Response to Sen.

Malcom Roberts
Reply to scientific points in the Senate at Parliament House in Canberra
Video of presentation here
Transcript here
(original comments in red)
Like Socrates I love asking questions to get to the truth.
Fair enough- here are some answers.
So I ask the question; over the last 130 years what was the longest single temperature
trend?
130 years. The longest trend in any time series in the length of the time series.
Is not the inconvenient truth this .... that from the 1930s to the 70s during the period of
the greatest industrialisation in human history when our carbon dioxide output increased
greatly, atmospheric temperatures cooled for forty years straight?
It is broadly true that from the 1940s or so, until the 1970s, planetary temperatures did
not exhibit a significant positive trend. There is, however, always variabilitythe trend is
not a monotonic decline, and also depends on the hemisphere of interest.
It is notable that global temperatures are expected to respond to CO2 concentrations
and all combined forcings (including volcanic eruptions, land-use change,
anthropogenic aerosols, other greenhouse gases, etc.) and not simply coincide with the
onset of intense industrial activity.

Figure 1. Annual-mean (and with smoothing) temperature evolution in both hemispheres

since 1880. From http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ .
CO2 concentrations only increased by ~15 parts per million during the mid-20th century
interval (they have increased by 75 ppm since 1970). Additionally, there was a rapid
increase in SO2 emissions (which become sulfate aerosol in the air) from 1940 through
1970, driven for example by fuel combustion in industry and by emissions from electric
power plants. Global SO2 emissions peaked in the 1970s and have generally declined
worldwide since (despite increases in China and India), and are expected to be less
important over the 21st century.
Sulfate aerosols, along with black carbon and organic carbon, are submicron particles
that affect the energy balance of the planet. Black carbon generally warms the surface,
and exhibited increases in the early portion of the 20 th century and leveled off somewhat
in the mid-century period. Sulfate aerosols, however, peaked later and strongly scatter
incoming sunlight. This leads to a large cooling effect that masked greenhouse gas
warming. This partially explains the hemispheric difference in temperature evolution
(Figure 1 above), with the Northern Hemisphere cooling while the Southern Hemisphere
did not (aerosols tend to be more confined to where they are emitted). The aerosols,
however, are very short-lived and follow emission trends, whereas extra CO2 will last
hundreds of thousands of years in the atmosphere. Thus, due to the gradual buildup of
CO2, combined with regulations that resulted in aerosol reductions, the warming
influence of greenhouse gases emerged by 1970-1980 and will continue to dominate
global temperature trends in the coming century.
Other natural forcings such as changes in solar output or variations in the Earths orbit
are very small in the last century, but without the human component, temperatures
would have actually cooler in the later part of the 20 th century. Models at the complex
end of the hierarchy in complexity include species such as sulfate, nitrate, organic
carbon, and black carbon, and are able to reproduce the observed decadal temperature
evolution, including the mid-century flat line in temperatures. This visualization, based
on output from the NASA ModelE2 simulations, does an excellent job of showing the
contribution of individual forcing agents.
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/
Another inconvenient fact; temperatures statistically have not been warming since 1995.

This is not true, although it is no secret that there is variability in the global
temperature time series (as can be seen in both hemispheres in Figure 1). This
variability is large enough to complicate inferences concerning short-term trends,
and allows for endpoint cherry-picking to make it appear as though a robust hiatus
in warming existed. However, the long-term trend and decade-by-decade
temperature increases are unequivocal.
The presence of a hiatus in warming is disputed on statistical grounds by many of
us in the field, but the variability seen in the record can be explained by short-term

fluctuations associated with El Nio/La Nia, as well as short-term trends in external

forcing (e.g., small volcanic eruptions). There is no fundamental missing physics
required to explain this.
It is noteworthy that 2016 will be by far the hottest year on record, partly aided by a
huge El Nio event, and is warmer than 1998 that exhibited a similar size El Nio event.
It may be that in 2020, people will say global warming stopped in 2016, except they
will also be deceiving themselves.
Records show there have been warmer periods in Australias history then the current
decade.
Temperatures are now cooler than 130 years ago. This is the reverse of what were
blatantly told by the Bureau of Metrology.
This is simply a conspiracy theory. Reported Australian temperature trends can be
found in the following link, for example. It is unclear where Sen. Roberts is obtaining the
data to draw his flawed conclusion.
http://www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/en/climate -campus/australian-climatechange/australian-trends/
.firstly, changes in the carbon dioxide level are a result of changes in temperature, not
a cause. Thats the reverse of what were told. Second, we do not and cannot affect the
level of carbon dioxide in air.
This is an old zombie myth that is over a decade old, and seems to have been
resurrected.
There is context behind it. The claim originated in some early papers such as Monnin et
al. (2001) or Caillon et al. (2003). The motivating question in these papers involved the
timing of Antarctic temperatures and CO2 changes on glacial-interglacial cycles. Indeed,
these studies pointed to a lead of Antarctic warming with respect to the CO2 increase
over several glacial terminations. However, this lead has been challenged in more
recent work (e.g., Parrenin et al., 2013) using air 15N (of N2) to determine the depth at
which air in ice is permanently trapped, allowing for a more precise quantification of
leads and lags between changes in Antarctic
climate and in atmospheric composition. Further complicating the interpretation, global
temperatures typically lag Antarctic temperatures throughout the most recent
deglaciation, and thus CO2 is clearly effective in both amplifying the temperature rise,
providing a necessary trigger for deglacial warming, and communicating the changes
across the tropics (see e.g., Shakun et al., 2012).
While this work is interesting, it should not come as a surprise that climate affects the
carbon cycle, and thus CO2 concentration in the air. Indeed, we know variations in the
Earths orbit pace glacial-interglacial cycles. In fact, it would be an even larger mystery if

CO2 always led global temperature, since that would require a trigger for the carbon
cycle to change on its own in a well-defined periodicity.
These results are quite specific to glacial terminations, and other events in Earths
history (the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or the gradual cooling during the
Cenozoic) quite clearly involve a temperature response to CO2, as we expect from basic
physics.
However, none of this is relevant today. We know from isotopic evidence of carbon, as
well as the fact that carbon is increasing in multiple reservoirs (the ocean, biosphere,
and atmosphere) that the increased CO2 is from fossil fuel burning. This increase is
much faster than glacial-interglacial cycles, and of similar magnitude but occurring on a
different baseline (~180 to ~280 ppm from a glacial to an interglacial, but ~280 ppm to
~400 ppm since pre-industrial times). There is no serious question that virtually all of
this increase is from human activities. There is no basis for the statement that, [we]
cannot affect the level of carbon dioxide in air.
Its basic. The sun warms earths surface. The surface by contact warms the moving
circulating atmosphere. That means the atmosphere cools the surface. How can
anything that cools the surface warm it? It cant.
This is an interesting line of argument, since it is true that heat transfer exists from the
surface into the atmosphere (via e.g., evaporation, infrared radiation, sensible heating).
There are thus multiple mechanisms for the surface to lose energy to the overlying air
column, cooling the surface and heating the atmosphere. The bulk portion of the
atmosphere (the troposphere) is also constantly convecting, distributing energy upwards
in order to relax the air column to a stable temperature gradient.
However, the planets energy balance must also be respected, and an isolated
consideration of the surface is a poor way to develop an intuition for thus. The heat
fluxes at the surface provide a means of eliminating temperature gradients between the
surface and overlying air, but defining the absolute temperature of the entire system
requires a calculation of the energy budget of the whole Earth, including individual
atmospheric layers. Radiative transfer is the means by which this can be achieved.
The fundamental constraint on almost any rocky planets climate is the demand for
incoming (absorbed) sunlight to balance the among of infrared radiation the planet emits
to space, at the top of the atmosphere. It is true that most of the sunlight Earth absorbs
occurs at the surface, although the effective communication between the lower and
upper troposphere by dynamical motions implies that the specific location where heat is
deposited does not matter too much. But the system must radiate enough infrared
energy to space to ensure it does not keep heating up.
The presence of greenhouse gases means that most of the infrared radiation from the
surface and lower atmosphere do not immediately exit to space. Instead, emission

occurs from the upper (colder) layers. Since these layers are colder than the surface,
the emission is correspondingly weaker (from something called the Planck law). If more
greenhouse gases are added, the level at which an average photon escapes to space
moves upward, the instantaneous emission goes down, and the planet becomes less
efficient at losing energy to space. This means the planet is now taking in more sunlight
than it is losing to space, and must therefore heat up.
Thus, planetary energy balance is a tug of war between temperature and atmospheric
opacity, and temperatures at the surface (and throughout the air column) will adjust to
whatever is demanded in order to ensure the planet is losing energy at the same rate
that it comes in.
The resulting greenhouse gas increase and temperature change will also compel the
heat fluxes from/to the surface to change. Indeed, a hotter climate may be evaporating
more energy into the atmosphere, but this does not mean it is also somehow colder.
It is unlikely that Sen. Roberts (or his advisers) understand these physical constrains on
planetary temperature, or that they much care. But they operate on Venus (a planet
endowed with an extremely dense CO2 atmosphere and over 860F, or 460C at the
surface), and will continue to operate in the future, no matter how much attempt is made
to legislate them away.

Chris Colose,
PhD candidate- Atmospheric Sciences