18 October 2014

AGW is already falsified

The global atmospheric warming pause, going on 18 years now, together with the lack of sea level rise acceleration, has already falsified the AGW hypothesis.


There are dozens of explanations for the warming pause.


Pause choc anyone?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/12/friday-funny-52-excuses-to-blow-your-carbon-diet/
(courtesy Cartoons by Josh)

My explanation for the "pause" is: that carbon dioxide is an insignificant warmer. And that's what I call the "best" explanation too.

What Twitterer and climate activist Dr Manjana Milkoreit says the "best" explanation is, is that the "missing heat" is going into the ocean.
To which I retorted:
But the facts are against this hypothesis as well. The main way ocean heat uptake is measured is sea level rise. 22,000 years ago changes in earths orbit, or perhaps other unknown mechanisms, caused the huge ice sheets to melt.


This gave rise to the fast sea level rise depicted in this graph from 15,000 to 7,000 years ago.


About 7,000 years ago substantial land ice melt ceased and the rise of the oceans began to be dominated by thermosteric rise, where ocean rise is due to thermal uptake. Hence sea level rise is a measure of ocean heat uptake since 7,000 years ago, and especially so since 3,000 years ago.

Well, unfortunately for Manjana and her fellow AGWers, there has been no acceleration in sea level rise, which is thought to be a fairly steady 1.3mm - 1.8mm a year.



There are claims of a higher rate of rise of up to 3.2mm/yr from satellites. But these are tweaked somewhat by the dubious and arbitrary Global Isostatic Adjustment.
 
The rationale for the upward tweak of the Global or Glacial Isostatic Adjustment is that lands are rising and ocean beds are falling due to more seawater making seas heavier, pushing the sea floors down.  Also, that rising land is making sea level rise seem a bit less than it "really" is.

Well, wouldn't the melting of earth's ice sheets make earth as a whole get bigger, springing back due to weight of ice sheets being lifted?

Perhaps there is merit in this GIA argument.  The problem arises in determining how much to adjust things by. 

We've only been measuring by satellite for a few years, and even then changes in gravity, used to measure sea and land level rise, could be due to several factors superimposing -- it's hard to separate these factors.

Rather like to often touted "2C limit" to global warming, the GIA number is likely mostly plucked out of thin air.
 
In any case reality is "wrong", and needs to be adjusted (by small 0.3mm/yr boost). It's just an amazing coincidence that all tweaks to official climate records always support, and never detract, from the AGW narrative.

Another tale of upward tweaking:
 
Satellite sea level data has been "adjusted" upward by 34% over past 9 years alone



And see:

Global sea level rise from tide gauges is half of that claimed from satellites. Which is right?

Steven Goddard weighs in with a relevant rant here:

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/the-global-isostatic-adjustment-scam/

And more doubt over satellite measurements of sea level rise courtesy of Goddard:

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/data-tampering-with-sea-level/

In fact there is plenty of reason to suggest there's been a slow down in sea level rise:

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/new-paper-finds-sea-level-rise-has.html

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/new-paper-finds-global-sea-levels-rose.html

Even the upwardly tweaked satellite data is showing a slowdown from around 2004:

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/satellite-altimetry-rate-of-sea-level.html

 

No acceleration and maybe a slow down in sea level rise:



See also:

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/new-paper-finds-sea-level-rise-has.html

For the last 3,000 years the sea level rise has been fairly steady and almost exclusively from thermosteric and halosteric rise. And of those two, thermosteric rise is the vast majority, as depicted in this graph:

 Halosteric rise (rise caused by less saltiness in water -- red line) is small compared to thermosteric rise (black line).
 
Some say there's little or no sea level rise at all:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/blog_watch/sea_level_is_not_rising.html

http://www.john-daly.com/ges/msl-rept.htm

All glaciers are a balance between precipitation and melt/advancement.  The polar ice sheets operate at ice-load saturation, meaning they hold about as much ice as they can handle, and more ice/snow means the glaciers will move faster.

One of the things that is problematic for taking ice core samples is the constant movement of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.  There so much movement they have to regularly move the marker for the South Pole:
Within the polar circles glaciers survive the current warmer interglacial in a permanent and secure equilibrium between snow and melt, receiving more precipitation during warmer times, offsetting any increased melting at the edges due to the warmth.

Hence a few degrees of global warming, whatever the cause, can not melt these glaciers!

This Richard Alley graph shows that warming produces increased precipitation to compensate for any glacial ice melt during hotter times:


How do glaciers form in the first place? By precipitation -- snow -- turning to ice. New glaciers are beginning to form in Scotland right now:


Another question is: will the missing AGW heat come back to the ocean surface to do more "terrible" warming in the air? It may not.

The oceans have been absorbing heat for 1000s of years since the last ice age; that heat may stay in the oceans for 1000s of years more, until well into the next period of glaciation.

And, if this missing heat's not on the surface to do damage then it can't produce worse weather. (Of course a warmer world has better weather though, not worse).
 
==============
 
There is better coverage for measuring ocean heat content since ARGO was deployed in 2004.  Even ARGO is showing a reduction of ocean heat:


Yet even with ARGO, sea level rise still remains the best measure for ocean heat uptake.
 
You could argue that natural factors are cooling earth, offsetting AGW, causing the "pause" if it even is a pause. "Pause" assumes CO2 will make it warmer, which isn't in evidence.
 
But Atlantic and Pacific ocean oscillations that influence temps are pretty near normal, so it's not that.
 
And, though the sun is relatively quieter overall, it's at it's peak right now. And though that peak may be lower than the last few, it's still a peak that increases the sun's solar wind output and irradiance a bit compared to the bottom of that sunspot cycle. So, the sun's not the cause of the lack of warming either.
It's not aerosols:
 
 No noticable trends in aerosols according to Optical depth measure
 
None of the 52 & growing number of pause excuses really stack up.
 
With CO2 rising in supposedly record amounts, the effect on earth's average temp is seemingly close to zero, reflecting a climate sensitivity of close to zero
 
It's not cherry picking (as some claim) to say that there's a lack of rising temps together with rising CO2 during the last 18 years or so. The so-called pause is significant, especially given the faster rise in atmospheric CO2.


Did human CO2 emissions cause the slight warming from 1976 to 1998?

How do we know 1976-1998 warming wasn't all natural and not CO2? There's more cooling than warming during time of rising CO2.
 
Some insist there is no pause:
But even Australia's left-leaning ABC admits to the pause:
So, when you combine the lack of atmospheric warming for 18 years with the lack of sea level rise acceleration, showing there is no anomalous AGW heat uptake by the ocean, the AGW hypothesis is already falsified.

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Updated 25 Oct 2014.

Tags: global warming, climate change

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