Geronimo

Sorry, that should have been

1) CO2 concentration stabilised at 395ppm.

The would be the ECS you're referring to, in the meantime we will only have TCR to deal with because the CO2 is showing no signs of stabilising. I'm not underestimating anything, at least I don't think I am, I'm using empirical data which shows that the TCR cannot explain the changes in temperature, and pointing out that no one else can either.

Both you and Dana have used the deltaT = lambda deltaF formula to estimate short term temperature rise, in the case of Nutti he announced that 0.29C was near enough to 0.45C to say that CO2 caused all the warming.

Geronimo, Mike Jackson, Martin A

Three posts playing the uncertainty card. ☺

Of course it is uncertain! This is not an electric circuit on a bench, about which you can have complete information.

This is a planet.

Don't be too keen to play the uncertainty card. Uncertainty is not necessarily your friend. The bottom end of the range is fairly benign; the top end is truly unpleasant.

Unfortunately, as more information comes in, the lower end outcomes are looking less likely and the high end projections more likely.

Do you feel lucky, punk?

"In areas where there are no currents the deep ocean will equilibrate to 4C"

Why? Why doesn't it eventually warm up to the atmospheric temperature. Conduction would be a slow process but it would eventually get there wouldn't it? Or are you saying it has always been 3/4 degrees throughout Earth's history. I asumed it would have cooled down a bit during a 100,000 year glacial period.

Do you have a link to a simple physics proof of the bottom being 3 or 4 degrees?

This is very lazy - commenting on a second hand comment about something someone else (EM) is supposed to have written. But how did the change in radiative forcing from CO2 over the period 1910-40 become 5.35ln(310/290)? Data in climatology changes from month to month, but Nasa/GISS still has the CO2 concentration for 1910 at around 300, that for 1880 around 290. This change would approximately halve the claimed figure (and the stated observed temperature change of 0.45C over this period seems slightly low as well).

The point I was going to make on the question at issue concerns the climate literature. This must be exceptional (??) for the proliferation of different sources for essentially the same data, together with the repeated, frequent revision of these data sets. Empirical research in this literature must rapidly become obsolete through the data used having changed considerably. A transient literature cannot be helpful to any discipline.

"Three posts playing the uncertainty card."

"Of course it is uncertain! This is not an electric circuit on a bench, about which you can have complete information.

This is a planet."

Is the vino kicking in? You are the one saying there's a direct and predictable outcome from increased CO2 - just like an increase in voltage will increase current if resistance stays the same - we are the ones saying that simpleton ideas about being able to foretell the future based on one parameter in an incredibly complex interacting system is bollocks.

It's not uncertainty I'm worried about it is complete and utter ignorance of what has caused warming and cooling in the climate system being presented as "uncertainty".

Rob Burton

Martin A got in ahead of me. Cooler water is denser water, until you get to 4C. It then gets less dense to 0C when it freezes. This is why ice floats.

Most of the 4C deep ocean water comes originally from the Arctic or Antarctic. Being denser than warmer water it sinks off the continental shelves onto the abyssal plain and stays there.

If you look at the temperature profile of the oceans you see decreasing temperatures as you go deeper.

In the Arctic and Antarctic you get meltwater at less than 0C which complicates things somewhat.

You would only warm that deep ocean water once the supply of cold water stops. This would require a complete thaw of both the Arctic and Antarctic. While there is more than 500 cubic kilometres/year coming off Greenland and Antarctica land ice at present, a complete thaw looks unlikely.

Martin A

Alas, someone else always beats me to the good lines. ☺

Mike Jackson

"What "top end"? Temperatures, as far as we know, were higher during the MWP and the Roman Warm Period and probably the Minoan Warm Period as well, during which civilisations flourished."

That is based on transient spikes in one ice core. Combine data from many ice cores and the spikes disappear.

Most of the rest of your post is a rant, not worth a reply.

I will mention that one of the two solar papers you mention discusses a drop in sunspot activity of 60%. This is less change than you see in one solar cycle and a cooling effect of about 0.2C. Your mini ice age looks unlikely.

Regrettably all this is not a joke. Sometime this century will be hit by a ropadope of resource depletion, overpopulation and climate change.. Denial is not going to help.

Geronimo

You still have this all or nothing approach to uncertainty.

Look at the manual for your multi-meter. It will say something like *"Measurement. Of resistance in the range 0-1000 Ohm's. Uncertainty +/- 0.05 Ohm's.

Electronics must be a marvellous profession. All the uncertainty left behind with the scientists who developed the principles you use with such confidence.You do not even seem to be aware of the uncertainties under which you operate.

EM. You have no idea what my approach to uncertainty is, but strangely you're certain you know. You seem to have a definition of uncertainty which allows complete and utter ignorance to be called "uncertainty" which, conveniently, allows warmist alarmists to make outlandish forecasts for the future of the climate and mankind on the basis of applying probabilities to ignorance. "Uncertainty" in the real world is meant to imply there is some basis for making a choice of emperical alternatives, but climate scientists aren't looking at the scientific alternative of a voltmeter and telling us that its accuracy is +/-0.5%, (empirical evidence from voltmeter), they're making shit up (computer models programmed by people who believe there are upcoming disasters) and telling us it has an accuracy of +/-0.5%.

And I don't want to go into a philosophical debate about the eye of the reader when looking at a voltmeter, or the angle at which it's read, or the affect of warming on the voltmeter output etc. etc. these are all uncertainties we can live with because the voltmeter is measuring a real world phenomenon.
I note you've stopped giving me lessons on TCR. Both you and Nutti made, what for you is, a blunder when working out the 1910 - 1940 temperature rise. You could have made a good case for the 0.45C rise in temperature if you'd thought about it for a bit, and almost certainly would have presented it as such, but you didn't. I any event it would have made other calculations less certain. But that's uncertainty for you.

Mike J. I fear the "optimists" are very much in the minority. We have always had people telling us that if we don't do as they demand there will be terrible consequences, and they have always found more people who believe them than those who don't, and moreover, managed to silence the non-believers to remove all possible doubts. I take the environmental movement very seriously indeed, people may look upon them as a small minority who are irritating, and indeed making some good suggestions about the environment, but underneath it all is a tyranny waiting to happen. They are undermining democracy with lobbying and organised protests, including letter writing protests; they have successfully stopped the development of fracking in the UK on the back of a campaign of fear mongering lies; the have prevented the production and distribution of Golden Rice with a campaign of fear mongering lies and physical bullying. The are a thoroughly malign influence on human beings, and not much better on the environment they claim to be protecting, but instead of being rebuffed they are growing in influence, with Obama being to the environmental movement what the Emperor Constantine was to Christianity.

The only fear I have for my children and grand children is that these ugly reminders of past tyrants get into political power whence their cruel and vicious intentions will be able to flourish under the rule of law.

As for EM, methinks he's an SkS regurgitator, but you're bang on on wanting to understand why these people want there to be catastrophic threats, they have a psychological need for the prospect of a dire future unless we execute virgins on the first of every month, or similar token actions that, surely they know? won't have the slightest effect on our climate.

Martin A The human need to believe in upcoming catastrophes, Nostradamus was still being quoted in the 1970s, and the failure of the most ambitious forecast of all Robert Malthus' theory of population didn't die with it's demonstrable failure. I take solace that we've been here before and here is a quote from the 1830 parliamentary debate on what to do about Malthus' theory that I cherish.

"On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?"

Thomas MacAuly