Deutsche Bank (which is investing in windfarms) released a paper this month, where they claim to rebut arguments of skeptics. I’ll review their responses one by one.
Author makes no attempt to rebut the claim that temperatures have not risen since 1998.
Skeptics 1, Deutsche 0
Straw man argument. The complaint is that the data was often hidden and incorrect, and that collusion occurred to keep other points of view repressed.
Skeptics 2, Deutsche 0
Author makes no attempt to rebut the claim that climate models are inadequate.
Skeptics 3, Deutsche 0
Author tries to change the subject away from the lack of a mid-troposphere hot spot.
Skeptics 4, Deutsche 0
Author agrees that MWP may have been as warm as today, despite lower CO2 levels.
Skeptics 5, Deutsche 0
Author makes no attempt to counter the claim that CO2 lags temperature.
Skeptics 6, Deutsche 0
More later …..
The preamble of that paper says clearly:
“The paper’s clear conclusion is that the primary claims of the sceptics do not undermine the assertion that human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term thread. Indeed, the recent publication on the State of the Climate by th US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), analyzing over thrirty indiators, or climate variables, concludes that the Earth is warming and that the past decade was the warmest on record. Quantifying cause and effector projecting future conditions is always incomplete in a system as Earth’s climate, where multiple factors impact the observations. Conclusions are thus presented in terms of probabilities rather than dead certainties. This uncertainty is not always adequately explained in the public debate and, when discussed, can appear to be a challenge to the credibility of the field. However, uncertainty is an inevitable component in our understanding of any system which perfect knowledge is unattainable, be it markets or climate.
To us, the most persuasive argument in support of climate change is that the basic laws of physics dictate that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere produce warming. (This will be the case irrespective of other climate events.) The only way that warming can be mitigated by natural processes is if there are countervailing ‘feedback mechanisms’, such as cooling from increased cloud cover caused by the changing climate. A key finding of the current research is that there has so far been no evidence of such countervailing factors. In fact, most observed and anticipated feedback mechanisms are actually working to amplify the warming process, not reduce it.
Simply put, the science shows us that climate change due to emissions of greenhouse gases is a serious problem. Furthermore, due to persistence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the lag in response of the climate system, there is a very high probability that we are already hitting towards a future where warming will persist for thousands of years. Failling to insure against that high probability does not seem a gamble worth taking.”
So if Deutsche Bank is capable of learning, why are all these denialists not capable of the same learning. It is counterproductive to ignore the overwhelming data and facts. Counterproductive to our societies and counterproductive to oneself?
No one disagrees that the climate has been warming over the last 100 years. The problem is that warming has been much slower than forecast by the models.
The “basic laws of physics” show us that additional CO2 has minimal effect on temperature. Claims of catastrophic warming are based on highly speculative “feedbacks.”
Here are some graphs which show no “small errors” as you describe your own graphs when debunked as false.
http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/images/gtc2005.gif
http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/images/tempchart.gif
These two graphs prove that you are wrong in stating “CO2 has minimal effect”. CO2 levels have been rising by 30% since industralisation. The rising temperatures are going along with that and show us that that the temperatures are even accelerating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg
http://climate.nasa.gov/images/GlobalTemperatureGraphic1.jpg
And this graph shows you some feedback
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v224/Chiloe/Climate/predicted_extent0.png
Melting arctic ice causes further warming because white ice reflexes sun radiation much more than dark water.
Basic physics, reseach from specified scientist, tons of data, and you keep on denying the undeniable.
You just got another time debunked today => http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/1000-comments/#comment-1232
It’s time to stop spreading nonsense and calling it “Real Science”.
You are using old graphs. The fact that CO2 levels have risen above Hansen scenario A, yet temperatures have risen below scenario C – goes counter to your argument.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif
The new graph just confirms what I’m saying, and it reproduces the global downturn within the financial crisis. The trend is so obvious.
Your view will be abandoned soon when the facts are really kicking in in the US (unfortunately).
You can’t stop enlightenment. The church has been trying that for millenia. You can only hamper education with your counterproductive articles. The sooner we act to combat AGW the better for our children and their children. At the end we will be asked why we didn’t do anything earlier.
Global warming is a mindless diversion from the real problems our children will face – like $13 trillion National Debt.
This will be meaningless when you imagine the consequences of AGW.
You are distracting.
I see that you have an active imagination.
Maybe you haven’t seen what happened in Russia and in Pakistan this record (in temperature) summer.
You probably haven’t spoken to people in Greenland and in Iceland or in the Alpine states in Europe. Most of them would not take you for serious.
Real scientists are not takijng you serious anyhow.
It’s just that bad propaganda you’re spreading why I’m posting here.
Do you have any specific rebuttals to the content of this article? Your arguments are all over the map.
I posted them at the start of this conversation.
No you didn’t. Your first post (and all subsequent) were attempts to change the subject.
Untrue.
Read my first post.
You are flailing around all over the map. Find something specific, and try to focus on it.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/banks-want-to-make-money-part-1/#comment-1231
This article is a line-by-line discussion of the DB claims. If you have a disagreement with my analysis, please show specifically which one(s) of them I got wrong. You have made no attempt to do that so far.
Author makes no attempt to rebut the claim that temperatures have not risen since 1998.
Skeptics 1, Deutsche 0
Deutsche Bank: “The decade of 2000 to 2009 is the warmest since measurements have been made”
So if it is the warmest decade then the temperatures must have been risen since 1998.
[Response – No, the peak was 1998 and has been flat since. That makes 2001-2010 the warmest]
—
Straw man argument. The complaint is that the data was often hidden and incorrect, and that collusion occurred to keep other points of view repressed.
Skeptics 2, Deutsche 0
That complaint is not part of the question.
[Response – straw man means he is making up a claim and arguing against himself]
—
Author makes no attempt to rebut the claim that climate models are inadequate.
Skeptics 3, Deutsche 0
Deutsche Bank: “We do not only rely on models for our understanding of the effect of the greenhouse gases. Theory (…) and observations are the foundation of our ability to understand and asses and quantify forcing and impacts.”
It is not Deutsche Bank’s task to rebut or confirm climate models. They are a bank.
[Response – they did not rebut anything]
—
Author tries to change the subject away from the lack of a mid-troposphere hot spot.
Skeptics 4, Deutsche 0
“Mid-“troposphere was not the question.
[Response – yes it is, he just failed to mention it.]
—
Author agrees that MWP may have been as warm as today, despite lower CO2 levels.
Skeptics 5, Deutsche 0
Again something you added to the original claim of the ‘sceptics’: “despite lower CO2 levels”. So Deutsche Bank was not asked to explain how it was possible despite lower CO2 (earth orbit, distance to the sun, angular of Earth’s axis)
[Response – he agreed that MWP was just a warm which destroys his entire argument]
—
Author makes no attempt to counter the claim that CO2 lags temperature.
Skeptics 6, Deutsche 0
That’s the way you interpret the claim. Indeed it is an interaction between CO2 and temperature. Higher temperatures more vegetation more CO2 more temperature etc.
[Response, again – that is the claim and he didn’t rebut it.]
—
It is surely not Deutsche Bank’s task to prove climate change. They seemingly are convinced by the overwhelming evidence, data and facts that AGW is happening and that it is accelerating.
[Response – they shouldn’t dabble in things they don’t understand]
—
And as you’re challenging the whole paper, read my first comment again.
If you have specified questions that don’t occure in that paper, I’m sure Deutsche Bank will answer these if you ask them.
Charlie Williams says:
September 20, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Maybe you haven’t seen what happened in Russia and in Pakistan this record (in temperature) summer.
Mr. Williams, the Russian and Pakistan problem happened because of a blocking high pressure. the high got there thru a movement in the jet stream a Fossby wave I believe it is called. Even NOAA put out a statement on this and stated it had nothing to do with CO2 or AGW.
Please get your facts correct.
And I lived in Iceland for a year what’s your point.
So do you believe that AGW is just a hoax, mkelly?
Here is what Reuters reports on August 9, 2010:
—
Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia’s heatwave match predictions of extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists say.
This year is on track to be the warmest since reliable temperature records began in the mid-19th century, beating 1998, mainly due to a build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
“We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes,” said Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at WMO headquarters in Geneva.
“It is too early to point to a human fingerprint” behind individual weather events, he said.
Recent extremes include mudslides in China and heat records from Finland to Kuwait — adding to evidence of a changing climate even as U.N. negotiations on a new global treaty for costly cuts in greenhouse gas emissions have stalled.
Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs “shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist.”
The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.
“Global warming is one reason” for the rare spate of weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
DOWNPOURS
He pointed to the heatwave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. “We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom,” he said.
The weather extremes, and the chance of a record-warm 2010, undercut a view of skeptics that the world is merely witnessing natural swings perhaps caused by variations in the sun’s output.
Russia’s worst drought in decades has led to fires that have almost doubled death rates in Moscow to around 700 per day, an official said. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a grain export ban from August 15 to December 31.
Nearly 1,500 people have died in landslides and flooding caused by months of torrential rains across China, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said.
Baddour said one cause of a shift in monsoon rains in Asia seemed to be a knock-on effect of La Nina, a natural cooling of the Pacific region.
Scientists say it is impossible to pin the blame for individual events from hurricanes to sandstorms solely on human activities led by burning of fossil fuels that release heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Still, one study concluded that global warming had doubled the chances of heatwaves similar to a scorching 2003 summer in Europe, in which 35,000 people died. Those temperatures could not convincingly be explained by natural variations.
“It may be possible to use climate models to determine whether human influences have changed the likelihood of certain types of extreme events,” the U.N. panel of climate scientists said in its latest 2007 report.
That report said it was at least 90 percent likely that most warming in the past 50 years was caused by mankind, a finding questioned by skeptics who have pointed to errors in the report such as an exaggeration of the melt of Himalayan glaciers.
“Warming of the climate is likely to bring more events of this sort,” said Henning Rodhe, professor emeritus of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, of the Russian heatwave.
“But you can’t draw the conclusion that this is caused by global warming.”
Most countries agreed at a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen last year to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, a tough goal since temperatures already rose 0.7C in the 20th century.
The latest round of U.N. climate talks in Bonn, from August 2-6, ended with growing doubts that a global climate treaty could still be agreed as hoped by some nations in 2010 despite deep splits about sharing the burden of curbs on emissions.
U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has all but abandoned climate change legislation this year. The United States, the number two greenhouse gas emitter behind China, is the only major industrialized nation with no law to cut emissions.
—
And this is what the NOAA publishes:
—
What has been the role of human-induced climate change in the Russian heat wave of 2010? As indicated at the beginning of this report, globally averaged surface temperatures during the first 6 months of 2010 were the warmest since about 1880 based on NOAA and NASA analyses.
This current condition in global mean surface temperature is thus consistent with prior conclusions of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level”. The IPCC Synthesis Report goes on to state that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th Century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations”.
A comprehensive analysis of observed changes in extreme daily temperatures for the period 1901-2003 also reveals symptoms of a warming planet with a majority of stations over western Russia and eastern Europe (and also over Canada) showing significant increasing trends of warm daytime and warm nighttime temperatures.
Whereas this phenomena has been principally related to a natural extreme event, its impacts may very well forebode the impact that a projected warming of surface temperatures could have by the end of the 21st Century due to greenhouse gas increases.
As we learn from our 2010 experience what a sustained heat wave of +5°C to+10°C implies for human health, water resources, and agricultural productivity, a more meaningful appreciation for the potential consequences of the projected climate changes will emerge. It is clear that the random occurrence of a summertime block in the presence of the projected changes in future surface temperature would produce heat waves materially more severe than the 2010 event.
—
Of course it is too early to blame AGW fully for that, but all indicators point to it. The problem is if we wait until we have 95% proof it will be too late.
I take my ear from the rail before the train is running over my head.
Charlie williams says:
“The only way that warming can be mitigated by natural processes is if there are countervailing ‘feedback mechanisms’, such as cooling from increased cloud cover caused by the changing climate. A key finding of the current research is that there has so far been no evidence of such countervailing factors. In fact, most observed and anticipated feedback mechanisms are actually working to amplify the warming process, not reduce it.
Take a look at Dr. Roy Spencer’s recent paper about feedbacks:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Spencer-Braswell-JGR-2010.pdf
I agree, as you say, that from the laws of physics, more CO2 causing more warming. BUT HOW MUCH?
What evidence can you cite of positive feedbacks? Is it only because the climate models says so?
From the information I read, the CO2 increase is overcome by other negative feedbacks, such as mentioned in Dr. Spencer’s paper. What about solar influences, and discussion of how sun spot cycles, which DO correlate with temperature changes over longer periods of time.
Since CO2 does not lead temperature rise, it cannot be the driver of a temperature change.
But don’t believe me. Ask Dr. John Cristy. Ask Dr. Richard Lindzen. Ask Dr. Spencer. Ask Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. ( I could list more, but don’t want to clutter up the post)
DO your own homework on BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUE, just don’t take the Al Gore/Jim Hansen position that it is CO2, and that ‘the science is setttled’.
Martin C.
Since industrialisation the amount of CO2 (as one of the carbon gases) has risen by 30% due to burning fossil fuels. This still goes along with the rise in temperature.
I don’t need Al Gore. He is not a scientist. He tries to do a good job as a politician I suppose. I take it with David Archer (http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/lectures.html) for example. He is a leading capacity.
But I also think logically. Every year we burn the equivalence of some 500,000 years of carbon storage in the ground. Do you really not think that this is the reason for the dramatic rise (and about one degree Celsius is dramatic in Earth times) of the average temperature in a century? And as you can clearly see on this graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record_(NASA).svg) the temperature is accelerating. Is it positive feedback or is it the rise in emissions? The consequence is the same.
Ice reflexes most of the radiation, water absorbs it more.
What feedback impact you think has the dramatically shrinking arctic ice?
Charlie,
You are coming in to this conversation very late. I have addressed these issues extensively over the past few years. Please do some research.
The fact that CO2 has risen as temps have gone up in the last century and a half does not prove that C02 is the cause. The temps have been rising since coming out of the ‘little ice age’, long before man was generating a lot of C02.
The correlation of temperature increase vs C02 is very poor.
And no, 1 degree C is not an dramatic in the least. Look at the medieval warm period, and roman warming. See how much temp increase was there.
temperatures aren’t accelerating right now either. The temperature has been flat this decade (your link didn’t work, and at the moment, I don’t have one to point you to. I am sure Steve will though . . . ) .
The recent lows in Sea Ice area/extent aren’t dramatic either. The same occurred in the 1930s, and 1950s. There are navy documents that describe how little ice was there at those times. Let’s see what happens in the next 3 to 5 years. The minimums are increasing, since 2007.
I used to think globar warming was an issue, until the 4th IPCC report came out. With all the controversy I heard, I started doing my own research and learning.
I know I won’t convince you. I just suggest you do more research than just one person’s website.
Climate Audit, Watts up with that, Icecap.us, (and now this one) are just a few I visit on a regular basis.
Pingback: Banks Want To Make Money (Part 2) | Real Science