Friday, April 1, 2011

Trenberths missing heat has been found!

There have been a lot of discussion about "Trenberths missing heat", e.g., see "Examining Trenberth’s ‘The heat will come back to haunt us sooner or later’ statement". What it is all about is that in the global energy budget there is approximately 0.8 W/m2 missing to confirm the AGW hypothesis based on CO2.


(Picture linked from US National Science Foundation)

After careful investigation I have today, April 1, 2011, found where the heat is! The explanation is a rather simple Y2K problem showing up in Trenberths calculations. As you all know, there are 365 days every year, except for every four years which has 366 days. Except that there are exceptions to first exception. Please consult Wikipedia's page about leap year for the details.

The problem that has happened in Tranberths calculations is that from 2000 and onwards, he has forgotten to add the leap days to the leap years. Not a big deal? Actually it is.

The energy that heats the earth is approximately 1366 W/m2, see Sunlight. The increase in energy when adding the approximately 0.25 days per year is thus: 0.25/365. This result in the total change in the energy budget with 1366*0.25/365 which is approximately 0.94 W/m2. It could possibly be that the year 2000 is correctly handled in Trenberths calculation and thus the difference will be lower.

In any case, this difference is well within the estimation error done by Trenberth. Thus, the missing heat has been found to be a simple calculation error for leap years following the year 2000.

Personally I think this is a disaster. This actually shows that the AGW hypothesis has been correct all the time but the calculations have been incorrect. Until today, I have always thought it was the other way around, i.e., the hypothesis is incorrect since it could not be possible to do simple calculation mistakes with the huge amount of review each climate science paper must undergo. Not to forget all "skeptics" that would do anything to find the smallest of errors in any paper.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Utopi vs verklighet

Jag sitter och skummar genom ett stort antal bloggar och läser på SkepticalScience hur man kan gå över till helt "förnybara" energikällor.

We recently examined how Australia can meet 100% of its electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020. Here we will examine how that goal can be scaled up for the rest of the world.

...

There's a saying, "where there's a will, there's a way". In this case we have a way to fully transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy by 2050. The question is, do we have the will?


Men som jag ser det så lär inte användningen av olja, kol och naturgas minska något nämnvärt det närmaste decenniet eftersom det är alldeles för billiga energikällor. Om man har en förhoppning eller målsättning att ersätta fossila energikällor så måste man konkurrera ut dem, jag ser inget annat sätt. Med andra ord, det som presenteras på SkepticalScience ser jag som ren utopi.

I verkligen händer det istället riktiga och viktiga saker. Läs tex om att Kina kommer starta byggandet av sin första Gen IV reaktor. De viktigaste fördelarna med Gen IV jämfört med de gamla skruttarna som vi har i Sverige (och som för den delen även finns i Japan där det nyligen uppstod härdsmälta) är säkerhet, kostnad samt användningen av bränslet på ett annat sätt så att man slipper problemet med slutförvaring.

Gen IV kraftverk är ingen lösning för all framtid, men det är en möjlighet att på kort sikt konkurrera ut fossila bränslen (om man nu så önskar). Den enda möjligheten. Varför är den sk miljörörelsen emot ny modern kärnkraft? Varför vill man satsa på miljöförstörande teknik som tex vindkraft? Varför vill man symbolisera framtiden som mörk och osäker med Earth hour istf att se ljust på framtiden, utveckling, människans drivkraft och uppfinningsrikedom? Själv skall jag inte "fira" människans undergång under Earth hour på lördag utan istället tända en (energisnål) lampa för upplysningens timme. Det tycker jag att du också skall göra!

(Länktipsen kommer från Gunnars Littmarks blogg)

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

CO2 and ice ages?



On Skeptical Science there appeared a blog today about "Understanding the CO2 lag in past climate change". They show a figure from the ice core records from Vostok.

I actually studied this particular data a few weeks ago since I noticed a small error in the figure presented on Wikipedia. If you look very carefully you will notice that the three graphs are not aligned properly!

I downloaded the data and made my own graphs. You may find all the figures and Octave/Matlab scripts here: http://www.ekstrand.org/climate/iceage20101122/.

About the main question, what conclusions are possible make from this data? I can think of three different things:

1) There is a systematic error in the data and CO2 and temperature should be aligned (if you didn't notice, there is a 600-1000 year delay in the CO2 levels after the temperature). CO2 is the primary control knob of the earths temperature. We have no explanation for the CO2 changes.

2) CO2 does not affect the temperature in any significant way. But the temperature of the oceans will control the CO2 in the atmosphere. We have no explanation for the temperature changes.

3) CO2 has a major impact on earths temperature: more CO2 will cool the earth.

On Skeptical Science they promote the theory that CO2 provides positive feedback. That means that something triggers an increase in temperature -> CO2 levels will rise -> more temperature rise. But we can't make that conclusion from this data since there is no explanation why the temperature rise stops and we get a temperature drop when the CO2 level increases far enough. Does the positive feedback turn negative all of a sudden?

You have to look at the graphs more than once. But after a while you will probably see what I wrote as item 3: The high CO2 level will actually push the earth into a new ice age. The temperature increase -> CO2 levels will rise -> as CO2 levels rise a negative feedback kicks in -> temperature decreases -> CO2 levels will fall after some time.

As far as I can tell, item 2 and 3 are both consistent with the theory outlined in Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory.

But item 1 and the description on the Skeptical Science blog does not appear to be reasonable from this data alone.

World climate widget shows too low temperature?

For those of you how look at the world climate widget on the right hand side of my blog may have been puzzled by the last update with the December 2010 temperature. The temperature anomaly is now at +0.18C, while it was "much" higher just a month ago. There are two reasons for this:

1) The global temperature is decreasing really fast as a result of the transition from El Nino to La Nina conditions last year.
2) There is a change in the base line for the anomaly.

The reason for the base line change can be found on Roy Spencer's blog:

"NEW 30-YEAR BASE PERIOD IMPLEMENTED!
Sorry for yelling like that, but if you have been following our global tropospheric temperature updates every month, you will have to re-calibrate your brains because we have just switched from a 20 year base period (1979 – 1998) to a more traditional 30 year base period (1981-2010) like that NOAA uses for climate “normals”."

So, no need to worry this is just a small offset update as it has no implications of the actual interpretation of the data.