And so it should be in theory... but sometimes it not so in practice. And hence we all need to be vigilant and ensure that we keep as much confirmation bias [which is the best example of a meme in action] out of "scientific" endeavours.

" it’s a question of the most reasonable interpretation of evidence"

Which is exactly why we should always adopt a very skeptical stance and question any and every supposedly scientifically based hypothesis, theories and and claims.

I would like to see more of this kind of thing in these threads . Getting to the root of issues rather than simply remaining superficial and unchecked.

This post is related to a post of mine in the News thread, dated 22 / 2 2012 @ 11.22. in which I post on most of the items found in the Science Bits comment as below but the author does a much better job than myself in explaining some of these perfectly natural climate controlling and climate changing, geologically long time span phenomena.

It is a comment titled "Further Evidence" [ Author not identified ] in Nir Shaviv's "Science Bits" blog post "On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity"

As it is climate science and is to me at least, is an excellent, short and understandable even to an interested layman, exposition on the subjects of the news thread I posted on.
The relationships between water vapor, CO2, global temperatures, climate sensitivity, feedbacks, cloud cover, modeling and the real limits to our knowledge in so many climate related fields.

I figure I should at least place it here for other's perusal so;

And for some further clarity, the critical Sensitivity Numbers on which all climate modelling is done and all those predictions of CAGW are created, the temperature rise for a doubling of the current CO2 levels [ approx 390 ppm to approx 800 ppm ] is claimed by the IPCC to be around 1.5 C to 4.5 C with the number to be most likely around 3C.

BUT that climate sensitivity number can only reached if all the known and guessed at "feedbacks" as outlined in the above post and in my "News" post are all "positive". ie they ALL reinforce and bootstrap up the warming tendency of increasing CO2.
And there is a growing body of science that is saying most of those feedbacks are "negative" ie; they reduce and iron out the increase from the warming effects of the CO2's absorption of the CO2 absorption specific solar spectrum energy bands and then theCO2 molecule re-radiates that energy in the longer wave length form; ie heat.

The real interesting number which I went looking for as it is rarely if ever quoted as it destroys the argument, is the numbers of degrees of warming for a doubling of CO2 with NO other influences, no feedbacks nor anything else, just a number for a doubling of the current levels of atmospheric CO2 alone by itself.

And that number is just 1.C [ one degree C ]

And on that number all the catastrophic alarmist global warming claims are being made.

Back to the science!
Don't know why but so often in this life, I get onto a subject or project and lo! a whole spate of information just shows up a few days or so later on the same subject / project.

And this one is on Climate Sensitivity, feedbacks and the increase in global temps from a doubling of CO2 all of which I have posted on above in the last few days.

The Skeptic's Case by David Evans


We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message. Here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.




The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.[2]

Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.[3] The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.

The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two-thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks.



The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2. The argument is entirely about the feedbacks.

The feedbacks dampen or reduce the direct effect of the extra CO2, cutting it roughly in half.[5] The main feedbacks involve evaporation, water vapor, and clouds. In particular, water vapor condenses into clouds, so extra water vapor due to the direct warming effect of extra CO2 will cause extra clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space and cool the earth, thereby reducing the overall warming.

There are literally thousands of feedbacks, each of which either reinforces or opposes the direct-warming effect of the extra CO2. Almost every long-lived system is governed by net feedback that dampens its response to a perturbation. If a system instead reacts to a perturbation by amplifying it, the system is likely to reach a tipping point and become unstable (like the electronic squeal that erupts when a microphone gets too close to its speakers). The earth's climate is long-lived and stable — it has never gone into runaway greenhouse, unlike Venus — which strongly suggests that the feedbacks dampen temperature perturbations such as that from extra CO2.

And much more in the article.

Have either 'side' factored in that CO2 is not evenly distributed across the globe and appears more dense at mid-latitude ,as concentration belts.. Will this affect the behavior of maybe the Ferrel or Hadley cells or other circulation patterns. ?



Animation of the distribution of mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide. The transport of carbon dioxide around the world is carried out in the "free atmosphere" above the surface layer. We can observe the transport of carbon dioxide across the Pacific to North America, then across the Atlantic to Europe and the Mediterranean to Asia and back around the globe. The enhanced belt of carbon dioxide in the southern hemisphere is also clearly visible. Image credit: NASA


http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/agu/airs-images20091214.html

Looks bad until you include the scale. Those uneven distributions across the globe are about a maximum of 10 ppm as the satellite instruments can monitor the concentrations of CO2 down to 1 to 2 ppm and this out of a level of 390 ppm globally.

Just for your edification crikey and to frighten you as you seem to be so wrapped up in that dangerous CO2, a list of CO2 concentrations from Lubos Motl, a Czech physicist


It may be useful to summarize some important values of the CO2 concentration:

150 ppm - the minimum concentration below which many plants may face problems to run photosynthesis and stop growing
180 ppm - the concentration during ice ages
280 ppm - the concentration during interglacials, i.e. also the pre-industrial concentration around 1750
391 ppm - the concentration today
500 ppm - the concentration around 2060-2070 (unlikely that before 2050 as they claim)
560 ppm - the concentration around 2080-2110 (the "doubled CO2" relatively to the pre-industrial values) relevant for the calculations of climate sensitivity); a concentration routinely found outdoors today
700 ppm - the concentration in an average living room
900 ppm - concentration in an average kitchen
1,270 ppm - the concentration used to double the growth of Cowpea in a famous video
1,700 ppm - the average concentration in the Cretaceous 145-65 million years ago (early mammals came, plus figs, magnolias, birds, modern sharks)
4,500 ppm - the concentration 444-416 million years ago (the Silurian dominated by corals and mosses); see other values in geological epochs
10,000 ppm - sensitive people start to feel weaker
40,000 ppm - the concentration of CO2 in the air we breath out
50,000 ppm - toxic levels at which the animals like us get weaker in hours; the value is 5 percent of the volume
180,000 ppm - the concentration of CO2 in exhausts of a healthy motor; that's 18 percent
1,000,000 ppm - pure CO2, just to make you sure what the units are

ROM
It is not so much the CO2 concentrations on their own that is a concern but rather the energy budget of the earth. If you release energy stored in molecules from fuels at the rate we have been doing over the centuries with such a large population the energy has to go somewhere. The major heat sink being the oceans and the moisture in the atmosphere
As the potential energy ( stored in fossil fuels and other exothermic reactions)) converts to kinetic energy , that energy is available to do work. Infra red radiation heating the oceans and atmosphere. Heat warmimg the oceans and melting arctic regions
The consequences of warming the oceans will effect our weather.
The whole energy balance altered .which will create changes in weather dynamics
It is comforting to know we have a large heat sink.

In this article Trenbath explains why the land temps flattens sometimes and suggests the oceans take in the heat at deeper depths
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/ISSI_fulltext.pdf

Trenberth is desperate to explain where the "missing" heat has gone that was supposed to be raising global temperatures as global temperatures have plateaued over the last 12 to 15 years.
So he has come up with this completely unproven idea that the "missing" heat has somehow by-passed the 3000 ARGO floats temperature sensors that measure ocean heat down to 700 metres, now extended controversially down to 2000 metres, without ever showing any evidence or any indication that extra heat is moving down into the deep ocean past those ARGO floats.

As Roger Pielke Sr said of that particular hypothesis, if the heat has gone down there in to the ocean depths it's going to stay there for a few hundred years at least.
The full overturning of the oceans which I was reading about today takes about 3000 years to accomplish and you can bet in that case that Trenberth's 'missing" heat if it is there at all which is generally regarded with a sardonic smile by most climate scientists, is there to stay for a very long time.
Spencer's satellites are showing that the OLR [ Outgoing Long wave Radiation ie heat energy ] is actually exceeding the incoming solar radiation levels by a non statisttically important amount so the planet is cooling albeit very slowly and the ocean heat content is steady and showing signs of falling. The heat content of the entire global atmosphere is equal to the heat content of the top 3.2 metres of the world's oceans. The oceans with their immense heat content drive the global weather systems and the solar incoming radiation balances drive the heat content of the oceans which cover 71% of the global surface.

Arctic research has shown that the Arctic ice has been melting from the bottom, not the top as would be expected if it was due to a warming climate.
Large active volcanoes have also been found on the Arctic's Gakkel Ridge, north of Greenland and also on the mid Arctic Ocean's deep Lomononsov Ridge. So lots of warm water coming from those sources as well.
A warm slug of Atlantic [ possibly from the Pacific through the Bering Straits ] water flowed into the Arctic ocean some 8 or 9 years ago . Researchers were actually tracking this warm pool as it circulated around the Arctic ocean for some 7 years before dissappating. Arctic Ice levels are now getting back closer to the long term normal.
Meanwhile Antarctic ice is growing in extent except around the antarctic peninsula where again a warm pool from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current has settled into around the Antarctic Peninsula
We have been releasing energy from fossil fuels at a rate which has only been significant since around 1940 so any alarmist crap about fossil fuel energy being a factor in "heating" the Earth is just that, crap and complete ignorance of the actual colossal numbers involved with the Earth's heat energy budget compared to the puny amount of heat energy mankind has released over the last 70 years through his consumption of fossil fuels.

If you are worried about this, completely disconnect your power , gas and water . Don't ever go anywhere except by walking.
Sell your vehicles. Chop down trees to repair your house. Use no metal tools, only those you stones can pick up at say a quarry. No use of medical facilities allowed and etc and your conscience will be clean as you will be using no fossil fuels in any way even indirectly and therefore you will not be contributing to any extra anthropogenic CO2 or to the so called global warming and you won't have to worry about it anymore.

It always pays to read the abstract at least and figuring out just what is being said before quoting from papers.



"Based upon a number of climate model experiments"

Big, big alert when they start quoting results from "climate models" based on lousy data or guessed data as some sort of credible reason to believe some hypothesis; ie Climate models = GIGO.
If Trenberth knew the answers or even of any observed data backing his claims he wouldn't be using models with comments like "likely " below.


"the main sink of the missing energy is likely the deep ocean below 275 m depth."

That is just nothing more than a pure bloody guess when they put in likely and carries no weight or credibility at all.

Oceans;

Cover 71% of the surface of the Earth.
Have 1,100 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere (99.9% of the heat capacity of the Earth's fluids)
Contain 90,000 times as much water as the atmosphere (97% of the free water on the planet)
Receive 78% of global precipitation
More than one-half of the world's population lives within 60 miles (100 km) of the ocean.

Deepest Oceans and Seas
Pacific Ocean (35,837 ft) (10,924 meters)
Atlantic Ocean (30,246 ft) (9,219 meters)
Indian Ocean (24,460 ft) (7,455 meters)
Caribbean Sea (22,788 ft) (6,946 meters)
Arctic Ocean (18,456 ft) (5,625 meters)
South China Sea (16,456 ft) (5,016 meters)
Bering Sea (15,659 ft) (4,773 meters)
Mediterranean Sea (15,197 ft) (4,632 meters)
Gulf of Mexico (12,425 ft) (3,787 meters)
Japan Sea (12,276 ft) (3,742 meters)

And something else below that is critical to understanding the global climate, the CO2 sinks and etc that they just don't know if, when and where !

May I very strongly suggest that those interested in a very clear and concise presentation and exposition on Global warming / climate change Science read Proff Richard Lindzen's presentation at a public Seminar at the House of Commons Committee Rooms. Westminster, London. 22nd February 2012

The whole presentation is a very easy and understandable read and covers the whole range of climate science.
And to my humble satisfaction, covers and reinforces many of the items I and other skeptic posters have been posting on in recent times on this and other threads.

Reconsidering the Climate Change Act

Global Warming: How to approach the science.

[ Proff ] Richard S. Lindzen
Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Richard Lindzen is a Proff of Meteorological at MIT and is a skeptic.
Lindzen is one of the world's most respected scientists in weather and climate science and is arguably the world's pre-eminent scientist in Climate Science.

Even Lindzen is now calling some so called climate science, a qasi-religious issue.

And for a media comment on Lindzen's address; Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millennium Bug, a mistake?

Roy Spencer in a very recent post on his blog covers similar ground to Lindzen in his address above.

Again it is worth a read to get a feeling for the weaknesses, the caveats and the deliberate hiding of the uncertainties from the public by the warmist scientists who are using advocacy of a particular unproven section of science as a bludgeon and a threat against he public, those who question their claims ie; skeptics and the political and bureaucratic branches of our society to try and achieve an society re-engineered outcome that fit's their personal and group philosophies.
And that is about as far from honest science as any so called scientist can get.

The message that is now coming through is that there are a whole bunch of climate warming advocacy scientists who have been and still are considerably less than honest or downright deliberately misleading in what they are telling the public and the politicals about the science behind the so called global warming, something known for a long time amongst the climate cognoscente.

Ten Years After the Warming

&

Is the fight against global warming alarmism hopeless?

Can you provide some evidence that the data is lousy or guessed at?


Can you provide evidence that using the word “likely” in relation to the said climate-model experiments does not sufficiently describe the model outcomes?

Not getting into that one...but how does the heat mysteriously not appear at the surface of the ocean but appear at 275m plus.
AS the sun heats the surface layers and does not penetrate far into the ocean. local air heat does little to heat the water, in reality it
is the solar rays that do it, not the suppossed heat from any CO2 effect!

Cosmic, just go and read Roy Spencer's comments in the post I linked above; "Ten years after the warming".

I will quote from his post;


Now if thats not a lousy means of creating a model when the modelers don't even know what is the right / correct / most likely levels of aerosols to put in their models and THEN they go out and sell it to the world as being the only scientific outcome which we must spend a few hundred billion dollars on to overcome and which is and has contributed to the running down and possible bankrupting of the economies of much of Europe and the USA.

The 21 models used by the IPCC rely to a high degree on being able to tune or backcast their runs by changing the level of aerosols as a major input amongst the other inputs until they can get their model run to match the past climate.
Then of course they project forward ; ie predict the future climate on the basis their model matches the past climate.
The fact that those same models which supposedly can predict the future climate on the basis that they can track the same as the past climate after suitable fudge factors have been worked into the model can't predict the most influential climate changing phenomena on this planet, the ENSO and it's phases or it's timing or it's intensity only 3 or 4 months out from an ENSO event should tell you just how bloody useless those climate models are to get any sort of prediction out of.

If those 21 IPCC models were actually a useful climate predicting tool after some 20 or more years of development they would ALL consolidate their predictions around a one fairly narrow band of temperatures and sea level rises
So what do we get in the way of predictions from those models?


Temperature and sea level rise in the various scenarios
There are six families of SRES scenarios, and AR4 provides projected temperature and sea level rises (excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow[15])for each scenario family.

Scenario B1
Best estimate temperature rise of 1.8 °C with a likely range of 1.1 to 2.9 °C
Sea level rise likely range [18 to 38 cm] (7 to 15 inches)

Scenario A1T
Best estimate temperature rise of 2.4 °C with a likely range of 1.4 to 3.8 °C
Sea level rise likely range [20 to 45 cm] (8 to 18 inches)

Scenario B2
Best estimate temperature rise of 2.4 °C with a likely range of 1.4 to 3.8 °C
Sea level rise likely range [20 to 43 cm] (8 to 17 inches)

Scenario A1B
Best estimate temperature rise of 2.8 °C with a likely range of 1.7 to 4.4 °C
Sea level rise likely range [21 to 48 cm] (8 to 19 inches)

Scenario A2
Best estimate temperature rise of 3.4 °C with a likely range of 2.0 to 5.4 °C
Sea level rise likely range [23 to 51 cm] (9 to 20 inches)

Scenario A1FI
Best estimate temperature rise of 4.0 °C with a likely range of 2.4 to 6.4 °C
Sea level rise likely range [26 to 59 cm] (10 to 23 inches)

Six different scenarios with estimated temperature increases ranging from 1.1 C to 6.4 C

There is only one planetary climate so why the hell do the IPCC modelers come up with the predictions for what you might say are 6 climates.
If their science is so settled and so established that they can demand that we spend our wealth on crazy schemes to stop this catastrophic warming, why are there so many scenarios? Why is there such a range of temperatures which most posters on here with some knowledge of the science would probably go close to just picking those temperatures out of a hat and still be within the range of temperatures those climate modelers at great expense are saying is the best science around and cannot be argued with?

And sea level rise predictions ranging from 18cms to 59 cms.

At least the sea level predictions are reasonable as there are only a fraction of the factors that have to be included compared to predicting the climate And they are far, far away from the 1 metre to 6 metres sea level rise that the climate change alarmist whack jobs are spouting off regularly about.


Each of those 21 models uses very different levels of aerosols and never ever admit that they are just throwing in this stuff according to their own personal biases in the interpretation of the science they are supposed to be using to tune the models and altering the input mixes according again to their own personal biases and understandings
[' they really don't have much of an idea yet on how much, when, where and why aerosols are distributed through the atmosphere or how much they change and when ]
So you have a situation where each model has a completely different profile of aerosols plus the similar situation for other inputs, to get it to approximate the past climate.


Trenberth in using "Likely" as means of trying to convince the public that his claim is just more than smoke and mirrors and he can't think of anything else and can't bring himself after so expending so much ego over CO2 , that perhaps the sun is the reason why the planet is not warming as HE thinks it should be.
He has absolutely no proof what so ever that the "missing" heat is even there, particularly as the sun is very quiet with very low magnetic activity and solar UV is also down by quite few percent.
All Trenberth has tried to do is convince people that he has the answers but tries to hide the fact he doesn't have ANY evidence whatsoever if or where that missing heat might be and do this by using "likely" as a smoke screen to hide his ignorance while still claiming that he was never committed to the ocean deep heat concept if it all turns out to be just another of his totally misleading furfies.

Keeps the continuing grants rolling in to of course. A small factor never to be forgotten when looking at climate warming science.

"Likely" for this "empty tweed jacket" is a cop out as it is with all of them, when they haven't really got a clue about whether or not the idea is a viable proposition and it gives a nice little verbal escape hatch if their theory goes tits up.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...ace-agency.html

'Our data show that Earth has been accumulating heat in the ocean at a rate of half a watt per square meter (10.8 square feet), with no sign of a decline,' Loeb said. 'This extra energy will eventually find its way back into the atmosphere and increase temperatures on Earth.'

Scientists generally agree that 90 percent of the excess heat associated with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations gets stored in Earth's ocean.

If released back into the atmosphere, a half-watt per square meter accumulation of heat could increase global temperatures by 0.3 or more degrees centigrade (0.54 degree Fahrenheit).

Loeb said the findings demonstrate the importance of using multiple measuring systems over time, and illustrate the need for continuous improvement in the way Earth's energy flows are measured.

Bob Tisdale; October to December 2011 NODC Ocean Heat Content Anomalies (0-700Meters) Update and Comments

NODC = National Ocean Data Center

Funny how all that "missing" heat is tooling right on down past all those 3000 ARGO floating buoys which were developed specifically to measure ocean heat and temperatures all the way down to 700 metres [ 2000 feet deep ] and do it without a sniff of that "missing" heat appearing in the ARGO data.

And maybe you have noticed that just when all that "missing" heat went missing, the global "ocean heat content" rise just quite suddenly flattened right out over the last 9 years or shortly after the ARGO float system became operational in 2003.

And note the how Hansen's, head of NASA's GISS, usual alarmistic claims of another catastrophe in the making have gone right off track AGAIN!

And to lay another bogie to rest; Josh Willis, the head of the ARGO project is a warmista who has removed floats from the data base which he claimed were giving low temperature readings.
No ARGO floats reading high on the temps have been so removed as far as is known.
Helps keeps the global warming meme going!

I do like this "Scientists generally agree that 90 percent of the excess heat associated with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations gets stored in Earth's ocean."

Let that "scientist" provide proof of that statement before some third rate warmist "scientists" tries to use that phraseology as he has already tried, to support and con the public on a very dicey, non science backed claim.'

"Agreeing" ain't science!
It's politics to get people to "agree" to something.

Keeps the grants rolling in of course and it sounds like he was maybe about running out of grant money so out goes the alarmist claims and more funding needed to "study" this " Earth's energy flows"
Earth's Energy Flows! Nice bit of high sounding, no content gloss there.

Yeh! I'm getting more and more pi***d off with this constant alarmist crap and more and more cynical about most so called climate warming scientist's motives let alone their science.
After all I am one of those paying and I'm one of those getting ripped off by this so called science mob and I'm just fed up with the stupidity of this whole crazy global warming scam and fed up with all the rip off merchants that are up to their eyeballs in the public rough.

I was asking two very specific questions about a specific paper/publication. To be honest, I don’t give a rats about much of the non-scientific content of these threads anymore because I don’t see it as relevant to a rational, non-attacking debate, including rants, innuendo, political-speak and so on an so forth.

If the intent is to encourage scientific debate, then I would think taking the nit-pickiness out of it would be a good option, unless, as I implied in the questions I asked, there is evidence to support the assertions from the literature.