Can the temporal response of the earth's climate to perturbations be used to invalidate climate theories?

Question

In an earlier question, we established that there is a time delay between the perturbation and effect.

http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20080129164421AAoR7ty

Which climate theories can be invalidated on the basis of the time correlation function of the proposed perturbation with the time series for the earth's temperature? ie <g(t)|g(t+x)> where x is a time constant from the prior question.

Answer 1

Your question sounds rather like someone trying to sell a perpetual motion machine design - designed to baffle so that one cannot see the wood for the trees.  Actually the earth&#039;s response to different radiative fluxes is quick as evidenced by the differences in air temperature between night and day.

Answer 2

None of the climate change theories can be invalidated with that argument.  Scientists aren&#039;t dumb, they think of all these things.  Your question is worded very fancy but has no substance to it.

Answer 3

Sure, you can invalidate the obvious ones.

For example, the theory that the current warming is due to the Sun.  Solar output has not increased for over 50 years.

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-...

And there is no time delay that large.  The same argument applies to galactic cosmic rays.

http://www.realclimate.org/images/TheChi...

Those are the 2 theories referenced most frequently by AGW skeptics, and quantifying the possible time delays illustrates that they are simply not plausible theories.

Answer 4

I don&#039;t think you could disprove AGW sufficiently strongly that people would stop believing in it.  

The fact that you can&#039;t detect the 11 year solar cycle in temperature fluctuations in the earth&#039;s climate suggests to me that the climate is not as sensitive to changes in radiative forcing as some researchers are suggesting.  

You counldn&#039;t really prove anything beyond all doubt and those who believe in AGW will continue to believe in it.

Answer 5

simply no.

in the past CO2 rising was due to the warming of the oceans. this acted as feedback increasing the size of the change brought about by the changes in the earth&#039;s orbit. that&#039;s why CO2 followed warming.

currently CO2 is increasing. this is not due to warming oceans because the increase is happening first and not following temperatures. also they can compare the isotopes of carbon and they have found that the ratio of carbon 12 to 14 in the atmosphere is increasing. this means that burning fossil fuels is largely responsible for this change in CO2 levels.

BTW no one is saying that there is a direct correlation between time and temp or co2 and temp. doing to would be ludercuris because the earth is a chaotic system.

Answer 6

Probably not, since we haven&#039;t been studying enough elements in the system to fully understand all of the processes involved and their interactions.

We may have a decent idea of how fast various components might react to simple greenhouse gas warming, but study of past climate change indicates many potential positive and negative forcing agents, some of which might get rapidly triggered after reaching a particular tipping point: albedo change due to melting ice, release of tundra methane, release of ocean sediment methane, changes in cloud cover due to increased water vapor (could be either a positive or negative influence on temperatures), negative forcing from aerosols, and so on.

I assume that youre referring to

&quot;HEAT CAPACITY, TIME CONSTANT, AND SENSITIVITY OF EARTH&#039;S CLIMATE SYSTEM&quot; by Stephen E. Schwartz, June 2007

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCa...

&quot;The time constant pertinent to changes in GMST is determined from autocorrelation of that quantity over 1880-2004 to be 5 ± 1 yr. The resultant equilibrium climate sensitivity, 0.30 ± 0.14 K/(W m-2), corresponds to an equilibrium temperature increase for doubled CO2 of 1.1 ± 0.5 K.&quot;

I won&#039;t have time to finish it tonight, but I notice the wording contains a few statements like, &quot;Here I use the framework of time series analysis to infer this time constant from the temporal autocorrelation of GMST. This analysis rests fundamentally on the fluctuation dissipation theorem of nonequilibrium thermodynamics [Einstein, 1905], which relates the impulse response of a dynamic system to the fluctuations of the system. While this applicability remains an open question...&quot;

So he seems to make some assumptions about the simplicity of forcings from 1880-2004 (when in fact CO2 may mainly come into play only in the last 30 years) and he admits that the applicability of his approach may be questionable.

His basic opinion is pretty clear though in plain English: &quot;No matter how the uncertainties are calculated, they are quite large relative to the estimated total forcing over the industrial period. In view of these uncertainties, which are due largely to uncertainty in aerosol forcing, it cannot be stated with certainty that the warming influences of CO2 and other GHGs exceeds the cooling influences due largely to aerosols, although this is likely to be the case.&quot;

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/schwartz.ht...

He goes on:

&quot;It should be emphasized that one should not take any comfort with the fact that the aerosols may be negating much of the greenhouse gas forcing--in fact just the opposite. Because the atmospheric residence time of tropospheric aerosols is short (about a week) compared to the decades-to-centuries lifetimes of the greenhouse gases, then to whatever extent greenhouse gas forcing is being offset by aerosol forcing, it is last week&#039;s aerosols that are offsetting forcing by decades worth of greenhouse gases. Because the greenhouse gases are long-lived in the atmosphere, their atmospheric loadings tend to approximate the integral of emissions. Because the aerosols are short-lived, their loading tend to be proportional to the emissions themselves. There is only one function that is proportional to its own integral, the exponential function. So only if society is to make a commitment to continued exponential growth of emissions can such an offset be maintained indefinitely. And of course exponential growth cannot be maintained forever. So if the cooling influence of aerosols is in fact offsetting much of the warming influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, then when society is unable to maintain this exponential growth, the climate could be in for a real and long-lasting shock.&quot;

So the chief scientist of the Department of Energy&#039;s Atmospheric Science Program doesn&#039;t consider his own work to &quot;invalidate&quot; AGW theory, but I&#039;ll be very interested to hear your take on it.

Here&#039;s more on Dr. Schwartz&#039;s expert opinion:

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/news/NorthShoreSu...

&quot;I&#039;m very concerned about the world my grandchildren will live in,&quot; said Mr. Schwartz, who is currently studying climate change. &quot;There could be an increase of four to eight degrees in the next century, and that&#039;s huge. The last time there was a five-degree Celsius decrease was the last ice age. An increase of eight degrees Fahrenheit would bring change unprecedented in the last half-million years.&quot;

Scientists aren&#039;t sure exactly what such a change in temperature could bring, but one of the &quot;big possible consequences&quot; is an increase in sea level, Mr. Schwartz said.

&quot;It&#039;s not out of the question that the ice sheet on Greenland could melt, and the consequence of that is the sea level would rise,&quot; he said. &quot;The shoreline on Long Island would move inland by two to three miles.&quot;

Mr. Schwartz, a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, is one of about 50 scientists studying climate change at the lab. Most recently, Mr. Schwartz published a study in June that has resulted in sensationalist headlines across the country.

A report on Fox News introduced the study by saying, &quot;Skeptics are increasingly certain the [global warming] scare is vastly overblown,&quot; and other news sources said Mr. Schwartz&#039;s study debunked the notion that global warming is a force with which humanity needs to contend.

This, he said, was not what he was trying to prove at all. Global warming is a very real reality, he said, and his study spells that out -- though in a different manner than those carried out by other scientists and organizations.

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http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/news/NationalPost...

Stephen Schwartz knows as much about the effects of aerosols on climate change as anyone in the world, and he&#039;s worried. He believes climate change is so massive an economic issue that we face costs &quot;in the trillions if not quadrillions of dollars.&quot;

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Darn, your direction sounded promising.  It&#039;s disappointing to find that you may be simply presenting another denial hoax from the professional propaganda artists.  They&#039;re really good, aren&#039;t they?  It blows my mind how poor and blatently misleading a news source Fox News is.  By the way, where&#039;d you pick up on the misleading misrepresentation of the Dr. Schwartz&#039;s conclusions?  Junk Science?  Heartland Institute?  Just curious.

Answer 7

No, because feed back mechanisms are not accounted for in climate theories because they are not intuitive, so they must be modeled by using computer simulations. In other words no theory could be intellectually shared between humans and have the slightest chance of getting it right, it will take petaflops of computing power, and a decade to refine the computer code required to handle the feed backs. Simple finite difference algorithms cannot handle the task, it will require some type of neural network system with genetic optimization to handle the feedback&#039;s.