good policy option to adopt). Furthermore, if the food that foreigners now grow (to replace the US imports they can no longer get) comes from newly cleared land then it is reasonable to count the resultant CO2 emissions as part of the 'whole system' cost for the decision to devote Iowan corn to SUV-juice rather than exporting it for tortilla flour or whatever.

It's not America's *fault* that foreigners clear forests or drain peat bogs to grow food, but it's an unintended consequence of the biofuels policy the US has adopted.

Regards

Luke