AGW Denial, The Greatest Scam in History?

[petros]

NASA Peer-Reviewed Study Finds Low Sensitivity To CO2 Doubling: The UN's IPCC Global Warming Science Is Imploding

Read here and here. The infamous, never-before-seen, IPCC climate model prediction of scary, positive AGW-feedback has now been vanquished by scientific empirical research. NASA's researchers have just pushed the button of detonation, which will likely hasten the collapse of the IPCC's version of "climate science" upon itself.
Simply stated, the IPCC's Climategate scientists and computer models conjured up the scary prediction of a 3 to 5 degree Celsius temperature increase from a doubling of CO2, along with requisite, speculative, calamitous events of biblical destruction proportions. But now the latest research finds that CO2 doubling causes an increase of only 1.64 degrees, which is within the range of outcomes that skeptical scientists have been saying for decades.
Per physicist Luboš Motl, the NASA researchers, Bounoua et al., concluded the following:
"The article in Geophysical Research Letters combines their climate model with the feedbacks linked to vegetation, especially evapotranspiration - the sum of plant transpiration and evaporation from leaves...What is their result?...The resulting climate sensitivity attributed to the CO2 doubling from 390 ppm today to 780 ppm expected in 200 years from now (under business-as-usual) is just 1.64 °C - less than a Celsius degree per century or so. This figure is below 2 °C, the low end of the interval guessed by the IPCC." [Note: study's authors - L. Bounoua, F. G. Hall, P. J. Sellers, A. Kumar, C. J. Tucker, M. L. Imhoff (2010)]
From another publication comes this:
"A group of top NASA boffins says that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise...According to Lahouari Bounoua of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and other scientists from NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), existing models fail to accurately include the effects of rising CO2 levels on green plants. As green plants breathe in CO2 in the process of photosynthesis – they also release oxygen, the only reason that there is any in the air for us to breathe – more carbon dioxide has important effects on them...In particular, green plants can be expected to grow as they find it easier to harvest carbon from the air around them using energy from the sun: thus introducing a negative feedback into the warming/carbon process. Most current climate models don't account for this at all, according to Bounoua. Some do, but they fail to accurately simulate the effects – they don't allow for the fact that plants in a high-CO2 atmosphere will "down-regulate" and so use water more efficiently."

 

[Avro]

These astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy

As I see in threads on my articles, the online sabotaging of intelligent debate seems organised. We must fight to save this precious gift
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/georgemonbiot
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis...ertarians-internet-democracy#history-link-box
They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences. In the WikiLeaks punch-up the commoners appear to have the upper hand. But it's just one battle. There's a wider cyberwar being fought, of which you hear much less. And in most cases the landlords, with the help of a mercenary army, are winning.
I'm not talking here about threats to net neutrality and the danger of a two-tier internet developing, though these are real. I'm talking about the daily attempts to control and influence content in the interests of the state and corporations: attempts in which money talks.
The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing. An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations but which has in reality been organised. Anyone writing a comment piece in Mandarin critical of the Chinese government, for instance, is likely to be bombarded with abuse by people purporting to be ordinary citizens, upset by the slurs against their country.
But many of them aren't upset: they are members of the 50 Cent Party, so-called because one Chinese government agency pays five mao (half a yuan) for every post its tame commenters write. Teams of these sock-puppets are hired by party leaders to drown out critical voices and derail intelligent debates.
I first came across online astroturfing in 2002, when the investigators Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews looked into a series of comments made by two people calling themselves Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek. They had launched ferocious attacks, across several internet forums, against a scientist whose research suggested that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen.
Rowell and Matthews found that one of the messages Mary Murphy had sent came from a domain owned by the Bivings Group, a PR company specialising in internet lobbying. An article on the Bivings website explained that "there are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved … Message boards, chat rooms, and listservs are a great way to anonymously monitor what is being said. Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party."
The Bivings site also quoted a senior executive from the biotech corporation Monsanto, thanking the PR firm for its "outstanding work". When a Bivings executive was challenged by Newsnight, he admitted that the "Mary Murphy" email was sent by someone "working for Bivings" or "clients using our services". Rowell and Matthews then discovered that the IP address on Andura Smetacek's messages was assigned to Monsanto's headquarters in St Louis, Missouri. There's a nice twist to this story. AstroTurf TM – real fake grass – was developed and patented by Monsanto.
Reading comment threads on the Guardian's sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there's little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.
Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it's a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which appears to be the point.
The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and traditional progressives tend to be more willing to discuss an issue than these rightwing libertarians, many of whom seek to shut down debate.
So what's going on? I'm not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I'm suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.
For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to "manipulate the medium". This is what he told them: "Here's what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in 'Liberal books'. I go through and I say 'one star, one star, one star'. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in 'Movies on healthcare', I don't want Michael Moore's to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click … If there's a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That's how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance."

Over 75% of the funding for American Majority comes from the Sam Adams Alliance. In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance's money came from a single donation, of $3.7m. A group that trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes was, in other words, set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.
The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We're in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained. The question for all of us – the Guardian, other websites, and everyone who benefits from this resource – is what we intend to do about it. It's time we fought back and reclaimed the internet for what it does best: exploring issues, testing ideas, opening the debate.

• A fully referenced version of this article is available on George Monbiot's website

 

[petros]

Cancun climate change summit: glaciers increasing despite climate change

Glaciers in many parts of the world are increasing, according to a new United Nations report, despite climate change.


By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent in Cancun 11:57AM GMT 08 Dec 2010 54 Comments


Glaciers have grown in western Norway, New Zealand’s South Island, parts of Asia and the Tierra del Fuego in South America.

However, overall ice and snow on mountains has been retreating since the industrial age, according to scientists from around the world.

In some regions, it is very likely that glaciers will largely disappear by the end of this century, whereas in others ice cover will persist but in a reduced form for many centuries to come.


There have also been large losses in the northwest United States and southwest Canada followed by the mountains of Asia, including the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas, the Arctic and the Andes.
In Europe the rate of loss is slower. In fact glaciers have been putting on mass since the mid-1970s, but this trend was reversed around the year 2000.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a separate science body attached to the UN, was forced to admit that a previous report was wrong to claim the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035.
However the new report made clear that glaciers are being lost in the region, albeit on a slower scale.
Achim Steiner, head of the UN’s Environment Programme, said loss of glaciers can have a severe impact on millions of people. For example in the Himalayas the glaciers are responsible for drinking water and irrigating fields.
“Accumulation of science shows us a clear general trend of melting glaciers linked to a warming climate and perhaps other impacts, such as the deposit of soot, reducing the reflection of heat back into space”, he said. “This report underlines a global trend, observed over many decades now in some parts of the globe, which has short and long-term implications for considerable numbers of people in terms of water supplies and vulnerability”.
As more than 190 countries meet in Cancun for the latest round of UN climate talks, Mr Steiner called for action to stop global warming and reduce the risk from melting glaciers.

Greenland ice sheet flow driven by short-term weather extremes, not gradual warming: research

December 8, 2010
Sudden changes in the volume of meltwater contribute more to the acceleration – and eventual loss – of the Greenland ice sheet than the gradual increase of temperature, according to a University of British Columbia study.


The ice sheet consists of layers of compressed snow and covers roughly 80 per cent of the surface of Greenland. Since the 1990s, it has been documented to be losing approximately 100 billion tonnes of ice per year – a process that most scientists agree is accelerating, but has been poorly understood. Some of the loss has been attributed to accelerated glacier flow towards ocean outlets.
Now a new study, to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, shows that a steady meltwater supply from gradual warming may in fact slow down glacier flow, while sudden water input could cause glaciers to speed up and spread, resulting in increased melt.
"The conventional view has been that meltwater permeates the ice from the surface and pools under the base of the ice sheet," says Christian Schoof, an assistant professor at UBC's Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences and the study's author. "This water then serves as a lubricant between the glacier and the earth underneath it, allowing the glacier to shift to lower, warmer altitudes where more melt would occur."
Noting observations that during heavy rainfall, higher water pressure is required to force drainage along the base of the ice, Schoof created computer models that account for the complex fluid dynamics occurring at the interface of glacier and bedrock. He found that a steady supply of meltwater is well accommodated and drained through water channels that form under the glacier.
"Sudden water input caused by short term extremes – such as massive rain storms or the draining of a surface lake – however, cannot easily be accommodated by existing channels. This allows it to pool and lubricate the bottom of the glaciers and accelerate ice loss," says Schoof, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Process Modeling.
"This certainly doesn't mitigate the issue of global warming, but it does mean that we need to expand our understanding of what's behind the massive ice loss we're worried about," says Schoof.
A steady increase of temperature and short-term extreme weather conditions have both been attributed to global climate change. According to the European Environment Agency, ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet has contributed to global sea-level rise at 0.14 to 0.28 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2003.
"This study provides an elegant solution to one of the two key ice sheet instability problems identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their 2007 assessment report," says Prof. Andrew Shepherd, an expert on using satellites to study physical processes of Earth's climate, based at the University of Leeds, the U.K.
"It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, Greenland ice sheet flow might not be accelerated by increased melting after all," says Shepherd, who was not involved in the research or peer review of the paper.


Provided by University of British Columbia

Alarmist Doomsday warning of rising seas 'was wrong', says Met Office study


By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:13 AM on 6th December 2010

Alarming predictions that global warming could cause sea levels to rise 6ft in the next century are wrong, it has emerged.
The forecast made by the influential 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would have seen cities around the world submerged by water, now looks ‘unlikely’.
A Met Office study also rules out the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s conveyor belt, which would trigger Arctic winters in Britain like those seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow.

Only in the movies: A Met Office study rules out the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean's conveyor belt, which would trigger Arctic winters in Britain like those seen in the film The Day After Tomorrow (pictured)

However, the report says the IPCC was right to warn of a sea level rise of up to 2ft by 2100, and that a 3ft rise could happen.

The IPCC underestimated the danger posed by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the release of methane from warmer wetlands, the report adds.
Vicky Pope, head of climate science at the Met Office, said: ‘In most cases, our new understanding has reinforced results from the IPCC report – and the degree of impact is about the same.’
The 2007 analysis was criticised last year after it was found to have wrongly claimed Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
The Met Office analysis comes as world ministers fly to Cancun, Mexico, for the second week of UN climate change talks.



They will try to agree a treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow deforestation.
The talks, hosted at a Cancun luxury resort and golf spa famed for its beaches and water sports, have also attracted former deputy prime minister and keen diver John Prescott.

The new Met Office report is the first serious attempt to update the science of global warming since the publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment.
The new Government funded study, says the worst case scenario is now a one metre (3.3 ft) rise.

In 2007 the IPCC reported preliminary evidence that the Atlantic conveyor belt that brings warm water north and keeps Britain relatively mild for its latitude during winters was breaking down.

But more recent observations show the currents are stable.

Safe for now: The 2007 analysis was criticised last year after it was found to have wrongly claimed Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035

However, the report also has bad news. It says there is new evidence that the Arctic will become largely free of ice during most summers earlier in the century than the IPCC warned, and that the Greenland ice sheet is more likely to melt in centuries to come than previously thought.

It also warns that the release of methane from warming wetlands will be greater than thought in 2007 - leading to more global warming in the coming decades.

The Met Office report comes at the start of the second week of talks in Cancun designed to create a treaty that curbs greenhouse gas emissions, sets up a £60billion fund to help poor countries cope with climate change and slows down deforestation.

The 46 strong British delegation will be joined from today by Chris Huhne, junior Climate minister Greg Barker and Labour Peer Lord Prescott, Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly Rapporteur.

The former deputy prime minister, who was involved in negotiating the original climate treaty in Kyoto, says he will present a “Prescott Plan” to break the deadlock between rich and poor countries.

 

[mentalfloss]

RE: Nasa C02 Doubling - you should really get the whole picture instead of posting these incomplete articles from astroturf blog sites..

"Bounoua stressed that while the model's results showed a negative feedback, it is not a strong enough response to alter the global warming trend that is expected."

""This feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming," Bounoua said."

"Scientists agree that in a world where carbon dioxide has doubled – a standard basis for many global warming modeling simulations – temperature would increase from 2 to 4.5 degrees C (3.5 to 8.0 F).

What the research showed is that modeling the interaction with plants in that specific way reduced predicted warming by 0.3 degrees C. They started from a baseline model that was on the low end of the range of climate sensitivities (1.94 C for a doubling of C02). That's how they got their 1.64 degrees C per doubling.

Science for Beaktros - swallowing the spin.
-----------

RE: Your glacier size increasing diversion ..

Glaciers have grown in western Norway, New Zealand’s South Island, parts of Asia and the Tierra del Fuego in South America.

However, overall ice and snow on mountains has been retreating since the industrial age, according to scientists from around the world.

In some regions, it is very likely that glaciers will largely disappear by the end of this century, whereas in others ice cover will persist but in a reduced form for many centuries to come.


Cancun climate change summit: glaciers increasing despite climate change - Telegraph

-----

RE: Your nonsense on extreme weather changes taking precedence over climate for the Greenland ice sheet..

A steady increase of temperature and short-term extreme weather conditions have both been attributed to global climate change. According to the European Environment Agency, ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet has contributed to global sea-level rise at 0.14 to 0.28 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2003.

--
RE: The spin on the MetOffice revealing IPCC as 'doom-sayers'

Vicky Pope, head of climate science at the Met Office, said: ‘In most cases, our new understanding has reinforced results from the IPCC report – and the degree of impact is about the same.’
​

----

So, keep spinning Beaktros. It's a wonderful web of stinky science that you have spun. So easily fooled that you barely do the research it took me less than 10 minutes to debunk all that crap.

 

[petros]

"A group of top NASA boffins says that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise...According to Lahouari Bounoua of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and other scientists from NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), existing models fail to accurately include the effects of rising CO2 levels on green plants. As green plants breathe in CO2 in the process of photosynthesis – they also release oxygen, the only reason that there is any in the air for us to breathe – more carbon dioxide has important effects on them...In particular, green plants can be expected to grow as they find it easier to harvest carbon from the air around them using energy from the sun: thus introducing a negative feedback into the warming/carbon process. Most current climate models don't account for this at all, according to Bounoua. Some do, but they fail to accurately simulate the effects – they don't allow for the fact that plants in a high-CO2 atmosphere will "down-regulate" and so use water more efficiently."

 

[mentalfloss]

The negative forcing from plants causes a 0.3 degree change from IPCC models. So change the IPCC range of:

1.94 - 4.94

to

1.64 - 4.64

Wow. What a shocking difference!

 

[petros]

Is it their only **** up recently? Those are stil guesses aren't they? What have they guessed right so far?

 

[Skatchie]

Of course not. Every time that virtually any oversight is put into these idiots and their garbage it is found that they are misleading everybody or outright lying.

 

[mentalfloss]

"Bounoua stressed that while the model's results showed a negative feedback, it is not a strong enough response to alter the global warming trend that is expected."

Please actually read the source material for these mal-constructed articles and stop falling for the spin from the Daily Mail, Christian monitor and the American Dreamer, lol.

 

[petros]

You don't get it do you? What part of 1/2 the impact eludes you Flossie? What good are expensive cut backs when it will take 2 centuries at the current rate of PPM per year to hit the CO2 levels they CLAIM will send the globe into chaos? If it takes 200 years to hit an increase of 1.65 how many Millenium will it take to hit 4. whatever?



Point out where things go haywire according to Danish records since 1958

COI | Centre for Ocean and Ice | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut






One of the funniest ones yet.....

'Climate change could give you cancer': UN report warns of deadly pollutants from glaciers



By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 9:29 AM on 9th December 2010

Melting glaciers and ice sheets are releasing cancer-causing pollutants into the air and oceans, scientists say.
The long-lasting chemicals get into the food chain and build up in people's bodies - triggering tumours, heart disease and infertility.

The warning comes in new international study into the links between climate change and a class of man-made toxins called persistent organic pollutants.

Warning: Melting glaciers and ice sheets are releasing cancer-causing pollutants into the air and oceans, claim scientists

The study – due to be published next month – says rising temperatures and more extreme weather are increasing human exposure to pollutants around the world, including in Britain.
Scientists are concerned about Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POPs, because they last decades in the environment and accumulate in body tissue.
They include pesticides such as DDT and chemicals called PCBs used in electrical goods.

Donald Cooper, of the United Nations Environment Programme which published the report at the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, said melting glaciers and ice sheets were releasing POPs trapped years ago into the air and seas.

Extreme weather events – such as this year’s devastating Pakistan floods - were releasing banned pollutants which been stockpiled ready to be destroyed.

And higher temperatures were likely to increase the spread of malaria – and increase the use of sprays such as DDT which are harmful to people.

Mr Cooper said: 'Very small quantities of persistent organic pollutants get into the food chain but they accumulate in higher and higher levels as they go up the food chain. And the end of the food chain is us. We find them in mother’s breast milk and in blood.'
He added: ‘It is a problem in all parts of the world – they do not respect borders. They travel thousands of miles and they continue to build.
'In the past pollutants have travelled long distances and become trapped in ice in glaciers and ice sheets. But as the ice melts, or when temperatures go up, they are released back into the seas and atmosphere.

'It doesn’t matter whether you live in Kenya or Britain, the food goes everywhere around the world.'
The UN study found that levels of POPs measured in breast milk and blood were rising in parts of the world.
PCBs were banned after studies showed they mimicked sex hormones and were linked to cancer and infertility. They were once used in electrical goods.

The study also raises concerns about the increased exposure to DDT – an insecticide banned for use in farming, but still allowed to control disease spread by insects.

The authors are also concerned at PAHs, airborne pollutants produced by burning fuels.
Achim Steiner, the executive director of UNEP said freak weather events were releasing stockpiles of dangerous pesticides and other pollutants.
'The increasing frequency and severity of tropical cyclones and flood events are increasingly putting at risk stockpiles containing thousands of metric tonnes of obsolete POPs pesticides,' he said.
Higher temperatures can also make seals, whales and polar bars more vulnerable to pollutants, the report says.

The full report is due out next month.



Read more: 'Climate change could give you cancer': UN report warns of deadly pollutants from glaciers | Mail Online

 

[mentalfloss]

You don't get it do you? What part of 1/2 the impact eludes you Flossie? What good are expensive cut backs when it will take 2 centuries at the current rate of PPM per year to hit the CO2 levels they CLAIM will send the globe into chaos? If it takes 200 years to hit an increase of 1.65 how many Millenium will it take to hit 4.

Okay, now I know you're trolling since you clearly didn't read the part that 1.64 is the low end of the range. You know, that funny word... range.. it also means something kinda like a spectrum.. The low end is 1.64 and the high end is 4.64. A fair 'scientist' wouldn't base his results strictly on the low end of the range. That's something McExperts like you do, Beaktros.

I'm not sure why you enjoy lying to yourself but whatevs. If you don't mind the inevitable angina, go for it - not my problem.

 

[petros]

Okay, now I know you're trolling since you clearly didn't read the part that 1.64 is the low end of the range. You know, that funny word... range.. it also means something kinda like a spectrum.. The low end is 1.64 and the high end is 4.64. A fair 'scientist' wouldn't base his results strictly on the low end of the range. That's something McExperts like you do, Beaktros.

How long will it take to get to 4.64C at 2PPM per year?

Am I going to get glacier cancer and die?

 

[mentalfloss]

How long will it take to get to 4.64C at 2PPM per year?

Am I going to get glacier cancer and die?

Yes. You're going to get glacier cancer from a rate assumption.

But you'll probably die of an aneurysm first from the cataclysm of logic.

 

[petros]

Well how long until we double C02 @ 2PPM per year and get 1.65C - 4.65C? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years?

Psssst it's at 388PPM as we speak.

GASP 194 years!!!! Oh nooooooo! We'll all be dead from glacier cancer by then.

 

[Avro]

YouTube - 'Doubled CO2 means just 1.64 degrees of warming...' or maybe not.

 

[mentalfloss]

YouTube - 'Doubled CO2 means just 1.64 degrees of warming...' or maybe not.

Potholer jumps on this one. Ha!

I figured it had all the tell tale signs of McExpert-level bullsh!t, but didn't think he would comment. I should have thought, considering all the news articles that just quoted selected parts of the press release without reading the source material. How skeptical of the deniers, lol

 

[petros]

All the models are 100% accurate and we're all going to die from glacier cancer.

If there really was a crisis we wouldn't have sat on our hands for 30 years.

In the past 30 years, name ONE program that has been a benefit without a profit motivater.

When do they plan on releasing a correction since Youtube cleared it all up?

So lets get this straight. Pohthead claims they didn't account for other GHGs. Can Pothead prove they left out all other parameters in their models? Where in the paper does it say other GHG were tossed aside? The folks at Goodard never thought of that?

 

[Tonington]

Well how long until we double C02 @ 2PPM per year and get 1.65C - 4.65C? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years?

Psssst it's at 388PPM as we speak.

GASP 194 years!!!! Oh nooooooo! We'll all be dead from glacier cancer by then.

Way wrong. Just try some math.

This looks linear to you?

If you plot the annual growth rate in ppm/year, you do not get a curve without slope...that means that it's not increasing linearly. The slope is positive, which means exponential, and in fact the log transformed data is not increasing linearly either. CO2 is increasing faster than exponential. But, let's just go with exponential, as that much at least should be clear from the above graph. Hold a pencil to the screen if you can't bother with the math.

The linear fit of the annual growth rate at Mauna Loa gives us 2.55%. If you stick with that fit, which only has an r-squared value of 0.4007, then use the equation for exponential growth: N= No *e^(k*t), No is the original value, N is the value after a specified period of time t, and k is the growth rate. We can figure out how much we really would have after 194 years like Petros claimed. In 1959, it's about 315 ppmv. So, in the year 2153, the new value for atmospheric carbon dioxide at the current rate of growth is a staggering 44,300 ppmv. Of course we don't have enough fossil fuel in the ground to continue that rate of consumption for two centuries...

But we can figure out how long it will take to double from the current rate. So, take the 388 ppmv from Petros, re-arrange the equation, and you get a doubling time of approximately 27 years.

Is that a sensible result? Well, the literature values aren't that far off to our simple result here:

Abstract

Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere and is of considerable concern in global climate change because of its greenhouse gas warming potential. The rate of increase has accelerated since measurements began at Mauna Loa Observatory in 1958 where carbon dioxide increased from less than 1 part per million per year (ppm yr−1) prior to 1970 to more than 2 ppm yr−1 in recent years. Here we show that the anthropogenic component (atmospheric value reduced by the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been increasing exponentially with a doubling time of about 30 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution (

1800). Even during the 1970s, when fossil fuel emissions dropped sharply in response to the “oil crisis” of 1973, the anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide level continued increasing exponentially at Mauna Loa Observatory. Since the growth rate (time derivative) of an exponential has the same characteristic lifetime as the function itself, the carbon dioxide growth rate is also doubling at the same rate. This explains the observation that the linear growth rate of carbon dioxide has more than doubled in the past 40 years. The accelerating growth rate is simply the outcome of exponential growth in carbon dioxide with a nearly constant doubling time of about 30 years (about 2%/yr) and appears to have tracked human population since the pre-industrial era.


​

 

[Avro]

Potholer jumps on this one. Ha!

I figured it had all the tell tale signs of McExpert-level bullsh!t, but didn't think he would comment. I should have thought, considering all the news articles that just quoted selected parts of the press release without reading the source material. How skeptical of the deniers, lol

Shopping list Math pwnd again.

 

[Tonington]

Shopping list Math pwnd again.

Yup, the denialist parrots never think to check the math on the bloggers who make big claims about overturning all science on it's head...one would think that sort of claim requires more scrutiny. It's not even hard to check...