This is serious. A highly regarded and widely recognized planetery physicist put together the most dangerous scientific ingredients that exist: skepticism of the established science, a comprehensive list of hypotheses that stood in opposition to that established science, a huge amount of data, a healthy amount of funding including a good chunk from energy companies that mainly sell fossil carbon based fuels, and a hand selected research team of others who were also skeptics.
In the end, he came up with an explanation for what people call Global Warming. Personally, I believe him. I think he has it right. Whatever you were thinking as the cause of global warming, you have to look at this work and if you have not come to the same conclusion, you should reconsider.
Here’s an interview which includes an explanation of the whole process.
There is more context and additional video here.
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So Richard Muller is saying the big dips in the temperature series were caused by volcanic eruptions?
What do you call it when listening to a true skeptic persuades you to believe something?
Now I’m skeptical of anyone who isn’t willing to reconsider what he’s discovered…
Harry, I would not say that he said that.
I don’t think an atmo specialization can be claimed for him, nor to my knowledge does he claim it. This recent amateur error is pertinent.
Muller said. Well that clinches it then; I better start transplanting goalposts because, once everybody is on board, the policy will inevitably be a greater stranglehold and futher attempt at control of life itself (I already see this with the distasteful suggestions that the Green Desert of pine forests are to be desired/encouraged over old growth hardwoods and biodiversity because reasons and AGW).
I wonder if his correlation/revelation looks just as tight if it was not rising CO2 graphed but declining O2 over the same period??
It just *feels right* (so I’m quite sure there are qualified scientists to show me how wrong I am) to me that a healthy biome with its’ concomitant biodiversity requires a healthy overturning of CO2. Perhaps it is not CO2, per se, which is the most problematic but, like an underlying metabolic abnormality, its’ buildup is rather a sequela of some deeper laying insult giving rise to the inability to come back into hospitable equilibrium. If that were the case, then a stranglehold on CO2 is just treating a symptom, here.
Of course, being a layperson, I’d expect CO2 to lag a rising temperature — Dissolution of calcium carbonate and less soluble in warmer water, for instance. So where is the O2 going??? Why isn’t the O2 rising with rising CO2? O2 is pretty reactive and also escapes into space so that it must be continually replenished from, you got it, CO2 and the carbon cycle…. Figure it out people; Or just go ahead and double down on taxation for inhalation of O2 and exhalation of CO2 while your at it. A more sensible policy might be to stop poisoning Earth with non-CO2 stuff, but I’m not holding my breath.
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php
Tim, you are, as you suggest, woefully misinformed and ignorant. Sorry. Somebody had to tell you.
@Tim : WTF!?
Really?
BEST survey site – I think it is anyhow :
http://berkeleyearth.org/
@5. Tim :
Huh? Quite a word salad you’ve made there but I’m afraid it tastes off, a bit stale and weird.
Control of life? Stranglehold? Of the who, what, how, why there? Specifics Tim. Preferably in the form of “I think X is behind Y to deliberately do Z” format please.
Citation? Who is saying this and what are they saying exactly? Sounds like you’re possibly discussing some notions of terraforming / geohacking / geoengineeering Earth and solving the problem by massive reforestation efforts but not sure. Also not sure that’s a view that’s widely touted and not already debunked, for example, by people like Clive Hamilton in his book ‘Earthmasters : Playing God with the climate’ (Yale University Press / Allen & Unwin, 2013) discussing the problems of those type of proposed suggestions.
Y’know I’m pretty sure we have satellites monitoring both carbon dioxide and Oxygen levels. Lemme check for a sec, Oh yeah, here we go, we do and they’ve been put together with sources here :
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=109
Took me literally 30 secs. Good graphs and site you really should check out there, dude. Surprised given your interest in the matter that you couldn’t find that yourself but, oh well. Happy?
You mean the natural carbon / Co2 / O2 cycle we’re all told about here I guess? Well, this is still happening even as human emissions also add ever larger quantities of Co2. The natural overturning and cycling isn’t the problem here. The extra human additions of carbon dioxide plus other Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) are.
Sorta like how the air on Earth working naturally deals with its Co2 in the way that broke down in the artificial environment of the Apollo 13 LEM Aquarius when a craft designed to support two humans for a shorter period of time had to cope with three human beings in it for a much longer one. Until NASA found a way to fix it with scrubbers that took the extra CO2 out of the air albeit with some difficulties along the way! IOW : Context matters here.
Whoah! Talk about clunky phrasing there! (Not that I can always talk on that score I know.) I’m not quite sure I understand what you are getting at here but :
i) The Co2 rise isn’t the symptom but the cause. (Or at least along with other Greenhouse Gases Emitted by us.) The symptom here would be the planetary rising temperature, the increased rate of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, heatwaves, melting Arctic sea ice extent & volume etc .. To use an analogy, the symptom is smelling something really bad and the cause is a fart nearby. Someone passing hot air out their backside and making it unpleasant for everyone in the room.
ii) What is your “underlying metabolic (sic) instability / deeper laying insult” here? If you are saying it isn’t Human emitted GHGs then what would your alternative hypothesis be?
FYI. solar activity and Milankovitch cycles have already been ruled out, ditto volcanic activity and other lot of other suggested causes too.
If you don’t know and just have a vague “oh its something else, dunno what” vibe to go on, maybe you should instead stop and listen to the climatologists who *do* know because they have been studying this issue at much greater depth and length than you. They know the actual underlying physics and consequently have endured a lot of not so deep insults for expressing their knowledge and raising the alarm about what is in reality occurring here.
iii) Even if Co2 rising *was* just a symptom it likely would still need to be addressed. Doctors treat symptoms of diseases all the time. For instance, analgesics for pain relief are commonly given and doctors will address a patients fever even if these are only symptoms caused by an underlying illness. Why then would you advise doing differently in respect to our the planetary climate?
Being a layperson would make you think what why?
We know that previously in glacial-interglacial “ice age” cycles there was an lag between rising planetary average temperatures and atmospheric GHGs incl. Co2 increasing. Because those events where caused by escalating feedbacks triggered by GHGs released through Milankovitch cycles. However, this time the CO2 is being released artificially – and is still acting just as physics and past geological history tell us it acts. Basic undeniable physics – GHGs trap more heat. Whether nature puts them there or we do.
IOW, twas natural before, tis unnatural now thus usual order hath been reversed. This has been long and well understood by the experts you’re not.
(NB. You could always become an expert yourself with further study but that does take time and effort on your part. But as an admitted “layperson” I’m not going to over-ride the diagnosis of my medical doctor or attempt to wire my own house instead of getting an electrician to do it. Same applies here. I would’n’t go attempting to overthrow known climatology if I don’t actually know more than the high school basics of it.)
And that little part of Tim’s rant is why I’m ripping him apart with a bit more snarky hostility than I might use otherwise folks.
Because nobody is actually suggesting what he’s suggesting here and that does sound very much the sort of thing a Teaparty Birther Truther wearing a tinfoil hat is going to say. (Admittedly there are no exclamation marks or ALLCAPS there so, congrats?) Its just plain wrong and silly and unsupported and contrasts with the somewhat more intelligent if bafflingly clunky mash of the rest of the word salad on offer at #5.
If you’re not someone like I’ve caricatured there Tim, you might want to say so and show so and not sound like one by using such straw monsters in future.
Actually and, again, this is rather obvious and well known, we are addressing non-GHG pollutants and other poisons too. This isn’t and never has been zero-sum situation. For instance, we’ve outlawed CFC’s and thus the Ozone layer thinning is now reversing showing that international action combined and informed can actually work. Also look at the state of many European and American rivers and a lot of other things that have also been improved by taking environmental action – all whilst the Global Overheating issue has also been, well, in fact not very well addressed but become a big talking point.
* Aww and just when Tim was doing so why with the excessive punctuation marks! 😉
There’s indeed quite a bit of word salad in Tim’s comment (and OMG, a link to i-sis, cranks extraordinaire).
The fact that the O2 decline is faster than the CO2 increase is entirely expected and even more evidence that the cause of the atmospheric CO2 increase is due primarily due to fossil fuel burning:
For every CO2 formed from fossil fuel burning, more than one oxygen molecule is used! Fossil fuels are not pure C, but also contain significant amounts of H (which combine with oxygen to yield water, H2O), as well as minor amounts of other elements like S (reacting to yield primarily SO2).
The ratio is, if I remember correctly, around 1 to 1.4.
From a 2012 op-ed:
“The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Nin?o and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant…We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change- skeptic.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
While it’s commendable that Muller, who had been feted by the septics, assembled a team that carried out serious research and reached conclusions antithetical to the septic position, it should be remembered that the Berkeley study confirmed what previously had been known. Evidently, the real climate scientists know what they’re doing.
After the results were released, Judith Curry, who had originally been a member of the BEST team, performed one of her famous snake lady contortion dances.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/judith-curry-opens-mouth-inserts-foot/
And Anthony Watts, who had declared, “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” proved himself to be a self-serving liar.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/20/349544/berkeley-temperature-study-results- confirm-global-warming/
http://wottsupwiththat.com/2011/10/21/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/01/best-study-peer-reviewed-and-confirms- what-scientists-knew
Ow ow owie ow, Greg Laden #6… Mommmm!!!
Recently here on Scienceblogs, a rather scathing critique of one, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, was posted. She had exuded a paper seeming to show tight correlation between the rise in glyphosate use and every modern malady from concussions to kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, and autism (Incidentally, a correlation compiled to lambast Seneffs’ work makes complete sense to me that the rise in consumption of organic produce fits the rising use of glyphosate — I, myself, have been wary of the stuff from the first days of the ads showing derps squirting dandelions like they’ve won the west; And transgenic crops since the Flavr Savr tomato and Starlink corn).
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/12/31/oh-no-gmos-are-going-to-make-everyone-autistic/
So. Here we have two brilliant, multidisciplinary scientists, each a little outside their pigeonholed fields; One of them reviled even as the other is revered. How does that happen? A conspiratorially minded individual might prematurely come to the conclusion that one fits the agenda while the other does not. Confirmation bias much, do we?
Thx, Astrostevo #9. It was a pleasure to read.
ps. WTC7 won’t go away 😉 .
Some credit for that good chink of funding is due the brothers Koch , who having passed their physics courses at MIT, must now must be governed accordingly.
Tim,
Muller and Seneff is definitely not an apples to apples comparison.
Muller just confirmed what was already in the climate science literature. In many ways he just wasted his time, though I am sure he would disagree.
I am not familiar with Seneff but her results were way outside the mainstream.
It’s like saying people laughed at Bozo the Clown, and not at Einstein, therefore people must have an agenda for not laughing at Einstein too.
Actually, Astrostevo #9; I did come up with an alternate, personal pet hypothesis(??) for that particular one.
It was back ~1990 while on summer break and enabling postholes through the mixed rocks of the southern Tennessee glacial till with nothing but a 1931 Model A axle, a BFH (big fuckin’ hammer), and warped hand diggers whilst being visciously molested by hords of giant, black grasshoppers and noisy, red-eyed cicadas that a thought popped into my head; Though dangerous, as one may easily loose a toe that way, it nonetheless mercifully distracted me from the sweaty trudgery of the task at hand and hammer and I began to postulate…
I was already miffed at a previous straight-forward task becoming a total clusterf*ck because of the new regulations and fittings. Being ever wary of the seeming self-inflicted wound of Big Freon and their masked machinations to “save the ozone”, I remembered something from entomology 102** — These insects navigate using planes of polarization in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum: “Why would they get out of bed if they can’t see?”, I thought. That July, I’d predicted to myself a periodicity in that newly(??) discovered *hole*. I’ve never been so good at following up on one issue so that I don’t know the status of that prediction now.
The 13-year cicada seemed as though it might be pretty straightforward to me:: The 11 year sunspot cycle so that they had 11 years to ‘just hang out’ and two years to develop into adults…. ( ‘11,17,…, hmm, 17 is kinda old,…, Buggers, I’ve gone crosseyed again’.) I gave up and asked the farmer if the posts were “to his liking” (It took him awhile to understand my ‘lean beef comes from these steep ‘clines’ joke but it turned out all good).
** ‘depicted derps dousing dandelions’ would have come off the toung better, should I have given it a little thought:: Perhaps, I should have foregone that entomolgy and home-ec elective in favor of a lit class. (que the grammar nazis what can’t see the meaning for the words)
Nobody laughed *at* Einstein, toby52 #14; They only laughed *near* him.
At, near, whatever. It is all relative.
Yeah, Tim, Einstein and Bozo had wacky hairdos, therefore Bozo was a great scientist. Another example of Timology.
Tim wrote: “I wonder if his correlation/revelation looks just as tight if it was not rising CO2 graphed but declining O2 over the same period?”
Here you go, Tim:
http://climatestate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/o2-oxygen-decline-co2-rise-keeling-scripps-620×360.jpg
And why is O2 declining in direct proportion to the rise in CO2?
Think about it, Tim. What would you expect to happen to atmospheric O2 when you combust 9+ Gt of fossil C per year, carbon that wasn’t in the active carbon cycle before you burned it?
They laughed at Bozo the Clown, but they also laughed at Tim. Apparently with good reason.
CO2 is a limiting factor to plant/algae/diatom growth, Jim Eager. Have you ever thrown gasoline on a fire? — Am I the only one not laughing here; It could be I’m the butt of the joke, afterall?
I see you haven’t thought about it, Tim.
Why am I not surprised.
Yes, you are the butt of the joke.
Either that or you are the longest running performance art piece in history.
^^That’s from the i-sis article I linked and proposes that anthropogenic land changes have resulted in an increased ‘oxygen sink’ — The Rust Belt does come to mind (they’re looking quite a bit more red, these days) but I’m going to also consider the old conventional wisdom that most net* O2 generation is due to phytoplankton, et. al.
Ok, Astrostevo #9; I’ll throw one out there:
I speculate that some agent** in the environment may be interfering with some metabolic pathway (either respiratory, or photosynthetic, or both) which is common to all of the most pertinent (for net oxygen recovery) photosynthetic organisms.
I further speculate that said ‘agent’ may be dose/concentration independent, possibly acting through receptor*** action:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130625073600.htm
I propose a possible causative agent may be herbicides.
*Remember; In the absense of light, plants use oxygen just like everybody else.
** either known and undisclosed or, as yet, undiscovered altogether
*** A small key may start a large car; Turning the key harder rarely proves more efficatious toward proper ignition.
(^^ok. Imagine a push-button car instead).
==============================
Thx for the graph, Jim Eager {Ba dun dunk}; Don’t forget to tip your waitress on the way out.
ps. anybody got a proxy graph or something to show the o2/n2 ratio before the age of satellites? — most appreciated, thx.
I see Tim is doubling down on his performance art schtick, and providing his own sound effects to boot.
Fact: We know pretty accurately how much fossil C we burn each year.
Fact: We know that every single atom of that fossil C will bond with a molecule of O2 when fully combusted and that even the incompletely combusted CO will eventually oxidise to CO2.
Ergo: We know that the measured drop in O2 has to be caused by the combustion of fossil C.
Unless you believe in magic.
Reality is a bitch, Tim, rent a clue.
Tim, you should look at ozone vis-a-vis plants.
A first guess would be that surface ozone would not affect the oceans much as its’ persistance is very short. Stratospheric ozone (ozone hole) seems to affect regions that don’t grow (land) plants.
—-
I did hear on derpitutinal radio (ClearChannel??) yesterday that some study had shown a decreasing incidence of lung cancer with increasing elevation — Naturally, the spokeshole attributed this to ‘oxygen causes lung cancer’ and yucked it up…
Upon a little extra thought, the untransformed (through UV irradiance) raw oxides of nitrogen and sulfur dioxide may survive longer and get through the top layers of the ocean(??) — If that were the case, then It may be combustion* afterall.
*even the ‘clean’ tech of hydrogen.. It has to do with temp/pressure in the presence of nitrogen (think: the benz) and that is why we have the low thermodynamically inefficient compression ratios in the modern automobile today.
I’ve often thought that the worlds like the one Tim lives in are much more interesting than our boring world that’s governed by physics, chemistry, and such. Science just removes that fascinating element of mysteriousness…
Gee thx, Brainstorms. While I don’t live in any such world, it was almost like visiting them when spelunking.
I used to do a good bit of crawling around in a certain couple bowels-‘o’-the-earth and just a few hours in there was enough to become resensitized to ozone (due to its short environmental persistance without continual regeneration — dirt/moisture/rock..anything organic and it’s gone. ‘Dryrot’ is rubber oxidized by ozone, for instance. It is just as reactive as monatomic oxygen) whereupon exiting would elicit the taking of ones’ breath away with the choking/stinging sensation like spending too much time at the over-chlorinated pool or waterslide.
^^ It is for that reason that I believe that majority NOx is not due to combustion but is instead the combination of humidity, soil, soil bacteria, and vegetation — for we were many square miles deep into wilderness far away from traffic, agriculture, or roads of any account yet had the suffocating ppm concentrations which would stomp any Birmingham, Atlanta, or Nashville flat by EPA standards. The forest, blackberry, and swamp was busting through non-attainment** non-compliance at twice acceptable concentrations. Lightning may be another major contributor.
Now, while I don’t *feel* it a global problem, NOx et al. is certainly a local problem and for the reason that cities often grew up in basins where the soil was better and wealthy landowners concentrated first (Idk why? Farming first and then populations grew to service the wealthy landowners, perhaps?) — Inversions over the basins do the rest of the dirty work.
**Some pilot studies I’d heard of actually cut down the greenery ahead of the prevailing wind and planted trees within metro areas to lower temperature (This did, indeed, lower the surface ozone counts). Surely, nobody wants fits-all policy that causes cities to take make-waste action to escape an arbitrary non-attainment status through uglying up and laying barren everywhere else. Nobody, that is, that has a clue why.
Well, Tim, perhaps you should be a writer… Of something like techno-mystery novellas. You certainly have got away with words…
@12. Tim :
Um, no worries! Also I certainly hope that’s true for the current (replacement) building & I do hope you’ are joking and not serious – its hard to know online these days sometimes!
@ 22. Tim :
Well, that is a new one. I gotta give you points for originality here Tim first I’ve heard of that idea.
Thing is, there are all sorts of herbicides with different chemical compositions that we’ve used in different areas and different amounts and I’m not sure there are likely to be any one herbicide used in anywhere near the right quantities to explain this whole global phenomenon nor does it seem remotely likely that this herbicide effect could have been missed and not noticed so far. I’d really have to see the maths and specifics for that speculation.
Glyphosphate is deactivated with contact with the soil too from what I gather and one reason it is used in place of for example DDT is that it doesn’t bio-accumulate and build up in the environment or have dangerous by-products – that I’m aware of right now anyhow.
Thing is, climatologists and physicists know how much carbon dioxide and other GHGs have been put into the air and they know the basic physics of how they interact with heat and the observations match the known physics and expected outcome and has done ever since the days of Svante Arrhenius. (1896 for Svante’s first proposal of how the greenhouse effect works.)
Occam’s razor and all the evidence strongly, no make that overwhelmingly, supports the current climatologists consensus here. To prove your extraordinary claim that they got it wrong and its because of herbicides instead you’ll have to show extraordinary evidence noting exactly which herbicides and exactly how they co-relate precisely and make for a better explanation of the current Global Overheating phenomenon whilst also explaining how they’ve led to the “illusion” (*if* you are correct) of the current understanding of how GHG’s interact with our atmospheric and thermohaline circulation systems. Plus scientific method~wise you’ll need to show how and why and where your herbicides hypothesis explains things that the current GHGs theory does.
I wish you the best of luck with that – quite seriously! Do the science or convince others to help you, win the Nobel prize and I’ll gladly shout you a chosen beverage at the ceremony!
I think though on current evidence and observations, sadly for the world, everything points to the 98% majority of climatologist experts here being correct. I wish they weren’t but .. yeah.
D’oh! There’s always one stuff up isn’t there?? Correction :
.Plus scientific method~wise you’ll need to show how and why and where your herbicides hypothesis explains things that the current GHGs theory does not.
Note that last word and the analogy being how Einsteinian Relativity explains how Newton’s older supplanted theory seems to work and also showed why the precession of Mercury’s orbit happened as it did for a couple of examples to illustrate my meaning here.
BTW. Tim have you tried suggesting and discussing your herbicde hypthesis here? :
http://realclimate.org/
Might be worth giving that a go after all they are real climatologists unlike most (?) of us here, me for sure.
Well Greg Laden #24; I did stumble upon this:
http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-us/publications/australian-antarctic-magazine/2001-2005/issue-1-autumn-2001/science/effect-of-ozone-depletion-on-antarctic-marine-microbes
Those type critters just sort of drift around with the current and, I suppose, it may be plausible that they get somewhat messed up (ha! like a bad sunburn in a child some summer family vacation) during their little excursions south.
There seems to be some study of the remote marine boundary layer and interplay of components of photochemical smog (natural, such as bromide (possibly), and manmade as well).
ps. ‘the benz’ above sb. ‘nitrogen narcosis’ but that analogy is not a very good one anyways and I’d certainly not wish to dissuade use of hydrogen, Brown’s gas, or fuel cells.
One question occurs to me. “… a healthy overturning of CO2.”
Healthy. Does anyone think that “overturning” several 10s of million years’ worth of sequestered CO2 in a single year for years on end is … healthy?
Sounds more like spillage than (re)cycling to me.