Headline: Earth™:
Katie Fehlinger hosts Headline: Earth, which takes an unbiased look at all sides of the global warming debate. The weekly show features the latest headlines related to global warming, along with interviews of prominent and newsworthy guests, including global warming legislation advocate and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW), Senator (D) Barbara Boxer of California and global warming skeptic and former EPW chairman, Senator (R) James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Visit Headline: Earth's video page to see any or all of Katie's videos.
Models may be Overestimating Global Warming Predictions
A Cornell University study of black carbon, which is the residue of burned organic matter, has found that there was far more black carbon in Australian soils than previously thought. Soils are the world's largest source of CO2 (10 times more each year than from all human CO2 emissions combined). What does all of this mean?
From the Cornell Chronicle story......
As a result of global warming, soils are expected to release more carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, which, in turn, creates more warming. Climate models try to incorporate these increases of carbon dioxide from soils as the planet warms, but results vary greatly when realistic estimates of black carbon in soils are included in the predictions, the study found.
By entering the Australian black carbon data into the models the researchers found that the predicted CO2 emissions from soil was reduced 20% over a period of 100 years compared to previous model simulations, which in their opinion failed to account for the long shelf life of black carbon.
To sum it up, it appears that black carbon's stability in soil has been underestimated and that the results of these findings indicate that global warming predictions from computer simulations has been overestimated.
Your thoughts?
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In case you missed it. President elect Barack Obama in a web video produced for the Bi-Partisan Governors Global Climate Summit discusses a new direction in climate change policy after he enters office in January.
Here is the AP video, courtesy of YouTube. Not the greatest quality video, but it will pass.
**We apologize for the site being down since last night. It appears that the problems have been corrected. Brett.
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Former Vice President Al Gore recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled 'The Climate for Change'. In the op-ed, Gore's goal is to commit producing 100% of our electricity from carbon free sources within 10 years. Ambitious indeed!
Gore feels that his plan will move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and also the economic crisis by creating millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.
Here is a breakdown of his five-part plan to repower America.......
1. Invest in incentives for the construction of solar thermal plants, wind farms and geothermal powered power plants.
2. Plan and construction of a national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from rural america to the cities, where most of the electricity is used.
3. Help America's auto industry to convert quickly to plug-in-hybrids to run on renewable electricity.
4. Have a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy efficient windows and lighting.
5. The U.S. needs to put a price on carbon at home. Replace the Kyoto treaty and reduce deforestation.
The extent of the last glacial ice sheet across parts of North America.
A computer model used by Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh and William Hyde from the University of Toronto predicts that the next ice age between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now will be more severe and extensive than any seen in millions of years, with permanent ice covering much of Canada, Europe and Asia with ice, but Crowley believes that when you factor in current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, that predicted ice age could actually be postponed or prevented.
Though this extreme ice age would be unusual, so is the climate that people are creating by emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases, Crowley said in the National Geographic article.
"Current greenhouse gas concentrations are probably similar to those that occurred three million years ago and are high enough to prevent an ice age for hundreds of thousands of years," said Lorraine Lisieck, a prehistoric climate expert from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
As is the case with many scientific studies that project far out into the future, Lisieck states that many more tests are needed to see if the study's prediction seems correct.
The study also notes that temperature swings during and between these ice ages have become more extreme, and that trend is expected to continue.
Recently in this blog, Brett and I have looked at various components of climate change (methane levels, sunspot activity to name a few) and gave recent updates on them. So, I figured I'd look at the most heard about atmospheric component dealing with climate change (especially in the media) carbon dioxide levels. According to this article I found surfing the web, in September, 2008 the carbon dioxide level, as measured from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, was 383.09 parts per million. As most of you already know, and is mentioned in this article, the carbon dioxide pre-industrial levels were around 280 parts per million, so man is thought to be responsible for an addition of 100 parts per million in the last 150-200 years.
-As was commented about my blog last week, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. An increase in a greenhouse gas leads to warming, right? Simple answer, in my opinion, is yes. A more complicated answer, and one that seems to be most accepted by most of the commenters, is not necessarily, as the earth's climate system is very complex.
-The simple answer is yes, an increase in carbon dioxide leads to warming on the planet. This is a very simplistic approach and assumes that nothing else in the climate system changes, and all the warming observed in the earth's climate is directly attributed to the change in the levels of carbon dioxide.
-As we all know, the assumptions made directly above are not true. The earth's climate is ridiculously complicated, and carbon dioxide is not the only thing that influences the climate that is changing. In fact, probably EVERYTHING in the earth's climate system changes at one time or another. So, earth's changing climate can not be entirely attributed to carbon dioxide levels rising.
-Below is just my opinion, and please comment on it. The increase in carbon dioxide levels will, by itself and no other changes in the climate system, lead to warming in the earth's atmosphere. However, this warming may or may not be seen in actuality. It may be hidden, or masked, by factors that are cooling the climate. On the other hand, if warming of the climate is shown to be occurring, the increase in carbon dioxide levels are playing a role in this warming, but are not entirely responsible for all of the warming as many other factors are involved.
I have been getting a number of comments lately directing me to the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) October temperature controversy that originated with bad data from Russia.
Basically, it appears that September temperature data from several observing stations in Russia was wrongly put in place of what should have been October data. This resulted in a tremendous "hot" spot showing up on the GISS October temperature anomaly map.
John Goetz from Anthony Watt's 'Watts Up with That?' website initially broke this story a few days ago.
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has also been closely following this and here is his initial story. Steve provides statistical analysis of climate data on his blog.
It appears that GISS has now had a couple of corrections to the data and you can see the results of that in the images below........
Here is the original October GISS temperature anomaly with the bad data. Image courtesy of Climate Audit.
Here is the correction from GISS as of November 12th. Image courtesy of Climate Audit.
Here is the latest correction from GISS.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller from GISS posted a response to the glitch on Real Climate.
In part two of her interview with NOAA scientist Michael McPhaden, Headline Earth's Katie Fehlinger finds out more about the influences of El Nino and La Nina.
Thanks goes to Katie for bailing me out today! Her new video just got finished in time to replace my lost blog. By the way, as of this writing my wife tells me we are still without power at home.
I was about 1 minute from finishing a new blog for today when our power went out at home and I lost it all. I have to say, my local power company is very unreliable and needs to upgrade their infrastructure as our area gets an outage about once a month and I am sick and tired of it! Time to file a complaint and get a credit on my bill. I have had enough. Yes, I know, I should hit save every few minutes or so. Anyway, I have to start my normal shift now that I am in the office, so I might not get a blog up till late today or this evening. Sorry. Brett.
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I just finished reading this excellent article from NASA's Earth Observatory, which is titled "Correcting Ocean Cooling".
In the article, Josh Willis, a scientist from the Jet Propulsion Lab describes in detail how a follow-up study of his on ocean heat content showed a surprisingly large, unexplained decrease in ocean heat content in the Atlantic from 2003 to 2006. Some of the media and web sites picked this up back then and concluded that global warming was not real. But, Josh did not trust his data and dug hard for more answers as any good scientist should do.
Through his hard work, Josh determined that there were errors in the Argo and XBT (bathythermograph) data. Some of the new Argo data was too cold and some of the older XBT sensor data was too warm. In short, when the bad data was taken out the ocean cooling went away.
The graphics from NASA below show the results of corrected data....
After applying a correction, the historical record shows a relatively steady increase (ocean heat content) in line with what’s shown by climate models. The remaining short-term variability is as likely to be natural variation, such as El Niño, as noise in the data.
The corrections made to this data impacted many other results from other studies including narrowing the gap between calculated and observed sea level rise. "What we found was that ocean heating was larger than scientists previously thought, and so the contribution of thermal expansion to sea level rise was actually 50 percent larger than previous estimates," said Catia Domingues, a CISRO scientist.
I like this last paragraph.......
"Models are not perfect," says Syd Levitus. "Data are not perfect. Theory isn’t perfect. We shouldn’t expect them to be. It’s the combination of models, data, and theory that lead to improvements in our science, in our understanding of phenomena."
It appears that TGdaily version of the MIT methane study was somewhat misleading. When I find articles like this, I usually try to see if there are other versions of the story from different sources and compare them. I also attempt to find the story about the study from the actual source, which in this case was MIT. When I wrote up this blog at the time I was unable to find the MIT article, which is not that uncommon, as many of these studies from universities do not get posted until a later date, or they are put into journals which are not accessible without a subscription.
In the TGdaily version of the story, they (TGdaily) stated that this study contradicts the climate change theory that man is the primary source for the increase in this greenhouse gas. Man is indeed the primary source for methane emissions (around 60-70%), but natural sources can certainly play a role in the increase in atmospheric methane and this has already been accounted for by climate change scientists in the IPCC. Here is the link to the actual MIT story from their website, and I cannot find anywhere in the actual MIT story where it says that this study contradicts a methane climate change theory.
The scientific team from MIT believe that the 2007 increase was partly caused by warming over Siberia, resulting in an increase in emissions from wetlands. In order to achieve this simultaneously global increase there needed to be a methane increase from the southern hemisphere. The teams best answer is that there was a drop in methane destroying hydroxyl in the southern hemisphere, but they are still not sure and further study is needed.
Key point from the MIT article......
"The key thing is to better determine the relative roles of increased methane emission versus an decrease in the rate of removal," Prinn (co-author of the study) said. "Apparently we have a mix of the two, but we want to know how much of each" is responsible for the overall increase.
Natural sources of methane emission are primarily from wetlands and insects (about 30% of the total).
I thank Mike Kaulbars for bringing attention to this. You can read his take on this story right here on his Greenfyre blog.
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My original blog is below.........
Atmospheric chemistry scientists from MIT have discovered that the world-wide increase in methane levels during 2007, which by the way was the first in 10 years, occurred siimultaneously, which would contradict theories that man is the primary source for significant increases.
According to the article from Tgdaily, it normally takes about 1-year got man-made gases generated in the more industrialized northern hemisphere to reach the southern hemisphere, but the methane levels recorded in this study rose simultaneously in the same year, indicating that this increase in methane may be part of a natural cycle.
The scientists caution that more study is still needed since 2007 is long gone and much of that data may not be that relevant during 2008.
There was an update to this report. A number of people wondered if the massive Siberian permafrost meltoff in 2007 was responsible. The authors disputed that saying that this episode was a northern hemisphere event and would still require the normal 1-year cycling to reach the southern hemisphere.
