Many climate experts are scientifically illiterate, and get confused by this graph showing the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature
The graph shows us two important facts.
- CO2 lags temperature, and responds to changes in solubility as the oceans warm or cool. This is one of the first things which freshman geology students learn, as it explains the formation of limestones.
- The recent rise in CO2 due to burning fossil fuels has had no impact on temperature.
Al Gore’s associate Laurie David didn’t like this relationship, so she simply reversed it in her children’s book – in a blatant attempt to defraud schoolchildren.
Lying to schoolchildren has made her a hero of the left and the White House.
Reblogged this on BLOGGING BAD w/Gunny G ~ "CLINGERS-AMERICA!".
How do you counter the argument that the lag may be accurate for periods before industrialization, but now man is causing rapid “unnatural” acceleration in CO2 levels? It seems like a fair point which would not be opposed to the “lag” evidence.
Did you actually read the article before commenting?
I did… maybe not close enough. will read it again.
can you post a link to that article? I can’t seem to find it now.
Think about it: if CO2 follows temperature increases in all past times, then temperature drives CO2 increases.
If that’s the case, and we are (as is generally accepted) recovering from the Little Ice Age, then it would make sense that CO2 would be increasing now.
There is no reason to think that a relationship which the historical records shows is persistent (ie. temps drive CO2) would suddenly reverse (ie. CO2 drives temps), especially when we have evidence that the same patterns as the past are now occurring (ie. temps recovering from the LIA lows).
To show that the historical relationship has suddenly reversed would require either incredible proof, or staggering fraud.
well Anto, given the evidence of data tampering all over the place….
“1.CO2 lags temperature, and responds to changes in solubility as the oceans warm or cool.”
If CO2 was the all powerful driver of T, then we would not have repeated instances of said T dropping, while CO2 is rising.
The IPCC says that co2 would not affect T until 1950. Since thenglobal average T dropped .3 C, and then from 1975 until 2005, rose .5C maybe, (Hadcrut 3) and turned flat, now dropping since about 2005. The correlation they are looking for is absent for 44 of the 64 years.
I am not disputing you. I agree that the correlation of CO2/T based on their hypothesis is unproven.
@daveandrews723:
The cause and effect relationship between ∆CO2 and subsequent ∆T has a mountatin of corroborating evidence to support it. Here is another chart — there are many more like it, on time scales from years to hundreds of millennia. But there is no such evidence showing that ∆CO2 causes ∆T. None at all.
If you don’t accept the evidence, then your mind is closed. if you do accept the evidence, then you have to re-assess the evidence-free alarmist claim that changes in CO2 cause changes in T. If that happens, the effect is so minuscule that it is unmeasurable.
So, daveandrews723, is your mind open? Or is it closed? This is where the rubber meets the road. Either the scales fall from your eyes… or your belief is religious, and therefore it cannot be changed by scientific facts.
Which is it?
I think I get your point. There are points on the first graph where CO2 increases lead temperature increases, though they are exceptional. And of course the large increase in CO2 since industrialization will lead whatever comes after it, such being the nature of time. So the warmists argue that the extra CO2 now can have a bigger impact than in the past and will lead additional warming. It’s hard to make out, but in the first graph it looks as though CO2 has got ahead of temperature again currently.
The answer would seem to be that, in the past, any warming effects from CO2 were eliminated by some natural variation, since humans were not a dominant factor in earlier times. So, contrary to the IPCC, natural variation appears to be more powerful than CO2’s contribution to warming.
Lets say this time is different. Why would that be? What’s the mechanism? Then it gets back to the simple fact that the CO2 absorption spectrum overlaps that of vastly more prevalent water vapor. So increasing concentrations of CO2 can’t exponentially increase warming, it takes some other mechanisms. Those used to be called “feedback loops”. But even the alarmists don’t talk about those anymore, as they’ve grown more dishonest. At least before they used to acknowledge CO2 wasn’t enough to cause concern by itself.
Even I, a non-scientist knew about the historical lag between temperature and CO2. Not sure where I knew that from, but when global warming became a thing and this historical “correlation” was brought up, I remember thinking, wait that’s not what happened before. If I were going to school today, I’d never have been told that in the first place.
Another trick the AGW crowd do is to show updated SH ice dates
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png (fits the agw mantra)
But delay the NH ice dates
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png (does not fit the AGW mantra, aint going our way) LOL
She not only reversed the relationship, she made the red line ABOVE the blue line to fool people into thinking this is the driver of the blue line and is ‘bigger’ and ‘more important’.
BTW of course increased SH does NOT fit the mantra but for some time they maintained that it did because increased SH ice was due to increased snow precipitation due to higher SH temperatures which is and was complete BS.They have been no significant increases in Antarctic temperatures
With the inconvenient, and clearly deranged, Medieval Warm Period occurring between around AD950 to AD1250, on the basis of the peer reviewed climate restorations ( those predating the modern era Climastrology Science Fiction Cult revisionism of course) indicating that approximately 800 years after this period one would confidently expect to see an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere sometime in the time period AD1750 to AD2050, what should we conclude when we have seen precisely that?
Business as usual for Gaia on Planet Earth as far as I can see.
actually her graph makes it pretty clear that absolute CO2 level is only loosely coupled to temperatures. Otherwise, explain the HUGE gaps between the lines during the cold periods when you line up the peaks. I suppose scaling would fix that (and I don’t know why they didn’t do that), but if you maintain a legitimate scaling such as % of change, or absolute (measured from zero) for both lines then this dichotomy becomes glaring.
Of course even with scaling games you still have those glaring time delays between warming and CO2 instead of the other way around. Ooops. How about a universal, variable, time constant to “properly” adjust the timing of the peaks? The Data Adjustment Bureau is falling down on its job folks.
My first editorial comment on AGW was in 1989 where I made a similar point using a can of beer. Open an ice chilled beer, there’s a crisp spritz. Open a beer that’s been in the trunk all day, geyser! Why? Well, CO2 is more soluble in cold liquid then in hot. Pretty basic. So if the earth warms up CO2 will respond, i.e. follow, lag, by coming out of solution. The earth warms and cools for scores of natural reasons outside and orders of magnitude greater than the influence of industrialized man.
that’s why the Goracle’s chart in his infamous slide show is laid out ‘backwards’. For normal people the past is to the left on a chart and today or the future lays to the right. With his backwards chart it is “apparent” that CO2 builds first a point he never clears up in his presentations.
Saw this on Tom Nelson yesterday. It shows NASA is lying to kids:
http://climatekids.nasa.gov/carbon/
“So, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are good—up to a point. But CO2 is so good at holding in heat from the Sun, that even a small increase in CO2 in the atmosphere can cause Earth to get even warmer.
Throughout Earth’s history, whenever the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up, the temperature of Earth has also gone up. And when the temperature goes up, the CO2 in the atmosphere goes up even more.”
They then show the same CO2-Ice area graph but don’t explain that the temperature in the graph has changed 1st and by hundreds of years.
You’re tax dollars at work… : )
the NASA SABER Project has clearly shown that CO2 acts as a barrier to solar heating, in effect insulating us from direct solar heating, thus more CO2 more heat insulation. This of course has been conveniently buried in the so-called “news” media.
Reblogged this on vuurklip and commented:
The clearest proof that CO2 is NOT the major cause global warming.
The video below changed me from a warmist to a skeptic.
If you haven’t already seen the video below, it shows the CO2 lag and Al Gore & the IPCC’s fundamental deception on CO2. It makes it clear as day that there is NO evidence that CO2 affects temperatures. Share and spread the word about it, because everybody that believes the warmists needs to see it:
Lying to school children is how you get future Democrats, and presidents like Skeeter.
What about wildfires? Why don’t you mention their role? Is it possible that effect of wildfires plus vulcanos is greater than everything else? Do you remember eruption in Iceland that stopped airflights from many countries?
The US is having one of the slowest wildfire seasons on record. Almost nothing outside of the west coast. less than half of normal burn acreage.
Is there really ice cores that confirm the “present” concentration of CO2 approaching 400 ppm or is there a lag there too? Was instrumental data spliced on or is this data from the cores exclusively?
Steven, I love your work, I really do. I’m fairly new here (but not new to climate blogs) and I have hit your Tip Jar once already for $200, and offered to double the dose recently in a comment which you probably never saw. That’s OK. You’re frenetically busy. Thank you for all the important work that you do.
At the same time, I have to say that IMHO you let yourself down by the way you glibly present things.
In this article, you say “Al Gore’s associate Laurie David didn’t like this relationship, so she simply reversed it in her children’s book – in a blatant attempt to defraud schoolchildren.” You failed to explain HOW she reversed it. What was obvious was that she had moved the CO2 line upwards (hey, that’s allowed). So where did she reverse it?
Lots of eyeballing of the two graphs ensued. After about 2 minutes, I finally noticed that what she had done was to REVERSE THE TIME AXIS. How many new visitors to your website would NOT spot this, and leave, thinking you are a crank? New website visitors are hard enough to get without sending them on their way in the first minute or two with a negative impression.
And so you get comments like James Strom’s : “I think I get it…” and then he proceeds to describe how he does not really get it. Or somebody makes a comment and you answer them tersely with “Did you even read the article before commenting?” Gosh, this was a small article. Surely they read it. What they hadn’t done was comprehend it.
In other posts, you may have done fantastic work investigating the outrageous adjustments, and present a graph of your results with absolutely no explanation of “HOW” you arrived at those results (other than a short description on the graph of the “WHAT it purports to be”). If people are interested in the “WHAT” that you present, then they will naturally try to verify it with the “HOW”. You often fail to give people the “HOW”. Regulars here will probably get what you are saying – as a newbie here, I am filled with enthusiasm, and at the same time, doubt.
I sense that people often don’t get the NUB of what you are saying. They get the GIST but not the NUB. You need to explain HOW you arrived at what you are presenting.
Write according to your target audience. If you want to entertain just the regulars, and spurn the newbies, then carry on as you are. I’ll keep visiting. But if you want to make an even bigger impact, write your articles for the newbies, backing everything up with an explanation of exactly “HOW” you arrived at the point you are making.
Maybe this is what Anthony Watts was pointing to when he said “Steven Goddard needs to do better.” The fact is that Anthony initially MISUNDERSTOOD the huge point you were making. That’s as much a reflection on your presentation as his comprehension. Try to see his ruffling of your feathers as a gift, pointing to possible improvement and even greater results by slightly changing your presentation. I for one, would remove all commentary on political matters. If somebody of the Left comes to your blog and sees you bagging Obamacare then they probably leave straight away. You’ve lost them.
You seem to have amassed an amazing collection of newspaper clippings relating to historical weather events. Where do you stand legally on publishing these in book form – say as an e-book? Is that allowed? It could be just the thing that makes the everyday Joe sit up and take notice of the message you are pushing – that the alarm has been created by adjustments, and the cherry picking of stations – and conditions that we have been told are exceptional today were even more exceptional in the not so distant past when CO2 was lower, and temperatures were… higher? Hey, wait a minute!!
Please take this note in the spirit in which it is delivered. I would be more than happy to edit such a book for you, pro bono. Feel free to email me direct.
I for one don’t see bagging obamacare as a negative.
Neither do I, but the site is called Real Science; it’s not called Cheap Politics.
My comment was about Steven directing his articles to the level of his target audience. If he wants to convince the masses that they have been duped, then don’t scare them off with side issues. Stick to the main game, and explain it better.
ZZZZZzzzzzzzz………………
The problem isn’t that she reversed the time axis, it is that she reversed the relationship between CO2 and temperature. It isn’t a mirror image, rather it is intentional fraud.
In an attempt to answer my own question about how she did it while still trying to maintain her credibility, I took a snapshot of her graph and flipped it horizontally. I then zoomed it to roughly the same size as the first graph and tried to line up the blue and red lines. In my opinion, most of the fiddle occurs simply by her raising the red CO2 line so that its peaks align with the temperature peaks, whereas the first (yellow) graph has the troughs of both lines aligned. It’s simple to imagine the effect of this: imagine two lines making a mountain shape, one beneath the other and with a much lower peak than the other. Then take the lower mountain and move it up to where the peaks align – the leading edge of the lower peak will now be outside the leading edge of the higher. I suspect that there has also been a slight movement of the red CO2 line to the left (in my flipped image) to assist the impression that CO2 leads temp. Fraud, it seems.
Please point me to a single non-political warmist article. I am unable to find one…
Good point, Deda!
Does that make them right? Or ideal?
OK, here’s one:
drroyspencer.com
I searched for “obamacare” on Spencer’s website and got no results. He gets to address congress. Would he get to do that, or maintain his credibility, if he threw mud on his blog every day?
Look, the simple fact is that many right of centre people like me want to convince our left of centre friends that this whole thing is bad science. The other day, the first 4 articles on Steven’s blog were great, and I was tempted to forward the link to a couple of my friends. Then the 5th article was just expressing anger at Obamacare. And then another. I didn’t send the link – what was the point? It would just end up invoking another never-ending Right vs Left argument with my friends, rather than force them to look more closely at the science. Once they open their minds to the weakness of the science, they will come to see the weakness on the political side.
I understand the anger with Obamacare… and at some point, it becomes self-sabotaging for Steven to keep doing this. He ends up just preaching to the converted and sending away those that really need converting. Steven has a great message; at the moment, IMHO, he is muddying it. That saddens me, because there is a great book in there, collating all those newspaper clippings from the past, and relating them to the original temperature records and the adjusted temperature records.
Just sayin’
I agree SG is to good to squander his efforts etc.Maybe doesn’t have the time? BEST skeptic site by far BTW.
Crowbar, I am honored to have read your comments to this article. A great perspective of how to look at what he or anyone has posted. I can already see that some have proven their myopic attention spans, which is mostly why many don’t take the time to listen to everything and the “gist” has to be packaged in rhetoric.
I can’t really affiliate myself one way or the other, I can only try to believe in what I believe, and will admit, tends to fall more in align with left rather than right. I like utilizing historic data in attempts to make a point, but I also would be curious to see the outlay of temps to CO2 on a smaller and more recent scaling vs. maybe a 100,000 years ago. The data exemplifies an excellent point, but this tends to fall under the same idealistic economic models of how supply and demand works from my perspective. The reason I ask for a scaled model as well is due to my thought that technology would seem to me be an un-calculated factor in the course of world history. It’s quite possible that under the course of natural cycles, the world will tend to correct itself, and I wouldn’t believe that cycles wouldn’t occur. But my skepticism lies in that the causes of CO2 increases(just in my opinion) comes from a source in large enough scale that hasn’t been shown and can’t be shown in all of the world’s historic data.
Now, that is just my thought process, and I could very well be wrong in my thinking, but I would hope it’s enough to at least find a way to explain that part out and thus be able to conclude nature will take its course…but my one caveat to that is, will the corrective measure if any be that we will still be here as perhaps the corrective actions will be quite catastrophic?
Just my thoughts I ponder.
Cheers,
Matthew