Truss's statement reflects the notion, common among denialists, that human activities cannot possibly affect the climate. Perhaps this will give some sense of the scale of the problem we face. It's interesting to look at this from a slightly different perspective. Every year our coal fired power plants emit as much CO2 as burning all of Tasmania. And we do it year after year. Then add in the 700million+ tonnes of CO2 we export and we are probably close to setting the entire continent on fire every year in terms of emissions. The coal industry and our state governments are intent on a trebling/quadrupling of our coal exports.
Who are the biggest arsonists in the country?

I'm not a fan of soil carbon farming either, it just doesn't add up. Also not that big a fan of tree farming for carbon either (for a different reason, as we need that carbon sequestering for emissions we've already made, not abatement).

Mark Peoples did a great summary for the senate on this topic, explains soil turnover of carbon, the amounts of increased biomass needed to maintain increased levels, etc. https://senate.aph.gov.au/submissions/comittees/viewdocument.aspx%3Fid%3D8eaf8150-a292-46ca-a3fd-47f64e3dc1c8+&hl

Carbon farming is a nice idea in that it attempts to rejuvenate our degraded farmland. Building up carbon in soils is a great aim, for produdtivity and future farm/ecosytem resilience. But measurement of carbon on a paddock scale is so inaccurate and slow that there is no way to verify soil carbon content. So until better measurement techniques (and ways of ensuring carbon retention) are available, its hard to see how pollies can push C farming, except as a political stunt. It is an area deserving of research funding, but nothing seems as important now as reducing C emisions from fossil fuels.

I just answered my own question by emailing Warren Truss inviting him to read this article, check his facts and respond accordingly. It is important that politicians and others be made responsible for what they say or write and this is one way of doing it.

Jennie Macklin said something silly about living on the dole and, rightly, she copped flak and has apologised.
It would be good to see Warren Truss go all mia culpa in a similar way especially since he was wrong by orders of magnitude. The mainstream press can make a story out of JM's goof because Joe Public knows how much $250 is and how they might live on it. WT's goof still is pretty abstract for many/most people. Comparisons with 'burning the whole of Tassie' each year are great but still don't get a lot of air-time. Tragically.
Perhaps if adverts had Mark 'Tubby' Taylor explaining how using that air-conditioner for a day was the equivalent of burning a tree of a certain size (help me here Mr. Gibbons) and depicting it actually burning , it may capture the public's imagination.

Bit like Tim Flannery but in reverse.

What appears to be lacking in both the arguments of those who are using Phillip Gibbon's article as a justification for more bush burning, and from the opinions of those having the pro/anti nuclear, and pro/anti solar-thermal arguments above, is any sense of geographical contextuality.

The recent bush-fires in Australia have been taken as an argument for more burning off generally, especially in Victoria, where the use of % of bush burned as the measure of success has seen absolutely no prior consideration of the actual risk reduction capacity of any particular burn, nor consideration of the locality, (remote or close to habitation) or ecological sensitivity of the area in question. Some redress to the general absence of consideration of the geographic locality of burning as an effect on CO2 has shown up in the comment above about how the extent of burning grassland, as opposed to bushland changes CO2 emissions.

Similarly, the arguments about which CO2 reduction technologies are best, lack any consideration of their geographical location. There are some countries which either lack renewable resources or only possess those which would be far more expensive to develop than nuclear alternatives. I am absolutely no fan of nuclear energy per se, but even I can see that where renewable energy alternatives are not available, nuclear solutions are better than coal. The fact remains though that anything which isn't fully renewable as nuclear is not, and which carries a higher potential risk of catastrophic failure, must meet higher standards of proof of necessity than those sources of energy that are renewable, on the principle of "first do no harm".

Both pro burning and pro and anti nuclear arguments could do with a little more "fact checking" at a local level on available resources and justification on grounds of positive benefit or risk reducing outcomes locally, compared to alternatives.

It makes more sense not to talk in generalities just as it makes more sense to "fact check". Both are empirical arguments grounded in the particular.

Sigh! And that, Daniel, is another generalization.
Ideologically I am on your side. Unfortunately you are poor at argument and do yourself and the cause no favours. Less energy spent on ad hominem argument and emotional charges would do all of us some good. Spend some time substantiating as Mark requires but both you and Mark could do a lot better by not treating the problem as "either / or". Very few real world problems have one solution.

PS If you want to get better at argument you could do worse than consider this book. Toulmin, Stephen Edelston. 1958. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
I'd like to see someone with your energy able to marshal an incisive argument.

And Mark, your comment "try telling the world's poor"...anything at all is also a generalisation. CO2 abatement strategies will perforce be different in different countries and localities and will have different effects on the poor sectors of any economy, and the differential economic and social offsets chosen will also make local circumstance relevant. Pontificating on effects as if they were equal and grandstanding on "one solution to rule them all" are not solutions. Arguing the literature as you have been is legit but you also need to find the literature that will allow you to take into account where your preferred solution might be useful and where not. That is economic and social as well as technical literature.

Fact 1-CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has almost doubled to 390 ppm in the last 200 years due burning of fossil fuels.
Fact 2- CO2 is a greenhouse gas - its global warming properties are practically incontrovertible - it's effect on Earth's temperature (climate) is eminently predictable.

I'm certain if you employed a little effort to research the climate science your continued fence-sitting would become most uncomfortable.

For a start see:-
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect-advanced.htm

Fact 1:
Pre-industrial levels of CO2 are generally acknowleged to have been around 280ppm.
Last I looked 390 isn't very close to 2 times 280, it's an increase of 39%.
Fact 2:
http://www.science-skeptical.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Entwurf3.jpg
It appears less predictable than you imply.

"The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade" James Hansen
"the stubborn refusal of planet to warm as had been predicted over last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable" James Annan

I take it that you have alternate data to justify your "facts"?

"Last I looked 390 isn't very close to 2 times 280, it's an increase of 39%"

Very true, not sure that a 39% increase is terribly welcome, but it is better than a 100% increase.

At what % increase should we start to worry?

It all depends on an accurate picture of climate sensitivity to CO2 increases.
The recent data seems to indicate that the 3x multiplier that was in vogue over the top of CO2 forcing is an overestimate. And so warming in the 4.5-6C range is unlikely per doubling.
So it looks like lukewarmers may be closest to having an accurate estimate, and doubling of CO2 is likely to produce less than 3C of warming. If the sensitivity turns out to be south of 2C then we won't be approaching that level of warming (based on CO2 emissions) for another 100 years.

Does that take into account any possible lag between CO2 concentrations and warming that results from it? (ie the "40 year lag" we hear about from time to time).

Harry

Not nearly so confident about that. 4.5-6 is looking less likely but the balance of evidence is still sitting around 3 - 3.5. Take a look at this paper http://droyer.web.wesleyan.edu/Rohling_et_al_2012_Nature.pdf, particularly Fig 3

Nearly 40 separate studies, all using paleoclimate data. No models. The shortest time scale considered is the last Glacial Maximum - 10-20,000 year. The longest time scale considered is the Phanerozoic - 420 million years.

The majority of the studies come in at CS around 3.1 to 3.7. The few that don't fit this range tend to show higher values. Notably, there isn't a significant set of these results suggesting anything below 3.

Past climate is the best indicator of how the climate system actually responds to various forcings.

There is also some confusion that can arise when different studies are looking at Transient, Charney or Equilibrium CS and the reader or others to whom comments may be addressed isn't aware of the distinction between them. Anything looking at time scales of decades or less is automatically looking at Transient or Charney and that shouldn't be projected to mean Equilibrium which is the one that really matters.

The advantage of Paleo studies is that they are automatically looking at Equilibrium CS.

It's the climate sensitivity, so if there is a lag then it takes into account the lag, since it is the total response of a doubling.

The disadvantage of Paleo studies are the rather large error bars on their results.

The error bars on paleo studies aren't that bad.Sure individual studies might have larger bars, depending on what sort of proxy they are working with. Others can be quite good. Have a look at Rohling et al that I linked to,particularly Fig 3. The errors don't look that wide at all - hence their figure for 3.1 to 3.7. Although it hasn't been published yet, thie is a really significant paper.Because it's not one study.It is dozens of them.

Although an individual study might have wider error bars, when many studies are tending to come in with very similar centerpoints, that is significant.

The advantages of paleo

- It is looking at total climate response, not just short term fluctuations

- It is looking at the basic underlying Thermodynamics of climate. Since it can't measure shorter term fluctuations, it is better able to reflect signal rather than noise. And it can thus filter out these shorter term factors. Even such not so short things as whether the Sun & Earth's movement around the galaxy has an impact on climate ultimately gets filtered out.

- It is looking over a broad range of past climates. If it doesn't show strong variability between CS for these different climates, which they tend not to, this is a good indicator that CS is actually fairly stable across many climate regimes. An indication that unexpected mechanisms don't suddenly 'cut in' in different climates apart from possible short term effects. This is a very important conclusion one can draw from paleo data. There aren't some vast array of poorly understood factors that influence climate. If there were, CS would be wildly variant across different regimes and timescales. And it isn't.

- To look over such a wide timespan, a quite varied set of techniques are needed. As a result, paleo data reaches a similar conclusion through many pathways and chains of evidence.

- Deep Paleo studies can't use proxies that would be highly influenced by geographically local factors - they would be laughed out of the literature. So even looking at rocks from multiple locations around the Earth immediately precludes any local factors.

- If there are methodological flaws with any one study, which there could be, one would expect that each study, or each study using a particular methodology would have it's own intrinsic bias. And there is no particular reason to think that methodological flaws would lead to results that follow some normal distribution around a central figure. If the methodology isn't well understood, one would expect all sorts of quite wild results. So the fact that the centre points cluster together around a particular value for CS strongly indicates that the methodology of the different techniques, the underlying Physics & Chemistry, is quite well understood. Thus we can have stronger confidence in the error bar estimates since the basic science is well understood and thus uncertainties can be better quantified.

When you look at the ocean heat content and the planets energy balence you find that the underlying temperature rate has increases over the last 15 years not decreased.

If you go on and read the rest of the Hansen paper that you quote from you find Hansen refers to aerosols masking the planets warming.

Since the last 10 years have been dominated by two large La Ninos you can expect a larger amount of heat stored in the deep oceans than earlier times. That more than accounts for the "flat period".

When you look at the average global air temperature for the last 40 years you find many "flat periods" followed by rapid warming from an El Nino.

It's James Annan's view that is with out the needed back up of facts.

Ocean heat content doesn't seem to back your claims, unless you can tell us why the heat that isn't in the atmosphere has managed to slow down the rate of ocean heating?
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/ocean-heat-content-calculated-based

So if sensitivity is high, and given the large growth in CO2 emissions and CO2 levels across the recent decades you'd need to show large energy stores in the atmosphere (as warmer air temps) or in the oceans. Instead we see a slowing down of OHC across this period and a similar flattening across air temps.

But the theory (inclusive of high sensitivity) demands that more energy is being retained.
So why isn't that energy being detected by an acceleration in heating rather than the deceleration seen in the data.

Harry,

Try looking at the proper figures for Ocean Heat Content i.e. 0 - 2000m instead of the surface waters (0 -700 m). Then you'll see at least some of the missing heat.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/modeled-and-observed-ohc-is-there-a-discrepancy.html

I must admit I rarely go to skepticalscience, I prefer to go to NOAA directly.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Sorry but I see a flat 0-700m graph and no acceleration in 700-2000 over the period.
Given flat air tems and upper ocean, you'd expect an acceleration in deep ocean, but the data says it isn't occurring, so the energy is still missing.

To call the 0-700 m graph "flat" over the past 10 years is exaggerating, but the increase in heat content appears to have slowed. That could be partly due to the spike in heat content in 2003-2004, which skews the running-means a little (as the 1998 El Nino event skewed subsequent surface temperature records for a number of years afterwards). But your breakdown between 0-700 and 700-2000 is artificial. If you look at the 0-2000 m data, there is a steady increase in OHC over the past several decades, with no sign of a slowdown.

This is an interesting quote from the recent paper by Levitus (of NOAA) and colleagues ("World ocean heat content and thermosteric sea level change (0–2000 m), 1955–2010", Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2012GL051106):

"We have estimated an increase of 24 1022 J representing a volume mean warming of 0.09C of the 0–2000 m layer of the World Ocean. If this heat were instantly transferred to the lower 10 km of the global atmosphere it would result in a volume mean warming of this atmospheric layer by approximately 36C (65F). This transfer of course will not happen; earth’s climate system simply does not work like this. But this computation does provide a perspective on the amount of heating that the earth system has undergone since 1955."

Though it won't happen instantly, this heat that is being stored will of course affect the climate in the future.

Harry

There is a fundamental error in how you are interpretting the NOAA graphs. The second graph isn't 700-2000, it is 0-2000. So the data in the 0-700 graph is a part of the heat recorded in the second graph.

Interpretation: in recent years more heat is being transported to the middle depths - 700 to 2000 rather than remaining in the upper layer. But the total rate of heat being added hasn't changed in any meaningful way, just it's vertical distribution.

An interesting paper worth reading is Meehl et al 2010 (or maybe 2011). It looks in detail at the vertical heating profiles predicted in the ocean by a number of climate models and finds that some of the models include periods, they call them hiatus periods, where the models predict exactly this sort of behaviour. They don't predict when it will occur but they do predict that periods like this will occur. And typical duration is a decade or so.

And all it needs is a period of reduced surface water heating to lead to a period of reduced atmospheric warming - dog wagging tail and all that. Even though the total heat accumulation hasn't changed.

So energy isn't missing, you have just misinterpreted the graph.

I must be misinterpreting the skeptical science graph too.
It sure looks like 700-2000m heat content has followed the same trajectory since 1980.
http://skepticalscience.com/levitus-2012-global-warming-heating-oceans.html
Perhaps you can tell them to redraw that black line to follow your interpretation.

Harry

Perhaps I misworded that last comment. By more heat I meant a larger proportion of the extra heat was going deeper. Which is what the 2nd graph we have at SkS says. And it isn't drawn by SkS, it is taken directly from Levitus et al 2012.

But the basic premise that the ocean are still substantially heating hasn't changed, and that any reduction in surface ocean warming will have a flow on effect in reduced warming of the atmosphere.

And if you read further down the SkS article you will see a discussion of Meehl et al.

The link you gave me was 0 - 700 metres.

It's hardly logical to make your claims based on this when others have pointed out to you that deep oceans are warming well below 700 metres.
A recent Australian mission to look at transects down to 4000 metres found that at all points across the South Pacific were warmer than last recorded.

The NASA Ocean air index shows no flattening in the last 10 years and I had already referred to the trend figures for the last 15 years for global warming increasing from the previous 15 years.

The dominance of La Nino conditions is expected to give less heat in the top 700 metres.

You seem to be fixated on a data set that give you the result that you want to ague rather than look at larger data sets that do not.

Considering that this is the second time I have referred to these data sets I wonder if your mind is rather made up?

Perhaps you can explain what part of "there is a steady increase in OHC over the past several decades" conflicts with a lack of acceleration? Given a lack of warming in the atmosphere and upper oceans, shouldn't the retained energy be causing an acceleration elsewhere?

The conversation regarding upper versus deep has moved on in other postings, most of what you have asked about is addressed there.

Perhaps you could post links to "NASA Ocean Air Index" I haven't found anything called that, and the graphs linked from google searches for what it thinks might be similar terms all display a flattening.

Also it is hard to understand what you are saying when you repeatedly use the term "La Nino",
the two terms are "el nino" and "la nina", taking parts of each of these terms produces confusion.

I expect you have a reference for that "recent Australian mission" and hope that it comprises a quite large area of ocean and contains somewhat more data to form a trend from than a current measurement and a prior one. Posting a reference would be helpful.

It would also be nice if you could stick to the data rather than implications about character, I doubt that this is conducive to the exchange of information.

In any case, we have wandered far from the original thread, and my questions regarding the veracity of some of the claims within the "fact checking" have not been addressed.