Cook goes full stupid and shoots himself in the foot.
He argues that Hansen’s predictions failed because humans have greatly reduced their output of GHG’s other than CO2. He also argues that CO2 is a minor component relative to the other man-made GHG’s.
the main difference between the various Hansen emissions scenarios is not due to CO2, it’s due to other greenhouse gases (GHGs) like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and methane (CH4), whose emissions have actually been below Scenario C (Figure 1). In fact, more than half of the Scenario A radiative forcing comes from non-CO2 GHGs.
Cook is claiming that the most important greenhouse gases have been reduced by more than 80% below what Hansen forecast.
Then he produces a graph showing that temperatures are below Scenario C.
This is what Hansen said about Scenario C :
“Scenario C assumes … that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000”
In summary, Cook is arguing that man has already cleaned up the most important GHG’s, and that temperatures are lower than if man had produced no GHG’s since the year 2000. We can conclude from his argument that the world has far exceeded its Kyoto GHG reduction targets, and that temperatures are rising very slowly.
Time for everyone to come home from Rio, and find a different way to repress and rob the citizenry.
Nice! But instead, the Rio Robbers Turned Jesus Green. That was certainly important. All these Uber Green Latin American countries are just waiting for the Climate reparations to come a rollin in from Uncle Sam.
Actually, a few years ago I heard Prof. Nicola Scafetta make a convincing case that CO2’s importance as a GHG was greatly overestimated, but that CFCs’ importance were underestimated. It sounds like Dr. Cook is coming around to that viewpoint! I do not think it’s stupid!!!
If you run radiative transfer models, you will see that H2O and CO2 are the only greenhouse gases of any significance
Dr. Scafetta said that’s wrong, and he made a convincing case. As I recall (and this was several years ago that I heard him speak about it), he took a commonly-used GCM and tweaked the weighting factors of various “forcings” — solar insolation, CO2, CFCs, etc., to find weightings that made the GCM best match the historical record. The best match came when the weighting of CO2 was rather drastically reduced, and the weightings of CFCs and solar isolation were increased.
The 12,000 fold warming capacity of CFC’s compared to CO2 (or whatever fantasy factor they write in the wikipedia) comes from the assumption that that stuff is supposed to linger in the atmosphere for ridiculously long times, while CO2 is only supposed to linger around for, depending on the warmist who claims it, 7 to 1000 years.
Cook deliberately ignores that.
No, the much greater warming effect of CFCs compared to CO2 primarily comes from the fact that there’s already so much CO2 in the atmosphere that we’re well past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to warming effect from CO2. MODTRAN calculates that less than 20 ppm of CO2 would result in fully half the warming that we get from the current ~394 ppm:
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/MODTRAN_etc.html
At the wavelengths that CO2 blocks efficiently, nearly all of the IR is already blocked. It is only at the fringes of the CO2 absorption bands that additional CO2 causes some small reduction in transparency.
But CFCs are at much, much lower concentrations, so small quanitities have a large effect at the wavelengths which CFCs efficiently absorb.
CFC’s contribute almost nothing to the greenhouse effect.
“daveburton says:
June 21, 2012 at 3:43 am
No, the much greater warming effect of CFCs compared to CO2 primarily comes from …”
Dave, could you point me to one, just one graphic on the web that shows the enormous IR absorption spectrum of CFCs compared to CO2. I find an enormity of images like this
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Absorption_Bands_png
comparing CO2 and H2O and what not but obviously none of the 10 million warmist scientists nor any of the 6 billion warmist fanboys has ever shown this enormous all-encompassing IR absorption of CFCs graphically.
The idea that half of all alleged antropogenic global warming comes about exactly because of the extreme scarcity of CFCs is, of course, a very interesting epicycle. So the scarcer a greenhouse gas is, the more frightening it is, as even a few molecules more could DOOM the planet.
One more reason to go full Khmer Rouge. Try to find an even scarcer atmospheric Greenhouse Gas ; that should be even worse.
DirkH, there are dozens of CFCs, and they all have different absorption spectra, so such a graph would tend to be rather cluttered. There are some studies, however, e.g.:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/w3l671g43413067t/
The lack of attention to CFCs from the consensus science crowd, which (at least until the last few days!) has been ’til-death-do-they-part wedded to the carbon-as-the-villain party line, doesn’t mean CFCs really don’t matter.
This is very good news, BTW! It seems that the irrational “concensus” that we have to “roll back the industrial age” (Lindzen’s phrase) to curb CO2 emissions, in order to stop catastrophic global warming, may at last be crumbling. Hallelujah!
Dave, I’m a bit skeptical as well. I believe CFC’s are also purported to adsorb UV as well. I’m wondering if they don’t also absorb in the visible spectra. In which case, there would be negligible difference. I’m not saying one way or another. I see no reason to search for a cause of a temp increase which is well within the limits of natural variations.
Dave, thanks, unfortunately it’s paywalled; I did find some other paywalled papers. And it was an honest question; I have only seen one thumbnail of one CFC yet and it didn’t look all that impressive re its emission lines.
When Scafetta tried to match forcings to a GCM, I think he wasted his time, as GCM’s are in my opinion so flawed (cloud formation, convective fronts, QBO, no biosphere, chaos arguments etc etc) that the 4th law of Stupidity gets invoked.
suyts, if any gas absorbs in the visible, you can see it in high concentrations. All the CFCs that I’ve encountered (R-11 old-formula Freeze-It, R-12 & R-22 refrigerants, aeorosol can propellants, etc.) have been invisible: colorless and completely transparent at visible wavelengths. So perhaps some CFCs, HCFCs and/or HFCs absorb in the visible, but I think most of them do not.
The abstract for this 1997 article indicates that, at least at that time, there was a lot of uncertainty about the absorption spectra of CFCs and their potential to act as GHGs:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1997/97JD01137.shtml
suyts says:
June 21, 2012 at 5:47 am
I don’t know the exact structures of all the CFCs, but if they absorb UV, it’s only very weakly or is below 200 nm where it only matters at very high altitudes. The reason is that they don’t have any double bonds and can therefore only undergo sigma->sigma* and n->sigma* transitions, which are high-energy transitions and therefore very low wavelengths. I could be wrong, however, so if someone can find absorption spectra, I’d like to see them.
-Scott
I’m not a scientist, but around 1976, before the AGW bandwagon got rolling, a friend of mine who was a scientist (now deceased) told me that CO2 would not contribute much to global warming because beyond a certain point, most of it would settle out. It would appear that 35+ years and a couple trillion dollars later, Dave Burton has confirmed his statement as being correct, thus confirming that the CO2 song and dance has been a scam from the start.
But now we learn there is a catch, that actually evil refrigerants are doing us in. I guess now we need a couple more trillion for further study. No wonder people don’t trust the “experts”.
Lol, So, it’s all pretty much fixed? What’s all that noise from Rio about?
They’re partying like it’s the end of the world…..again.
It turns out that DNA is a very good IR absorber.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030101040800428X
So we should urgently call in a giantic UN spamfest to debate international taxation of Western nations to limit the rise of DNA in the atmosphere. As the absorption spectrum of DNA is not saturated, even one extra molecule could turn the planet into a boiling hell.
Start with cutting down all trees.
Don’t forget that we need to redistribute the wealth and get some global governance and tax collecting mechanisms going !!!!
And punish the West for its tree-planting history.
CFC’s make up less than one part per billion in the atmosphere. If every human was a molecule of air, only four humans out of the entire population would be CFC’s.
It doesn’t take much coloring to noticeably tint a liquid or air, nor scent or flavoring to flavor it. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s use a liquid instead of a gas (because everyone is familiar with liquid food coloring), but the principles are the same.
Envision a straight pipe full of colorless, transparent liquid or gas, perhaps 2.5 inches in diameter and 4 inches long. (I chose those dimensions because it holds about 1 liter.) Let’s call the liquid “super-transparent water” (just like real water, but completely transparent). Add one drop of red food coloring to it, and shine a light through the length of the pipe, and you’ll see that, despite the very low concentration, it is noticeably reddish.
Now, one drop is about 0.06 gram, and the super-transparent water weighs 1000 grams, so the concentration is 0.00006 = 60 ppm. That’s obviously sufficient to absorb a lot of the non-red spectrum.
But with the atmosphere, we’re not looking through just a 4″ thickness of air. Looking straight up through the atmosphere is equivalent to looking through more than 5 miles of sea-level-pressure air.
So let’s make our pipe about 84,000 times longer, and put 84,000 times as much super-transparent water in it. Again, put ONE drop of red food coloring in it, and shine a light through it.
Instead of 60 ppm the concentration is now 60 ppm / 84000 = about 0.7 ppb (less than one part per billion).
Guess what? When we shine a light through the length of the 5-mile-long pipe, the liquid is just as reddish as it was when the colum was only 4″ long.
Do you see why even ppb concentrations of a gas could have a significant effect?
The atmosphere is largely opaque to LW radiation. Adding an occasional molecule of some GHG has essentially no effect.
Re: “The atmosphere is largely opaque to LW radiation.”
Yes, it is largely opaque to those wavelengths which are absorbed by CO2 and H2O vapor, because there is so much of those gasses in the atmosphere already. That’s why adding additional CO2 has little effect: the wavelengths it blocks are already blocked. But if you add even a very low concentration of a gas that is not already present in the atmosphere, but which absorbs some wavelengths that are not already absorbed by other, more plentiful, atmospheric constituents, you can make the atmosphere dramatically less transparent at those wavelengths.
I think I have just scientifically proven that trees and flowers cause summer by emitting pollen during spring. This is corroborated by circumstancial evidence: There are no trees in Siberia, nor are there any in Antarctica. It is highly unlikely that this is coincidental, as it happens near both poles.
Here we go again, excerpt from an article on CFCs and GHGs.
“A stepwise phase-out of HFCs is technically feasible since, according to Reimann, chemical and technological alternatives are already available. In the USA for example refrigerators are cooled using HFC-134a; in Switzerland the use of this substance in refrigerators is banned and climate neutral hydrocarbons are used instead.”
Science Daily 2/24/12
How many billions would this cost and just who benefits? Dupont was prize winner in the CFC ban.
This will be know as the “Age of Fanaticism.”
“Age of Fanaticism.”……. I’m going with the Age of Stupid.
and to prove this whole warmist thing is collapsing, the Arctic ice, as Mr. Goddard has repeatedly informed us this spring, is at normal 20th century levels.
Nice to see that you are back on wordpress
Why are you trying to change the subject?
Arctic ice is right where it always is in June.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi_ice_area.png
Or not…
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
Why are you trying to change the subject?
The climate and environmental sciences are a joke because there is far too much speculation and leaping to conclusions and not enough cautious analysis.
gofer makes an interesting point. Since air conditioning is much more widespread today than in 1988, and HFC’s are dangerous global warming gases, the forcing graph has omitted an important new forcing that appeared after 1988- the forcing from emitted/released HFC’s.
The most ‘dangerous’ greenhouse gas is, of course, the evil sulfur hexafluoride, one of the best dielectric gases known, used in large circuit breakers, HV equipment and some industrial processes. Even a few molecules of this gas can cause county-wide heatwaves, or snowsqualls., or something.
The 3rd world was denied a cheap source of refrigeration. The underlying theme in all these hoaxes is reduced population and everything they do seems to move toward that end. Witness the banning of DDT. Now they are trying to deny them a source of cheap, reliable energy. As Dr. John noted, a cheap and reliable inhaler was made more expensive and unreliable as well as harder to get, since now a prescription is required whereas an inexpensive OTC was available such as Primitine Mist.
I found the ProAir brand name inhaler to be unreliable. Proventil HFA and Ventolin HFA are both decent, yet expensive.
Primatene Mist is a different product – contains epinephrine instead of albuterol. I never liked it as it is not as safe, and in fact dangerous if the patient self-diagnoses asthma and is not properly managed with a steroid inhaler or other maintenance medication, or has occult coronary artery disease. I’m actually glad it’s off the market, though it did “work” by providing rapid temporary relief of bronchospasm.
There was no good reason to take generic albuterol off the market.
Requiring a prescription is a good thing for conditions that require a physician to monitor. Asthma is much more than just bronchospasm requiring a bronchodilator like albuterol or epi. Anything more severe than “mild intermittent asthma” needs testing (e.g. office spirometry or pulmonary function testing) and proper rx and titration of maintenance med(s).
dave burton
John Cook is not a doctor.
Thanks for the correction, Shub.
Say there daveburton, I would like to sell you several galons of diesel, based on your litre measurement. I could make a bundle, as 2and a half by four inches isn’t even close to being a litre.
You’re right. I goofed. The pipe should be about 4.5″ inside-diameter. Thanks for catching that.
And Arctic sea ice doesn’t just have area. It has volume too. Or it did. http://westcoastclimateequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Arctic-Sea-Ice-Volume-NS.gif
The thickness of Arctic ice is about the same as 1940
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/62428921
One report in a newspaper article of one set of soundings in a location that is not specified is not really very strong evidence that the “thickness of Arctic ice is about the same as 1940”, is it Steven?
Damn Russians – alweays lying about something. What data source do you prefer for 1940 ice thickness?
BTW – if you believe PIOMAS, the Arctic will be ice free in 2015.
I did not say the Russians were lying. I said “One report in a newspaper article of one set of soundings in a location that is not specified is not really very strong evidence that the “thickness of Arctic ice is about the same as 1940”
This is a data point taken in 1940 and reported by people at the time – without an agenda. This is a much better data point then Hansen’s altered temperatures from the 1940s, which no longer match what the original source wrote down.
Sorry?? You’ve made a jump from ice thickness data to temperature data.
If you can’t see the analogy, then you must not be very intelligent. Is that the case?
What data do you prefer I use?
No, I am quite intelligent. Intelligent enough to notice that you are inclined to invest a larger amount of significance in one interesting but limited scrap of data, and also that you are inclined to resort to the ad hominem argument. Perhaps you wish me to go away. If so, just write down the words Go Away, and I will happily do so.
Maybe CFC’s act in the atmosphere in a homeopathic-like way. They have an effect in infinitely small concentrations.
Thanks to banning CFCs, you can’t get a cheap generic albuterol rescue inhaler for asthma. CFCs in medical products is <<1% of all CFCs, but drug companies gladly replaced them with hydrofluoroalkanes (HFA) and the price went up an order of magnitude (brand name).
The same tactics are being use in the AGW hoax as was used in the Ozone hoax. This was published in the 90’s but it applicable to the AGW scare and they are using the same MO.
“The most extensive study to date of UV-B radiation at the surface is that conducted by Joseph Scotto and his collaborators at the National Cancer Institute. The study, published in the Feb. 12, 1988, issue of Science, presented evidence that the amount of UV-8 reaching ground level stations across the United States had not increased, but in fact, had decreased between 1974 and 1985. Instead of rejoicing at the results, the promoters of the ozone depletion scare saw to it that the network of observing stations was shut down, by cutting its funding (less than $500,000 out of more than $1.75 billion in research funds to study “climate change”).
One of the recent attempts to contradict the Scotto study was an article by J.B. Kerr and C.T. McElroy, published in Science magazine in 1993, claiming an upward trend in UV radiation over Toronto. The results were front-page news intemationally, but when it was soon demonstrated by other scientists that the so-called trend was based on faulty statistical manipulation this reverse got little publicity. The entire “rise” in UV was based on readings taken during the last 3 days of five years of measurements!
A correct statistical analysis showed that the trend in UV was zero that is to say, the amount of UV had neither increased nor decreased over the five-year period). Interestingly enough, the Canadian study had been rejected for publication by Nature. At the time the Canadian paper was submitted to Science, F. Sherwood Rowland was the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science. According to knowledgeable sources, Rowland rammed through the publication of the paper despite its obvious errors.”
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/ingles/crista.html
More background history and timeline of ozone scare:
http://www.american_almanac.tripod.com/cfc.htm
Correction:
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/cfc.htm
The fox is still guarding the henhouses:
” …in 1992, many veterans of the ozone wars sit in positions of scientific power. Ozone depletion theorist F. Sherwood Rowland, for example, is the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of Science magazine. Another ozone warrior, Ralph Cicerone, is president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), one of the world’s leading scientific societies. AGU publishes EOS, the Journal of Geophysical Research, and Geophysical Research Letters, the primary journals through which many scientific theories, especially global warming and ozone depletion, are debated.
Other leading ozone depletion theorists are also in top posts with command power over scientific journals and associations, and, ultimately, public opinion. In this intensely political situation, the doomsday scientific establishment thus decides who is published in the literature and who receives grants–issues that can make or break a career. The doomsday scientists have received a bonanza of research grants, titles, perks, positions, and much more, as a result of the publicity received by their theories. At the same time, the scientists who have had the courage to oppose the doomsday theories in public have had their papers rejected for publication, their grant money discontinued, and in some cases, have even lost their research and teaching positions. ”
http://www.american_almanac.tripod.com/cfc.htm
Correct URL
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/cfc.htm
CO2 has little effect? Well then Mr Cook, we can forget about those carbon credits, eh?
Read what Cook actually wrote here, http://www.skepticalscience.com/simply-wrong-solheim-hansen-88.html .
His most important conclusion is that Hansen’s scenarios (a) underestimated the amount that the CH4 component would be reduced, and (b) that short – term climate sensitivity is 3*C, less than the value that Hansen used in 1988.
3*C is in line with other estimates of climate sensitivity, produced by many other different lines of inquiry. This is not consistent with the AGW sceptic hypothesis, which requires a very low value for climate sensitivity.
@Richard: “This is not consistent with the AGW sceptic hypothesis, which requires a very low value for climate sensitivity.”
Roy W Spencer has published research which shows that cloud feedbacks are negative (based on satelite measurements), thereby producing an insensitive climate (0.5C temperature increase for a doubling of CO2). You can watch his presentation of that research here (part 1 of 2):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos49g1sdzo
Hi LLap
Thanks for engaging.
It is good to notice that Roy Spencer (RS) accepts that doubling of CO2 concentrations means a 1*C rise in earth temperature. Basic textbook physics.
First, a CS of 0.5*C cannot explain the atmospheric response to Pinatubo: http://greenerblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/can-roy-spencer-account-for-pinatubo.html
Second, whatever the net feedback effect of cloud, whether strong negative as Roy claims, or weak positive as Dressler claims, the effect is going to diminish in a warming planet:
http://greenerblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/cloud-cover-decreases-in-warming-planet.html
3rd, RS is alone in believing that clouds very randomly, rather than being influenced by ocean temperatures.
4th RS’ model (yes, he used a model) has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, (ocean current cycle) and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave.” In short, it uses a partial, not a complete view of the data.
5th , he does not supply error margins – and when his figures are reworked with error margins, his discrepancy vanishes.
6th, even if he is granted a negative feedback from clouds (and see 2nd above) there are also positive feedbacks from water vapour, albedo, soil CO2, and methane. The latter two are not yet integrated into models, since they are not yet quantifiable, as I understand.
7th there is the matter of the several other independent lines of inquiry which all point to a CS in the region of 3*C. That really is the clinching argument. When many diverse and independent lines of inquiry point to a figure, it is pretty clear that a single line of inquiry pointing to a different figure, especially if it does not even supply error margins, is not going to overthrow the main figure.
Thanks again for engaging.