re: #3 brookly red

so not to point one way or the other but I am wondering how this volcano thing affects all the climate models?

That’s actually a really great question.

The answer is that volcanoes were one of the very fiirt things modeled and that Hansen’s great triumph in showing that his modelling techniques were useful, predicted the signal of a large eruption in his models. The signal from the real world matched the modeled prediction almost perfectly.

Please note that this was 1978 and 1981!

Here are the abstracts for the papers:

pubs.giss.nasa.gov

Hansen, J.E., W.-C. Wang, and A.A. Lacis, 1978: Mount Agung eruption provides test of a global climatic perturbation. Science, 199, 1065-1068, doi:10.1126/science.199.4333.1065.

The Mount Agung eruption volcanic eruption in 1963 provides the best-documented global radiative perturbation to the earth’s atmosphere currently available. Data on stratospheric aerosols produced by this eruption have been used as input to a model for the atmospheric thermal structure. The computed magnitude, sign, and phase lag of the temperature changes in both the stratosphere and the troposphere are in good agreement with observation, providing evidence that the climatic response to a global radiative perturbation is significant, as well as support for the use of theoretical models to predict climatic effects.

pubs.giss.nasa.gov

The global temperature rose 0.2C between the middle 1960s and 1980, yielding a warming of 0.4C in the past century. This temperature increase is consistent with the calculated effect due to measured increases of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Variations of volcanic aerosols and possibly solar luminosity appear to be primary causes of observed fluctuations about the mean trend of increasing temperature. It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980s. Potential effects on climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.

Sinclair has a really good video that mentions it.

Youtube Video