Here’s another hockey stick graph. Interesting to compare it to the Michael Mann Hockey Stick that Al Gore used so effectively.
Gore’s Hockey Stick uses just the last five percent of this gr aph and makes you think that the temperature is about to explode. This graph shows some quite different things.
First, CO2 goes up more or less in lock-step with temperature for most of the graph, but generally lagging the temperature increases. It is only at the end that CO2 goes up without an increase in temperature.
This suggests that something is driving CO2 concentrations now other than what drove it before. I’m happy to accept that this “something” is man-made emissions.
However, while CO2 emissions climb significantly in the last few decades temperature does not follow suit and correlation appears to be broken.
There is another correlation that doesn’t appear to hold too well either. The warming effect of CO2 is logarithmic so if it is causing the warming it shouldn’t be tracking in lock-step with it, as it does for almost the entire 20,000 years. It should be increasing faster than the temperature.
Why isn’t it?
One reason could be that the CO2 increase is driven by outgassing from the oceans. As the oceans warm gasses are less soluble and they go out of solution into the atmosphere. This is a linear relationship which could be consistent with this graph.
This is certainly a graph that makes you think twice about the assumptions underlying the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.
I think there is a lot of literature out there, and the whole “hockey stick” thing has been explained to death.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy there is more info there than I am willing to type, but needless to say every scientific organisation on earth seems to see it as a non event. But I will say a few things.
If we saw less carbon dioxide dissolved in water we would see less carbonic acid, but we’re not seeing this, quite the opposite, also we see the Oceans as a carbon sink, not a producer of carbon and we can trace where carbon dioxide is released from, and it does seem to be from the burning of fossil fuels which is responsible for the 30% increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now if you want a direct relationship you have to remember there is a lot of lag in the atmosphere, nothing happens immediately and there may be a 30 year lag, and in some places you are going to get more drastic increases than other places.
Son in conclusion. If you want to read a book on Climate Change, reading Ian Plimer’s book is like reading Chariots of the Gods if you want to learn about archaeology.
Comment by hmmm — July 20, 2011 @ 1:37 am
I can always expect a troll when I post on this subject. So hmmmm where did the increase in CO2 come from before the 20th century? As it’s the IPCC’s view that it is only this century that man made CO2 emissions become significant where did the increase come from in the other 95% of the record? Or do you have information that the IPCC doesn’t have?
BTW, where did you get the idea I got my information from Plimer’s book? And in view of the call of Australian climate scientists to be treated with respect, don’t you think it’s a bit rude to be comparing him to Erich von Daniken?
Comment by Graham Young — July 20, 2011 @ 9:41 am
So the thing that annoys me most is the total inability of any climate model so far produced to replicate the past climate even given known data. How does a thinking person expect such a crippled model to correctly plot the future climate given hypothetical data.
What causes people to drop into groupthink. Apart from the chance to obtain research funding by towing the line.
The graph above is inconvenient and so will be ignored, or the last part of it promoted as anthropgenic atmospheric vandalism.
Comment by TL — July 23, 2011 @ 1:47 am
The hockey stick is just one of many examples of an exponential curve. Another good one is population.
Does anyone really doubt that CO2 emissions are increasing a lot, and that this relates to climate, as it has throughout Earth’s history?
Or that the seas are becoming more acid?
Comment by Ronda Jambe — July 23, 2011 @ 6:25 pm
Rhonda,why do believers deny the facts?If expodential increases in CO2 according to your theory cause global warming,why is it not happening? We in Sydney have just had 3 cold winters and this is by far the coldest.While we cannot point to isolated facts as being evidence to the contrary, we do see a general trend developing here.The earth has been cooling since 2000.
Ice core data shows CO2 increases come 800 yrs after temp increases which supports Grahams’s observation that increase in ocean temps cause a release of CO2
The Monkton/Denniss debate on the ABC was very revealing.Monckton won the debate because he made the salient point that science in the past has never been based on consensus.Richard Denniss constantly reveferred to bodies like CSIRO,NASA and the IPCC.This is not science.The two Aussies who found that bacteria were the cause of stomach ulsers,for years denounced as junk scientists.Perhaps the drug companies had a bit to do with that.Most people once believed that the world was flat.This was belief via consensus.
NASA by the way now admits that past warmings were caused by the SUN.Has God now changed the rules of chemistry and physics?
Comment by Ross — July 24, 2011 @ 1:04 am
Since anecdotal reports are unreliable, how about this site of climatologists that tracks global temperature trends:
http://reason.com/blog/2011/07/07/global-temperature-trend-updat
or this one:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
both say temps are getting higher.
Where is your data set that supports cooling?
Science eventually does operate on consensus (ie, we can agree the world is round and circles the sun, even though Gallileo was nearly excommunicated for that view).
Scientists agree CO2 raises temperature, any lags are part of the complexity.
Comment by Ronda Jambe — July 24, 2011 @ 5:07 pm
The facts remain that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that increasing it will increase temperature. But also that – as there is a discrete window of infra red that CO2 absorbs there is a level at which the CO2 effect plateaus out. The relevant CO2 greenhouse effect will then only increase as the size of the overlying atmosphere increases.
It appears that CO2 effect has already reached that plateau. So yes there is anthropogenic effect, we have already experienced it and it wont get worse, what we see in the main is climate change for other reasons.
Comment by TL — July 25, 2011 @ 9:51 pm
TL, I don’t think that the CO2 effect has plateaued, and while most of the CO2 component of it has happened.
But it is the reverse of what Ronda says. We are not looking at an exponential graph, at least not when it comes to temperature effects, but a logarithmic one, which is the inverse.
I put the graph up because it demonstrates the incoherence of graphing CO2 against temperature as though there is a linear relationship, and anyone who does it and claims it proves something ought to be taken out and have a straight line put through their heart!
Ross, you’re right it hasn’t gotten any warmer in the last 15 or so years, but that doesn’t mean it is cooling either. It’s quite consistent for a chaotic system to have a pause in an upward trend, without that trend being broken.
On the other hand, no-one can claim that the trend remains intact either. Trends only work in hindsight. We won’t know for another 20 or 30 years, maybe more.
Comment by Graham — July 25, 2011 @ 10:28 pm
Hi Rhonda
You need to learn how to read a graph and also how to check whether your graph has been fiddled or not… more here:
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_May_2011.pdf
Comment by Jennifer Marohasy — July 27, 2011 @ 7:27 am