Megaresponse
I’m concatenating all the responses. I hope you’ll read carefully, as I did spend a lot of time on this. And as you read, I’d be interested to see a list of claims in here that you suspect/believe are false. Then we could check those items in a more systematic way.
Acknowledged: greenhouse effect is necessary but insufficient.
From what I’ve seen of your approach to thinking about CO2, it seems to me you have an “if we don’t know everything, then we know nothing” philosophy… but this is not how risk management works, and in science we practically never know everything.
Obviously, increases to global average temperature are experienced as increases to local average temperature.
As an example I am in the Philippines right now (how about you?). For me, 25C is comfortable. 26-27C I can handle. 28C is annoying. And for 29C I need a fan, which then dries out my eyeballs.
It is a hot and very humid climate: much of the year it rarely drops below 25C at night, and it’s well over 30C most days. We open the windows at night to save power, if it’s not too hot (electricity is 3x the price charged in America).
Very few of the people have AC, so global warming sucks here. The climate of the Philippines last month is about 2°F hotter than 80 years ago, and my parents-in-law say it seemed cooler when they were kids:

But compared to Arizona or Iraq, we’ve been lucky. You can also see that the oceans have heated slower than the land, so it has generally risen faster where people live.
And of course, more extreme weather is projected. There is a larger standard deviation on weather patterns, meaning more hot records but not necessarily fewer cold records; more precipitation; more intense but possibly fewer hurricanes. This probably has economic costs which I’ve not examined.
Global warming is uneven. A lot of it occurs up north, so it’s a good time to be Canadian. A few places are colder or have no temperature trend, but this implies more warming elsewhere. Some places will get more heat waves and the equator will heat up too.
The heating may not harm you personally. But don’t say everybody should just suck it up. Especially given the evidence that higher temperatures increase violence.
Arguably, a bigger problem is rising sea levels. The temperature difference between ice and water can be small, and the poles are warming faster than anywhere else. However, it probably won’t be a big deal for at least decades, so it depends if you care about future generations or not.
Also, as I was writing way down below, organisms can’t adapt quickly enough to rapid climate change, which could lead to reduced biomass or a lot of extinctions. This is most obvious for some species of trees and plants that live in narrow latitude range. Depending on how they reproduce, they may be very slow at “migrating” northward; if the plant’s lowest latitude reaches its highest latitude, the tree/plant will go extinct. I saw a scientist who studies Koalas in Australia, explaining that those creatures are slow-moving and do not migrate quickly enough to get out of the expanding deserts of Australia. Increased weather variability can also have negative effects.
Melting permafrost is a peculiar problem in the Arctic. Building and roads built on permafrost rely on the assumption that it won’t melt; since it is thawing in places, keeping the buildings and roads in working order can be expensive.
And of course, there’s the other elephant in the room, ocean acidification, which still happens even if temperature were to somehow stop rising.
Well, the main point was just to show how the mainstream explanation of global warming fits together and is internally consistent, because I don’t think the sources you usually read would have explained it. I can also explain the greenhouse effect if you want :)
The fact that the ocean has high heat capacity was part of my point. Like a big thermal stone like you put in your oven, it resists warming up, and once the CO2 effect is removed (over hundreds of years), it will resist cooling. So the entire warming effect of CO2 has not yet happened. And oceans influence land temperatures, storm systems, etc.
I think you’ll find more fertile ground if you concentrate on how solar radiation actually warms the ocean.
How? Um, it warms the oceans by hitting them with photons :)

Now, as you probably know from your studies, cloud albedo is one of the least properly modeled and understood parameters in our models.
Yes, clouds are obviously quite hard. After many years of study, climate scientists believe clouds are a slight positive feedback, but it’s a small effect, and the error bars say it’s not possible to be certain that there is a significant effect.
If we really wanted to understand climate in a useful way, we’d probably be paying more attention to putting sensor networks in the ocean
Yeah. I heard there are seven teams measuring the ocean now, and a network of 4000 surface buoys (Argo) was deployed in 2000… that’s all I know.
Are you feeling a bit of cognitive dissonance? You’ve already admitted that the uptake of the oceans and vegetation was unexpected
Nope. The rate of uptake was not known precisely in the 1970s, and maybe not in the 80s. There were far fewer scientists studying climate science back then, and they had fewer sources of data. It may simply be an inaccuracy in early estimates, corrected once more data came in.
After the consensus formed in 1979 that AGW was a potential problem, a lot of new research was started, more measurements were taken, and more researchers turned their attention to the effects of CO2. After that, it would have taken some years for solid results to come in.
By the new millennium, all kinds of issues like the ones you’ve raised had either been investigated or were under investigation.
And that’s a gap in the models. If your models cannot account for terrestrial sinks and sources that dynamically react to changes in CO2, you’ll never be able to make decent predictions.
The models do account for this; there are research teams that study how life responds to different CO2 levels. It is estimated that, on balance, carbon sinks will slow down their absorption eventually.
All else being equal, plants absorb more CO2 as CO2 concentrations increase; however all else will not be equal. Plants also need nitrogen (which they strangely won’t take from the air), phosphorous and sulfur, and specific ranges and patterns of sunlight and rainfall (which are disrupted by global warming). Like a cat that is given unlimited dogfood, increased growth from CO2 should be muted by depletion of other nutrients in the soil.
Then, looking beyond the individual plants, there’s the question of how climate change will alter the vegetation landscape in ways that change the total biomass — some deserts are likely to shrink, while others are likely to get larger.
I think you mentioned bacteria. Scientists study that issue too (example). And they study the overall ecosystems (example).
So, there are scientists specializing in all the questions. They have done experiments on plants in controlled conditions in greenhouses. There are scientists doing experiments with underwater creatures — I saw a study where coral creatures were studied in water tanks; as carbonic acid increased according to both high and low IPCC projections, corals got more sickly or died. That tends to kill off life that hangs around corals. Not sure what studies have been done on other sea creatures, but the most reasonable assumption is that more carbonic acid is bad. There are CO2 domes over cities — how does this affect nearby plants? It would be no surprise if a team has already studied that.
Okay, imagine for example you’ve just identified the mechanism — plant life and the oceans actually drive atmospheric CO2 concentrations dynamically, based on temperature. Regardless of our human activity (or the activity of butterflies, or voles, or any other life form that generates CO2 as part of its life), nature will compensate for it. If CO2 is added, plant life grows to pick up the slack. If CO2 is removed, plant life dies and doesn’t absorb as much.
But there’s no evidence that such a buffering mechanism exists, is there? (regarding David Middleton’s claims below — I question his competence in basic math and reasoning.)
Here’s the tricky part — what if they also respond in a nonconstant and nonlinear way to decreased CO2 concentrations?
What do you mean?
Now, I understand the argument that PDO and AMO have no secular trend (that is, they average to zero over time), but that’s an assumption I don’t thnk has much basis in reality.
More importantly, their effects are globally small. PDO, the larger effect, simultaneously releases and absorbs heat. I don’t even know for sure which side of that equation is bigger. But since PDO is said to be a combination of three processes, the 60-year cycle may fall apart in the next 60 years (as only one cycle has ever been observed, IIUC.)
A buffer “solution”
Is anyone with credentials proposing a similar hypothesis? I’ve never seen it before. And it strikes me as unusual, because normally a hypothesis has some observations that motivated it — some reason why the hypothesis was chosen. That’s missing here. And it’s abstract, proposing no physical mechanism.
The data I’ve seen supports an exact opposite hypothesis.
Paleoclimatology shows there have been enormous (albeit very slow) global temperature swings, and huge changes to sea levels. While the swings match up with the Milankovich cycles, the effect of solar insolation+albedo alone is quite insufficient to explain such large changes (insolation varied by <0.7 W/m²). Also note that the temperature record does not look like the sum of the three sinusoids corresponding to the Milankovich cycles, so there is a nonlinear process that exaggerates, rather than buffers, the effect of these cycles. Climate scientists have always said CO2 causes the exaggeration.
Take a look at your graph again. Note the early period of warming in the early part of the 20th century is at the same rate as post-1970. The hiatus between 1940–1970 seems particularly odd, don’t you think?
The main explanation of the hiatus is large aerosol emissions in the post-war economic boom. Then, environmental regulations in the 1970s reduced aerosol emissions.
I’m sure you’ll agree that CO2 emissions increased dramatically post WW2. How was a rate of warming (look at the slope) as fast as we saw post WW2 possible pre-WW2?
This is a good question. A 2000 study explained it as human emissions plus an “unusually large realization of internal multidecadal variability of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system”:
You’re likely to point out that this is not the only explanation that you can imagine. However, it does fit into the existing theory, and it might help explain why the error bars in climatology are pretty large — natural internal variability can apparently create trends that are noticeable over multi-decade timescales.
This study also noted that not all factors had been considered (“solar and volcanic forcing, as well as with improved estimates of the direct and indirect effects of sulfate aerosols, will help to further constrain the causes”)
Since it’s an old study, I looked for (and found) more recent studies into early 20th century warming, as well as studies estimating the size of natural internal variability, but since I’ve pretty much spent the whole day responding to you, I’d like to take a break from investigating their conclusions. I’d encourage you to look at some studies in Google Scholar — without the WUWT jeer track. Whenever I hit a paywall, I just google the name of the paper...
Natural internal variability (NIV) is ambiguous. I suppose the interpretation in this paper is that an unusually high amount of NIV warming occurred before 1945, followed by a “rebound” in the 1945–1950 period, and then NIV had smaller effects in the rest of the century. Another interpretation is that CO2’s influence is a bit higher than thought, and that there was a smaller warming effect from NIV just before 1950, but a larger cooling effect at some point after 1970. (But this seems unlikely, as ocean cycles are the main cause of surface temperature variability, and ENSO records seems to go back at least to the 1950s, so if there had been a noticible cooling effect in the 1975–2000 range, I think I would have heard about it by now.)
Note that Paleoclimate records show a slight cooling trend for 5000+ years, which is similar to previous Milankovich cycles but with a slower cooling rate. We could therefore expect a slight natural cooling in the 20th century, if not for human influence.
As you may have intuited at this point, the problem is that the human body pursues homeostasis with all kinds of complex and interconnected systems, and will take the heat of the hot water in the bucket, and respond with sweating which would create evaporative cooling, or even slow the metabolism down in order to compensate.
First of all, that could at least heat up a person at least to a point of irritation.
However, the climate is not a living organism — it is big rock with a network of organisms, each distinct, and some ecosystems are fragile (technically all ecosystems are fragile in the mathematical sense proposed by Nassim Taleb, but then again, almost everything is fragile in that sense). Experiments have researched the reaction of collections of organisms — sea creatures and plants — to higher ocean pH and various combinations of heat, rain, increased CO2 and nitrogen. The results have been mixed. Whether the bad effects outweigh the good effects are a matter of debate, but it’s generally thought the bad effects are bigger.
However, the fact that some results are good allows people with a political agenda to trumpet only the good results.
You seem to believe in a “resilient Earth”. And it’s true, the Earth is resilient in the sense that “life” will always survive. But that’s not good enough — we want humans to survive. And that’s not good enough either — we want civilization to survive intact. There have been five big mass extinction events, and if we start a sixth one, the human race may suffer negative effects from that, at the exact same time as its population soars to 10 billion. This could lead to fighting over resources and tragedy-of-the-commons stuff, increasing the risk of WW3. You’re not concerned?
science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
Okay… remember the elephant story?
6 old blind wise men are told that there is an elephant on the outskirts of their village. None of them knew what an elephant was, and so they went over to see what they could find out by feeling the elephant.
“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.
“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.
“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.
“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.
“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.
“It is like a spear,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.
When it comes to huge, complicated problems, we’re not just blind but also paraplegic: we cannot feel most of the “elephant” for ourselves, and must rely mainly on other people’s stories of how the elephant looks and feels. Thus, who we choose to rely on determines our overall impression.
One of my favorite quotes is this:
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” — Newton
All the “easy” science was done 100+ years ago. As scientific fields get more and more complex, the importance of relying on others’ work keeps on increasing. Thus, the issue of trust is central.
I’d be interested to see the context in which Feynman’s statement was made. I’m sure he didn’t mean “laypeople should believe in the ignorance of scientists”.
Insofar as being critical, I find rather than looking at someone and seeing if they wear a business suit or a lab coat, I ask them for their necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
But your skepticism has only gone in one direction, right? Where are the “necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statements” of contrarian climatologists? And how much time do you devote to trying to demolish the arguments of, say, Roy Spencer?
Local studies have been done that show this.
That’s interesting. Now… what do we do with this information?
> It is not a reason for us, as members of the general public, to say “let’s not act on climate change.”
This reminds me of Pascal’s wager.
Whoa, now, you’ve got to be kidding me.
Are you suggesting that taking any action on climate change is a religious act, because you (you personally — not necessarily any climatologists) believe there might be a large unknown carbon sink?
Remember how the “missing carbon sink” in the link you sent was simply a lie? I call it a lie because any list of major carbon sinks will include vegetation (photosynthesis). I don’t think any honest author could have missed that. You’re reading untrustworthy sources.
Other sources treat the “missing carbon sink” issue quite differently — especially since it seems to be largely solved (example 1, example 2).
> Are you proposing that in the past CO2 massively and mysteriously increased over periods of 50 years and then, just as massively and just as mysteriously decreased?
If no ice cores are available in high resolution, it wouldn’t be possible to pick out the seasonal change in CO2 in the ice cores. Seasonal changes are small, and would not be visible with a large enough smoothing. So how do you think they are visible in the record?
For one thing, the “ages” of air molecules in the diffusive zone are not evenly mixed. For instance, at one ice core site it has been calculated that, while technically there are molecules from 30+ years in each bubble, it looks like about 3/4 of the molecules are from a single decade (age 7.5–17.5), thus preserving more detail than a simple moving average or a low-pass filter:

David Middleton’s claim in his ‘first guest post’ that we can trust plant stomatas for accurate CO2 readings is highly implausible. Stomatas may vary based primarily on CO2 content, but as a byproduct of biological growth, we should expect them to also be affected by other factors such as soil nutrients, precipitation, the bacterial environment, etc. Middleton’s own graph shows he’s full of crap, when he compares stomatas to the highly reliable Mauna Loa record. They’re very far apart:

His “5 point moving average” is blatantly fudged in the 20th century since it’s far from the actual data points. Also, you can’t compute a 5-point average without at least 5 points, and a “5 point moving average” is a strange quantity since the amount of time between the red points is uneven. And then he quotes another study simultaneously showing dramatically different CO2 levels…

“Yeah, that does a great job casting doubt on the ice cores,” I said sarcastically. Then he mentions ‘Moberg’s non-hockey stick reconstruction’, although Moberg’s actual paper is in agreement with the instrumental record and looks like the other temperature reconstructions I’ve seen including Micheal Mann’s 2003 Northern Hemisphere reconstruction, though with somewhat larger past variability.
So then in his new post he uses this graph:

Supposedly this shows that CO2 could be more variable than scientists believe. I don’t follow. If “mixing ratio” means “CO2 concentration” and “sample rate” means “number of readings per year”, what I see here is that:
- “Law dome” has a much higher sampling rate than “Taylor dome” because it gets much more snowfall.
- The black line is based on improperly combining the two datasets.
- Higher CO2 concentration is correlated with a higher sample rate, implying more snowfall. A related point is that climate scientists predict, as a general rule, more snowfall when global temperatures rise.
- Thus we get the highest resolution whenever CO2 concentrations are high. Here’s what Law Dome data looks like btw:

When I looked at this, I wondered why CO2 dropped suddenly in the last 3 decades of 1500. A team led by Richard Nevle explains this in a horrifying way, as the aftermath of tens of millions of deaths.
>solar energy dropped in price faster than anyone expected, and it’s now cheaper than coal in equatorial climates.
I’m going to call shennanigans, but I’m happy to be shown I’m wrong.
You linked to a 2014 article. Things have been moving fast!
earthquakes
PDO/AMO
hurricanes
tornadoes
droughts
floods
economies
technology
biology
Now, if someone is trying to tell me that on a regular basis, on every timescale imaginable, their predictions may be offset by natural causes, why should I predicate my life on their predictions?
As I was saying elsewhere, spending 0 to 2 percent of GDP isn’t exactly “predicating your life”, and humanity must transition away from fossil fuels anyway since they will run out anyway.
And then, even if I did get optimistic, we get to the intermittent and unreliable nature of solar energy, and the high cost both in rare metals and other toxics for battery technology
Solar proceeded slowly because when prices were high, sales volume was slow, so maximum economy of scale was not achieved. The price graph is inverse-exponential.
The same may be true of batteries.
However, solar will quickly take over southern climates with little need for battery storage, because energy demand peaks at roughly the same time as solar panels receive the most sunlight, due to ACs.
By the way, I’ve heard rare earths aren’t as rare as one might think. America has “rare earths” but we’re not mining them because of our screwed up regulations, as I mentioned somewhere in my article about LFTRs.
