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Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016

economist.com

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Re: Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016

#241
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People usually admit guilt, and I don't think I have anything to do with those models, as some of those are older than me. Of course they were flawed. Models are always imperfect, but the important things is, are they useful? Well. Ultimately, we shall see the usefulness of these climate models, and those old models were useful to show some the extremes, huge swings, big effects. Solar cycles, big non-sea ice melts (…

There is so much in your reply, I am gratified! I can't possibly reply adequately, at least on this touchscreen phone. A few things: - agree suncycles/sunspots follow a general pattern, but by no means precise nor energy predictable. - I suspected static because of some of your conclusions, for example that earth as a closed system. It's not! Earth is slowly growing due to dust/meteor accretions, our orbit and spin a…

How do you know that we don't know enough about the Sun to predict the energy output?

Because we actually do know. There's solar magnetohydrodynamics and simple measurements, and measurements of other stars' energy output. And stars are pretty well behaved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_constant

The number of sunspots in the past have also been reconstructed, seems crazy, but it's calculable from Carbon-14 dating. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle#/media/File:Sunspo... )

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solar_cycle&oldid... see the "ACRIM gap" problem, which is about 0.045% difference ( http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/acrim-... ) in estimating the long term trend in solar energy output.

Oh, well, of course Earth is not a closed system, since the Sun is constantly feeding us with energy, but from a simple modeling point of view those are constants. From a CO2 aspect it's closed. (As CO2 does not leave to space, it's too heavy for that.) Just as the mass of Earth, length of a day, and year, and so on are pretty well understood, the variations in orbital position (the already mentioned Sun-Earth cycles).

A really bad and big volcano throwing ash in the air is a single event, we can model those too. And those short term ("The screamer is legitimately afraid" - yes, that complicates human matters a bit. Everyone is a stakeholder, yet with slightly different preferences, fears and views.

Yes, indeed, carbon quota/tax/etc is the right incentive to make the right decisions. If we'd provide cheap loans to help the transformation, we would be borrowing against our own future, and we can decide to pay those back in a 100 years, so it's not like we lack the resources and capacity to deal with major producers (power plants, electricity, 30% https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... ).

Re: Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so that chart is from 2003 - 2009 ... and that is evidence of what exactly? 6 samples of a multi century phenomenon and you are ringing an alarm bell ! the chart smacks more of searching around for a chart that shows a decline to prop up the "ice is in trouble narrative". ice extent ( recovered from 2008/12 ) , ice age ( recovered again from 2012 ), ice thickness ( recovered ), ice refreeze date ( recovered ), polar…

https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/longterm What is it going to take to convince you? Let's just wait a few more decades to be sure though. It would be a waste spending resources trying to prevent the demise of life on Earth when we didn't need to.

more than 40 samples. 200 samples at minimum.

"Long term" is misleading and relevant only to a space age start point where we launched satellites.

2000 year ice core samples:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/15/western_antarctic_me...

Longer records exist in ships logs showing that ships sailed through an ice-free arctic.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/03/goddard_polar_ice?pa...

According to official US Weather Bureau records (pdf) from 1922, there was open sailing very close to the North Pole that year. Anthony Watts unearthed this quote from the Weather Bureau:

"In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81 degrees in ice-free water."

So much lower extent than today.

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