Apparently the original caption read:

Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959

But it seems to have morphed to:

Skate (SSN-578),taken in summer, perhaps in August 1958.

The above is from Real-Science: Navy Changes Their Caption

Innocent error by some alarmist file keeper who couldn’t conceive of the upper caption being correct?

An adjustment to better suit the Global Warming hysteria meme?

Day by Day, from Sept 28:

Original source for this cartoon: Day by Day

Day by Day is a long running series. Years, actually. It leans strongly conservative, so if you lean that way you’ll probably like it. If you don’t, well…

….

This strongly suggests that while the the linear response assumption made in a) may be valid (per attractor) — or may not, but it will be a huge problem to prove it — the effect isless than the natural excursion, not greater than the natural excursion, and the negative feedback factors that make the multistable attractors (locally) attractive also act asnegative feedback on the CO_2 induced shift!

The latter is the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, as I already noted in one thread or another (two tired of writing to go see if it was this one). In an open system in a locally stable phase, the oscillations (fluctuations) couple to the dissipation so that more fluctuation makes more dissipation — negative feedback. If this is not true, the locally stable phase is not stable.

This is a strong argument against catastrophe! The point is that given that CO_2 is making only small, slow, local shifts of the attractors compared to the large shifts of the system between the attractors, if there was a point where the system was likely to fall over to a much warmer stable point — the “catastrophe” threatened by the warmists — italmost certainly would have already done it, as the phase oscillations over the last ten thousand years have on numerous occasions made it as warm as it is right now.

The fact that this has not happened is actually enormously strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe. Yes, anthropogenic CO_2 may have shifted all the attractor temperatures a bit higher, it may have made small rearrangements of the attractors, but there is no evidence that suggests that it is probablygoing to suddenly create at new attractor far outside of the normal range of variation already visible in the climate record. Is it impossible? Of course not. But it is not probable.

The whole thing: No new strange attractors: strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe

Luboš Motl, of The Reference Frame, writes about Milankovitc Cycles and how some recent work has greatly tightened up their agreement with observed data. He also adds some remarks on CO2 and temperatures.

This paper by a former student of Richard Lindzen finally managed to fix Milutin Milankovič’s theory which hadn’t worked and the outcome was a theory that does work. The graph below contains both theoretical predictions as well as the observed data about the Northern Hemisphere temperature and you may see that the match is beautiful:

As the TRF article mentioned above shows, previous attempts to make the theory work displayed the right frequencies but the graphs never really agreed. The probability that the agreement above is coincidental is pretty much zero. Lots of high-frequency wiggles agree. In the future, one may optimize the Milankovič theory but these will be incremental improvements; the qualitative fact that the astronomical cycles dictate “most” of the dynamics in the glaciation cycles has been established by the graphs above.

….

Dynamics of CO2 concentration after fossil fuels

However, what’s even more absurd is the role that is being attributed to CO2. CO2 will only be modified due to the human activity for a few centuries which is much shorter than the time needed for the ice age cycles to collect several Celsius degrees – that requires thousands or tens of thousands of years….

Here’s the rest: Will CO2 save us from next ice age?

I do have a quibble, though. As I understand it, most plants (even grasses) have severe difficulty when CO2 levels drop below 200ppm. If it were to drop to 180ppm as LM suggests, then I suggest that we might see some major plant extinctions, beyond that caused directly by the lower temps of an ice age.

So either plants can survive at lower CO2 and the CO2 biology is not understood or, much more likely, CO2 levels were actually higher during the ice ages than we think.

Here’s a good book on understanding how Chaos works. It’s just the thing for those of us without advanced Math/Physics degrees:

On Amazon.com: Chaos: Making a New Science

There goes another scare campaign.

Until recently we had very little data about real time changes in ocean pH around the world. Finally autonomous sensors placed in a variety of ecosystems “from tropical to polar, open-ocean to coastal, kelp forest to coral reef” give us the information we needed.

It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.

Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats.  Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.

Ocean acidification happens all the time

Plants require a certain amount of CO2 to survive. People claim that ice cores taken from Antarctica and Greenland show that CO2 levels during the last ice age dropped to 180ppm. It’s then claimed that a 180 to 280 climb drove us out of the ice age.

The problem is that plants don’t do well at 180. Most just die. Grasses can scrape by, but it’s rough on them. So a period of 100k years of starvation should have had a major hit on grasses and destroyed other plants. Apart from being buried under a whole lot of ice.

Since that didn’t happen it seem reasonable to assume that the CO2 measurements from the ice cores are not accurate.

This is the comment:

Gail Combs says:

November 21, 2011 at 4:57 am

…..In past times, during the transition between an ice age and a warm period, atmospheric CO2 concentrations changed by some 100 parts per million (ppm) – from an ice age value of 180 ppm to about 280 ppm during warm periods….

If this was true there would be no trees and certainly nothing like mammoths during the last ice age. At 180 ppm Class 4 plants (grasses) could possibly survive but would not have the “energy” to produce seed. At 200 pm CO2 trees starve http://biblioteca.universia.net/ficha.do?id=912067 (That link of course has since been purged from the internet – SURPRISE – not)

…According to Barnola et al (1987) the level of CO2 in the global atmosphere during many tens of thousands of years spanning 30,000 to 110,000 BP were below 200ppm. If this were true then the growth of C3 plants should be limited at the global scale because their net Photosynthesis is depressed as CO2 concentration in air decreases to less than about 250ubar (less than about 250ppmv)(McKay et al 1991) This would lead to the extinction of C3plant species . This has however not been recorded by paleobotanists (Manum 1991).”http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf

“…Plant photosynthetic activity can reduce the CO2 within the plant canopy to between 200 and 250 ppm… I observed a 50 ppm drop in within a tomato plant canopy just a few minutes after direct sunlight at dawn entered a green house (Harper et al 1979)” Source

Another study on wheat (a grass) in open fields showed the CO2 level 2 meters above the crops was reduced to a near constant 300 ppm during the day but fluctuated during the night. Again indicating a lower threshold of 250 ppm ~ 300 ppm and certainly not indicative of below 180 ppm.

WHEAT: The CO2 concentration at 2 m above the crop was found to be fairly constant during the daylight hours on single days or from day-to-day throughout the growing season ranging from about 310 to 320 p.p.m. Nocturnal values were more variable and were between 10 and 200 p.p.m. higher than the daytime values.
Source

From the people who know and depend on the truth – FARMERS

Hydroponic Shop

…Plants use all of the CO2 around their leaves within a few minutes leaving the air around them CO2 deficient, so air circulation is important. As CO2 is a critical component of growth, plants in environments with inadequate CO2 levels of below 200 ppm will generally cease to grow or produce… http://www.thehydroponicsshop.com.au/article_info.php?articles_id=27

….With the advent of home greenhouses and indoor growing under artificial lights and the developments in hydroponics in recent years, the need for CO2 generation has drastically increased. Plants growing in a sealed greenhouse or indoor grow room will often deplete the available CO2 and stop growing. The following graph will show what depletion and enrichment does to plant growth:

GO TO SITE for CO2 vs Plant Growth GRAPH

Below 200 PPM, plants do not have enough CO2 to carry on the photosynthesis process and essentially stop growing. Because 300 PPM is the atmospheric CO content, this amount is chosen as the 100% growth point. You can see from the chart that increased CO can double or more the growth rate on most normal plants. Above 2,000 PPM, CO2 starts to become toxic to plants and above 4,000 PPM it becomes toxic to people….. http://www.hydrofarm.com/articles/co2_enrichment.php

Keith in another WUWT discussion brought up another good point the effect of partial pressure of CO2 at higher elevations on plants.

Speaking of carbon dioxide as plant food there is something else often missing in discussions of CO2 concentration. That is CO2 and its relation to altitude. Humans have trouble breathing near the top of Mount Everest even though the “concentration” of oxygen in parts per million is the same as at sea level. This is because the total density of the air is less so the actual amount of oxygen available per cubic meter is also less. The same holds true for carbon dioxide. Air density at 1000 meters altitude is about ninety percent of its sea level value, and crops grown at that altitude have access to ninety percent of the CO2 at sea level despite the fact that the “concentration” as usually given is the same. Half of the land surface of the earth is about 840 meters above sea level, and the absolute concentration of CO2 there is therefore ninety percent less. http://www.ecowho.com/blogs/120/CO2_global_levels_rising%2C_is_this_a_problem%3F/-b33b2

Now when will Engelbeen come to valiantly defend this very important pillar of CAGW? After all low CO2 is the KEY to CAGW.

Dr. Jaworowski tried to do the study to determine the accuracy of the Ice Core CO2 data but the funding was turned down because it was feared his study would “Disprove” the CO2 readings from the ice cores and we couldn’t have that now could we???

The speech was posted on WUWT, but a full PDF can he found here.

Here are some clips, but it’s important to read the whole thing.

My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

• Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
• Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
• Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
• Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
• Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
• Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.

…

Experts are worse at forecasting the future than non-experts.

Philip Tetlock did the definitive experiment. He gathered a sample of 284 experts – political scientists, economists and journalists – and harvested 27,450 different specific judgments from them about the future then waited to see if they came true. The results were terrible. The experts were no better than “a dart-throwing chimpanzee”.

…

I’ve looked and looked but I cannot find one piece of data – as opposed to a model – that shows either unprecedented change or change is that is anywhere close to causing real harm.

…

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

…

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

…

…did you know that the collective annual budget of Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth was more than a billion dollars globally last year? People sometimes ask me what’s the incentive for scientists to exaggerate climate change. But look at the sums of money available to those who do so, from the pressure groups, from governments and from big companies. It was not the sceptics who hired an ex News of the World deputy editor as a spin doctor after climategate, it was the University of East Anglia.

…

In conclusion, I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake. It needs heretics.

Read it all, here

My only quibble:

He says, ” I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible. “

And then says, “For, apart from the hockey stick, there is no evidence that climate is changing dangerously or faster than in the past, when it changed naturally.” (emphasis mine)

So what is man partly responsible for, when there’s no evidence that there is anything different about whatever current change may be happening?

Updates:

More by Matt Ridley

WUWT search for Matt Ridley

The hysterics place great value in the models, those that produce the “We’re all gonna die!!!” results.

Willis Eschenbach on WUWT posts some thoughts on scientific models in general:

There’s a lovely 2005 paper I hadn’t seen, put out by the Los Alamos National Laboratory entitled “Our Calibrated Model has No Predictive Value” (PDF).

…..

The paper’s abstract says it much better than I could:

Abstract: It is often assumed that once a model has been calibrated to measurements then it will have some level of predictive capability, although this may be limited. If the model does not have predictive capability then the assumption is that the model needs to be improved in some way.

Using an example from the petroleum industry, we show that cases can exist where calibrated models have no predictive capability. This occurs even when there is no modelling error present. It is also shown that the introduction of a small modelling error can make it impossible to obtain any models with useful predictive capability.

We have been unable to find ways of identifying which calibrated models will have some predictive capacity and those which will not.

There are three results in there, one expected and two unexpected.

Interesting stuff. Read it all (and 300 comments) here: A Modest Proposal—Forget About Tomorrow

RealClimategate.org asks:

Are Computer Models Reliable – can they be used to predict the future climate?

No: says the IPCC (Chapter 14, 14.2.2.2, Working Group 1, The Scientific Basis)

Third Assessment Report: “In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

…..

All the computer models do is produce scenarios based on the assumptions and limited understanding of climate programmed into them. They do not do clouds,  some of the assumptions are estimates that vary by orders of magitude, we have different scenarios varying from 1.0C to 6.0c,  some scarier scenarios of 10 – 12 C  for the next century.  These assume ‘climate sensitivity’ – ‘feedbacks’ due to CO2 which amplify the simple physics of per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere of ~1.0C , to increasing temperatures due to positive feedbacks producing the  various accelerated global warming scenarios… Yet the order of magnitude of the sensitivity is unknown.

In fact the sign is unknown, it is assumed positive, is could equally be a negative feedback, it is currently uncertain.

I do hope that some  scientists somewhere are doing some actual experimentation with observable data to establish this.  The fact that the Earth has not experienced this behaviour in the past at point when CO2 were much higher naturally, must demonstrate these assumptions of strong positive feedbacks are wrong.

The original post, well worth reading: Are Computer Models Reliable – Can they Predict Climate?

Updates:

But then…  a commenter on the WUWT post adds:

“Sir, you say the IPCC does not make predictions. The IPCC says the world is going to warm. I call that a prediction.”

The global uptake of carbon by land plants may be up to 45 per cent more than previously thought. This is the conclusion of an international team of scientists, based on the variability of heavy oxygen atoms in the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere driven by the El Niño effect. As the oxygen atoms in carbon dioxide were converted faster than expected during the El Niño years, current estimates for the uptake of carbon by plants are probably too low. These should be corrected upwards, say the researchers in the current issue of the scientific journal NATURE.

Here’s the rest: Plants gobbling up CO2 – 45% more than thought

Unlike the catastrophic fantasies of the Gore crowd, there is considerable real word evidence (enough to state it as fact) that plants love CO2 and more is definitely better. Here’s a tiny bit of that evidence, a video on improved plant growth with increased CO2.

 
The biosphere is greening up, CO2 to blame.

• 9/17: Climate Depot summarizes Green reactions to the Gore-a-thon: Greens Give Gore 2 Thumbs Down
• The day after - 24 hour GoreAthon summary
• With perfect timing, tonights temps will be in 20s in place, perfect for the climate show. It’s official, NOAA shows the “Gore Effect” hitting America tonight
• “Put a cork in it, Al!” – new online game for Climate reality day – the first comment is perfect:
  “In all of the decades-long idiocy about cow flatulence and methane, no-one ever mentions that before the beef cattle industry the Great Plains were home to a herd of 60+ MILLION American Bison, which outclass their poorer domestic bovine cousins in body mass by about 40% and, consequently, outgassed proportionally. When doing energy balances, one is SUPPOSED to subtract out extant conditions when examining a (perceived) impact. No-one EVER considers Buffalo Farts!”
• From C3: In Anticipation Of The Gore ‘Lie-A-Thon’ – Severe Weather Reality From The 1950s, 1960s & 1970s Well… I don’t think it’s a “lie-a-thon.” I think Gore really believes this nonsense.
• Facebook changes email alerts, maybe in response to Gore’s spamathon?
• JoNova – Last ditch Goreathon: Scare, smear and slur
• Lubos – What Al Gore has learned from No Pressure
• Maybe the CAGW theory is this: Throw Enough Dirt… Hope it Sticks…
• Steve is Betting On Big Al
• Maybe this is where the money comes from?

Gore claims the skeptics have money, but who is it who has enough spare cash to even think about holding a 24 hour fantasy telethon (not just a blogathon?) Not the skeptics.

Global Warming Hillarity: Global warming causes armed robbery, prostitution, drug abuse and lack of quality time in Ghana

That old chestnut… That the ‘climate denial machine’ is ‘well-funded’… is about to suffer another blow to its credibility.

Luboš Motl of the Reference Frame has an entertaining take on the Climate Reality project, which seems to be Al Gore’s latest stunt.(That page has since been updated and changed.)

Says Motl,

Just look at the dozens of people who had to participate in the creation of these amateurish, would-be interesting movies that have 12,000 or 15,000 views on YouTube, respectively. Imagine how many millions of dollars have been thrown to the trash bin, how many fat screaming female musicians had to be killed during the shooting. Gore’s videos are completely unoriginal, can’t compare with the videos that inspired Gore (like Honda’s Rube Goldberg device: I recently saw some equally good ones, not just the Melvin Machine, but forgot the URLs), and they really make no sense. Why is a Rube Goldberg machine used in a video about the climate? What point could it make (except that alarmists’ arguments are contrived and extremely unlikely)? Those people are just not capable of thinking, capable of doing anything well. They’re just low-quality people.

It’s a good point. There seems to be no end of cash available to promote the catastrophic story, and the individuals behind it, of course. This latest stunt is a 24-hour long web-TV extravaganza. The man himself, says,

“24 Hours of Reality will focus the world’s attention on the full truth, scope, scale and impact of the climate crisis. To remove the doubt. Reveal the deniers. And catalyze urgency around an issue that affects every one of us.”

AL GORE
CHAIRMAN OF THE CLIMATE REALITY PROJECT

It’s an interesting claim. Reality, it seems, is determined by committee, chaired by none other than himself. ‘I’ve got reality on my side’, he seems to be saying, ‘what have you got?’

We ain’t got enough cash for a 24 hour worldwide telethon, that’s for sure, Al.

This is a promo for the event.

And ain’t that the point… There’s the proverbial sh*t that his the fan, to which the promo visually alludes (oh, the subtlety), but there’s the other idiom, ‘throw enough dirt and some of it will stick’.

What possible use could 24 hours of web TV to settling the argument, other than to bore the opposition into submission? There are only two categories of people who will be willing to endure such a dull enterprise: the choir, who need no preaching; and sceptics, who will find it entertaining to see the climate Great and Good attempt to elevate and flatter themselves. Nobody will be watching this from on the fence.

If this 24 hour Gore-Bore-a-thon is an attempt to do anything, it is yet another attempt to win the ‘debate’ without having it. It’s about asserting a claim about ‘reality’, without ever having the claim tested. It’s not simply ‘bias’; it’s naked dogma. All it will do is epitomise the environmental movement’s intransigence; it’s inability to respond to criticism. It may work, of course, for the true believers in one respect. For the committed, it will be a self-affirming ritual… A ceremony for the smug, who will nod, tut, sigh and laugh on cue. But… there is good news…

This failure to permit dialogue must by now be the essential characteristic of the environmental movement, beyond question. I have lost count of the number of on and off-line discussions I have had, in which it became clear that my opponent’s intentions were not to respond to anything I said, but to merely recite the litany at me. In contrast to discussion, in which a point can be explored, conversations with the Faithful do not progress. These encounters are not conversations. There is no person, merely dogma.

If I were to speculate as to what might be going on, it is this. If one starts from the view that ‘the debate is over’ and ‘the science is settled’, and that all that is necessary to win the debate is to tell the consensus story, it is by definition, an appeal to authority: it’s not me who is saying it; it’s not my opinion; it is science‘. Thus the proponent of this view has completely surrendered his own judgement. Lacking any critical function, he has no option but to recycle the litany, as best it fits any turn the discussion takes. He doesn’t have to understand the science, he merely needs to know what to say, and when. It is impossible to have a discussion with such a mind. It is not capable of discussion.

The good news is this, then. As human as this tendency is, so is the tendency to realise that what once seemed like sense is dogma. Since the only people watching the contrived ‘reality’ that Gore and his crew want to promote are likely to be the choir, the only people it will bore are the choir. And the longer they are expected to obediently sit, listen, repeat, and sing on cue, for no reward — for no payoff whatsoever — the more likely they will want to start singing a different tune.

Please, Mr Gore, more 24-hour long ‘reality’ stunts.

So the reliance on the climate models is due to a shortage of proper theory, not an excess of it. Those people just don’t understand the things themselves. But they think that if they have an access to expensive computers, these computers may compensate for their personal ignorance. Except that they can’t.

The machines aren’t miraculous and the programs were written by some people. If you can’t do certain calculations without a computer, not even approximately, you won’t even be able to design the tests that will decide whether the models behave properly (at least not when you only claim that your models only reproduce some overall properties of a chaotic system).

A religious belief that the model is omniscient won’t help you. If the model is wrong, other people – better theorists than you – may ultimately see that the model is wrong, regardless of the strength of your beliefs. And if you believe some things despite the evidence, then you are a demonstrable bigot.