Monday, September 30, 2013

WSJ: One lesson of the IPCC report is it's time for policy caution; the climate models may need remodeling

Climate of Uncertainty

A U.N. report can't explain the hiatus in global warming.

WSJ.COM 9/30/13: Between 1998 and 2012 the global economy more than doubled in size—to some $71 trillion in GDP from $30 trillion. That's the good news. Over the same period the world pumped more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is supposedly the bad news. Yet global surface temperatures have remained essentially flat. That's the mystery: If emitting CO2 into the atmosphere causes global warming, why hasn't the globe been warming?

That's the question we would have liked to see answered by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which Friday published the summary of its fifth report on what co-chairman Thomas Stocker calls "the greatest challenge of our times." It would have also been nice to see some humility from the IPCC, which since its last report in 2007 has seen some of its leading scientists exposed as bullies, and some of its most eye-catching predictions debunked. (Remember the vanishing Himalayan glaciers?)

No such luck. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," insists the report in its first bold-face conclusion, followed by the claim that "each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850." What follows are warnings of shrinking ice sheets, rapidly rising sea levels and other scary events.

So what about the warming that hasn't been happening since 1998? Here's the key paragraph, buried on page 10: "The observed reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998-2012 as compared to the period 1951-2012, is due in roughly equal measure to a reduced trend in radiative forcing and a cooling contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean."

Corbis

After noting that scientists have only low or medium confidence in various theories for this reduced warming trend, the report adds that "there may also be a contribution from forcing inadequacies and, in some models, an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing." (Our emphasis.)

Translation: Temperatures have been flat for 15 years, nobody can properly explain it (though there are some theories), and the IPCC doesn't want to spend much time doing so because it is politically inconvenient and shows that the computer models on which all climate-change predictions depend remain unreliable.

Though the IPCC doesn't admit it, the real lesson of its report is uncertainty. Droughts and hurricanes? Contrary to Al Gore's hype, the report acknowledges there's little evidence to suggest that climate change caused by man has had much to do with the duration of droughts or the intensity of hurricanes, although it might in the far future.

Unbearable heat? The IPCC predicts that temperatures are "likely" to rise by somewhat more than 1.5 degrees Celsius throughout the rest of the century. But in 2007 the IPCC said they were "likely" to increase by more than 2 degrees, and "very unlikely" to increase by less than 1.5 degrees.

It's also hard to take any of this as gospel when the IPCC's climate models haven't been able to predict past warming. As Canadian economist and longtime climate student Ross McKitrick points out, IPCC models based on CO2 emissions predicted that temperatures should have risen between 0.2 and 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1990. Instead they have increased by about 0.1 degrees.

One lesson of the IPCC report is that now is the time for policy caution. Let's see if the nonwarming trend continues, in which case the climate models will need remodeling. But that's far less costly than trying to undo grand global redistribution schemes like carbon cap and trade.

The other lesson is that amid such uncertainty the best insurance against adverse climate risks is robust economic growth. The wealthier the world is in 50 or 100 years, the more resources and technology it will have to cope if the worst predictions come true. But that requires free-market, pro-growth policies that are the opposite of the statist fixes pushed by the climate alarmists.

They use the flimsy intellectual scaffolding of the IPCC report to justify killing the U.S. coal industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, banning natural gas drilling, imposing costly efficiency requirements for automobiles, light bulbs, washing machines and refrigerators, and using scarce resources to subsidize technologies that even after decades can't compete on their own in the marketplace.

All of these involve giving more economic control to political actors whose interventions make the world poorer than it would otherwise be. When even the climate-change lobbyists at the IPCC concede that the world is warming at a slower pace than they once thought, it's no time for panicky rearranging of the global economy.

The Economist: All of the warming we're not having is 'still our fault'

If you can't explain the pause, you can't explain the cause...

Article published in The Economist, with added [clarifications & corrections]

It's still our fault -- the IPCC climate-change report

by J. P., Stockholm, The Economist, September 27, 2013

It has been a long time coming. But then the fifth assessment of the state of the global climate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body, was a behemoth of an undertaking. It runs to thousands of pages, involved hundreds of scientists and was exhaustively checked and triple-checked by hundredds [sic] of other boffins and government officials to whom they report—and whose policies are often based on what they read. The first tranche of the multi-volume report—an executive summary of the physical science—was released in Stockholm on September 27th. And it is categorical in its conclusion: climate change has not stopped and man is the main cause.

It may be the last report of its kind: a growing chorus of experts thinks a more frequent, less bally-hooed and more up-to-date assessments would be more useful. It is certainly the first since negotiations for a global treaty reining in carbon emissions collapsed in Copenhagen in 2009; the first since questions were raised about the integrity of the IPCC itself following mistaken claims about the speed of glacier melt in the Himalayas and, most important, the first since evidence became incontrovertible that global surface air temperatures have risen much less quickly in the past 15 years than the IPCC had expected. A lot is riding on its findings, from the public credibility of climate science to the chances of a new global treaty.

The report is more definitive than in the past about the role of people in causing climate change. It say that it is "extremely likely"—IPCC speak for having a probability of over 95%—that man is responsible. This contrasts with the tentative tone of the early IPCC reports. “The observed increase [in surface air temperatures] could be largely due to this natural variability,” said the first one, in 1990. The next report in 1995 merely suggested a link between rising temperatures and human activity. That link was deemed “likely” (which means probability of 66%) in 2001, and “very likely” (90%) in 2007.

The latest iteration identifies radiative forcing, the difference between the amount of heat coming into the climate and the amount reflected back, as the immediate cause of warming. Radiative forcing is expressed in watts per square metre (W/m2), a unit of energy. A rise indicates that heat is building up in the system.

Total radiative forcing from man-made sources since 1750 (i.e., before industrialisation) has risen from 0.29-0.85 W/m2 in 1950 to 0.64-1.86 W/m2 in 1980 to 1.13-3.33 W/m2 in 2011. The average has jumped from 0.57 to 1.25 to 2.29, respectively—a four-fold increase in 60 years. [Note: all of these numbers are entirely based upon falsified, theoretical assumptions in climate models, models which have been falsified at confidence levels of 90-98% over the past 15-20 years] The big change recently, the report points out, is that the cooling effect of aerosols seems to have been less strong than it used to be. [This was formerly the excuse du jour why the Earth wasn't warming] But there is no sign that the [theoretical modelled] rise in radiative forcing has slowed during the past 15 years of flat surface temperatures. The best estimate for total man-made radiative forcing in 2011 is 43% above 2005 levels.

Of course, more heat does not necessarily equal perceptible climate change. The IPCC admits the pause in the rise of surface air temperatures is real. “The rate of warming over the past 15 years,” it says, “[is] 0.05 ºC per decade...smaller than the rate calculated since 1951.” In its 2007 report the panel had said the rate of warming was 0.2ºC per decade in 1990-2005 (four times the current rate). It predicted that this would continue for the next two decades. [i.e. the IPCC admits warming has slowed to only 25% of the former rate]

But it plays down the long-term significance of the shift, saying that “due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends.” The start of the recent 15-year trend, in 1998, was a year of a strong worldwide fluctuation in the climate known as El Niño. This produced a temperature spike.

Still, all the [theoretical, "missing"] extra heat implied by higher radiative forcing has to go somewhere.[or never existed in the first place] It isn’t going into the air. It is possible that not all that much is going into the surface waters of the oceans, either. The report says that “it is about as likely as not that ocean heat content from 0-700 metres increased more slowly during 2003-2010 than during 1993-2002.” That only leaves one other heat sink: the deep oceans below 700 metres [where we have no observations], where it could be locked up in the deep oceans without affecting other parts of the climate.

And indeed, most of the [theoretical] extra heat does go into the oceans, which is not surprising given that they cover two thirds of Earth’s surface and have a much greater capacity to absorb heat than the air does. “Ocean warming,” the report says, “is largest near the surface and the upper 75 metres warmed by 0.11 ºC per decade over the period 1971-2010.” It adds that more than 60% of the net energy increase in the climate system is stored in the upper ocean (0-700 metres)...and about 30% is stored in the ocean below 700 metres. [Note the upper 2000m of the oceans has warmed only 0.09C over the past 55 years, and even this is statistically insignificant & unmeasureable]

In fact, vast deeps are a plausible candidate to explain the pause in surface air temperatures. The trouble is that measurements deep down, while improving, remain patchy. The IPCC says that it is likely [>66% probability in IPCC-speak] that the ocean warmed from 3,000 metres to the bottom in 1992-2005 and that heat will penetrate from the surface down.[no measurements at all there & heat rises] Moreover, in a report earlier this month in Nature (published too late to make it into the IPCC report), Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, in San Diego, suggests that a cooling trend in an area of the eastern equatorial Pacific ocean may be “the cause of the pause.” But at the moment, this conclusion remains tentative.

Global warming is, then, continuing unabated in the watery world. It is not clear whether the trend itself has changed dramatically since 1990 or whether the rise is due to improved measurements, which have enabled scientists to gauge more exactly what has been going on. Probably the latter.[they can't "improve" measurements that were not done in the past] The new assessment says that, since the fourth report in 2007, "instrumental biases in upper-ocean temperature records have been identified and reduced, enhancing confidence in the assessment of change."

Either way, the trend is worrying. Since water, like almost everything else, expands as it gets hotter, its rising temperature causes sea levels to rise. It is "very likely," the report adds, “that the mean rate of global averaged sea level rise was 1.7 mm a year between 1901 and 2010, 2.0 mm a year between 1971 and 2010 and 3. 2mm a year between 1993 and 2010.” The rate of sea-level rise all but doubled between the start of the 20th century and its end.[false] That is a significant change and one that the first IPCC assessment report in 1990 had little inkling of. That report reckoned that “the average rate of rise over the last 100 years has been 1.0-2.0 mm a year. There is no firm evidence of acceleration in sea level rise during this century.” The rate is now thought to be higher—and growing.[false]

New instruments are providing better information about the rate at which ice sheets and glaciers are melting, too. In particular, the launch of the twin GRACE satellites has provided more detail about how much ice there actually is. GRACE, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, enables the mass of objects on Earth to be worked out more precisely by measuring tiny changes in their gravitation pull. The report says that “the average rate of ice loss from glaciers around the world, excluding glaciers on the periphery of the ice sheets, was very likely 226 Gt [trillion tonnes] a year over the period 1971-2009 and very likely 275 Gt a year over the period 1993-2009.” [GRACE shows sea levels are only rising less than 4 inches per century]

In other words, it has speeded up. The Greenland ice sheet, the Antarctic sea ice and the Arctic sea ice have all lost mass (got thinner). The extent of the Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 3.5-4.1% a decade in 1979-2012, more than was estimated in 2007, and the summer sea-ice minimum is shrinking by about 10% a decade, though this year’s summer ice melt was smaller than last year’s.

What does that mean for the future? The report uses four new sets of scenarios for greenhouse-gas concentrations to claim that “global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is projected to be likely to exceed 1.5 ºC relative to 1850 to 1900 in all but the lowest scenario considered, and likely to exceed 2 ºC for the two high scenarios.” The 2 ºC mark is widely considered to be the dividing line between warming which is just about tolerable and that which is dangerous.

For the first time, the IPCC gives some credence to the possibility that Earth’s climate may not be responding to higher concentrations of greenhouse gases quite as sharply as was once thought. The response is referred to as “equilibrium climate sensitivity” and defined as the rise in surface temperatures in the long term which accompanies a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. In its previous report, the IPCC put this at between 2ºC and 4.5 ºC, with a most likely figure of 3ºC. But recent work, partly influenced by the pause in temperatures, has suggested sensitivity might be somewhat lower. The IPCC’s new range of 1.5-4.5 ºC (the same as in its first report) reflects the new consensus (though some new research puts the upper bound of sensitivity below 4.5 ºC).

The IPCC also decided to scrap its central “best guess.” Perhaps this is meant to reflect uncertainty in the science. If so, some scientists argue, then perhaps it should not have increased its confidence that man is the main cause of global warming.

In theory, a lower climate sensitivity means temperatures would rise more slowly for any given amount of extra radiative forcing. Earth might hence have a little more time to adjust to a changing climate. But whether such breathing space actually exists depends on how many tonnes of greenhouse gases people are putting into the atmosphere. So, for the first time, the IPCC has set what is usually called a carbon budget. To have a two-thirds chance of keeping global warming below 2 ºC, it says, “will require cumulative CO2 emissions from all anthropogenic sources to stay between 0 and about 1,000 [trillion tonnes].”

The world has already blown through just over half that amount (531 trillion tonnes) by 2011. At current rates of greenhouse-gas emission, the rest of the budget will have been spent before 2040. The odds of keeping the eventual rise in global temperatures to below 2 ºC will lengthen—even if climate sensitivity is lower than was thought and even if the pause in surface air temperatures persists for a while. As Thomas Stocker, the co-chair of the report depressingly put it: “we are committed to climate change…for many centuries even if emissions of CO2 stop.”

WSJ Op-Ed: The U.N. IPCC is unreformable and its latest political science report should be its last

The Political Science of Global Warming

The U.N.'s latest climate-change report should be its last.

RUPERT DARWALL

WSJ.COM 9/30/13: "Human influence extremely likely to be the dominant cause of observed warming since the middle of the last century," was the headline from Friday's release of the first instalment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment report. "Extremely likely"—indicating a 95%-100% likelihood—was ratcheted up one notch from the 2007 fourth assessment report's "very likely." Yet compared to 2007, the IPCC widened its estimate of the responsiveness of the climate system to carbon dioxide by reducing the lower band to a 1.5°C increase from 2°C, qualifying the new estimate as only "likely."

This is a glaring discrepancy. How can the IPCC be more confident that more than half the temperature rise since the mid-20th century is caused by greenhouse-gas emissions when it is less sure of the climatic impact of carbon dioxide? The explanation is that IPCC reports, especially the summaries for policymakers, are primarily designed for political consumption. And as if on cue, British Prime Minister David Cameron commented on the IPCC report, "If someone said there is a 95% chance that your house might burn down, even if you are in the 5% that doesn't agree with it, you still take out the insurance."

But poke beneath the surface of the IPCC's latest offering and the confection is revealed for what it is. The IPCC's quantification of the separate components of the warming since 1951 (greenhouse gases, cooling from aerosols, internal variability) is deemed only "likely" (66%-100% likelihood). Only at the IPCC could the sum of these components be given a greater likelihood than the individual building blocks. Perhaps the most revealing aspect is that none of the climate scientists involved seems embarrassed at this nonsense or protests at the manipulation of science for political ends.

This time around, the greatest difficulty faced by the IPCC was explaining the ongoing 15-year pause in atmospheric temperature increases. The body estimates that between 2011 and 2005, there has been a 43% rise in human-induced radiative forcing—the difference between solar radiation entering the atmosphere and infrared radiation leaving the atmosphere, whose balance is supposedly greatly disturbed by heat-trapping man-made emissions. But there has been little warming for 15 years.

Other than saying that short periods do not reflect long-term trends, the IPCC ducked out of a dilemma of its own making. One lead author, Jochem Marotzke, explained to reporters that the issue had come a bit late in the process. There was a tendency for each of the 14 teams to think someone else was working on it. Thomas Stocker, the working-group co-chair, said that the IPCC relies on peer-reviewed journal articles. "I'm afraid to say there is not a lot of published literature that allows us to delve deeper into the required depth of this emerging scientific question," Mr. Stocker said, as quoted by the Christian Science Monitor. Is it plausible to believe that if the story had been temperatures rising faster than expected, the IPCC and climate journals would have remained silent? Evidently nature has embarrassed the climate-science consensus.

If climate scientists are really as confident in their understanding of the climate as the IPCC's 95% confidence headline figure is meant to suggest, they would put a firm date by when the pause must end and temperatures bounce back to what the IPCC claims is the long-term upward trend. All too predictably, the IPCC avoids such a hard-edged test. It merely projects a likely temperature rise of 0.3°-0.7°C for 2012-2035 compared to 1986-2005, offered with "medium confidence."

A better indicator of the evolution of what climate scientists really think can be found elsewhere. In the IPCC's first assessment report of 1990, there was discussion of scientists' then-inability to reliably detect predicted signals of global warming. The second report, in 1995, said the "signal" was still emerging from the noise of background variability. Have climate scientists at last unambiguously detected the greenhouse signal? The word is not mentioned once in the summary of the 2013 report.

Ever since the second assessment, controversy has surrounded these reports. It first erupted on these pages in 1996, when Frederick Seitz charged that he had "never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process." An official in the U.S. State Department had ordered text to be amended "in an appropriate manner." Justifying the intervention, Stephen Schneider, a leading IPCC climate scientist, argued that the Second Assessment Report was "fraught with political significance" as the Clinton administration was on the verge of announcing its acceptance of binding emissions cuts.

Politicization is thus an ingrained feature of IPCC reports. After the fiasco of the 2007 assessment, the U.N. secretary general asked the InterAcademy Council to review IPCC processes and practices. The committee, chaired by Princeton economist Harold Shapiro, observed that government representatives and scientists meet to agree the final wording of the summary for policymakers line by line "for clarity of message" and to get government "buy-in." Perhaps that's being polite. The real question is who is buying whom.

The committee recommended changes in IPCC governance, which were mostly ignored, and specifically recommended that the IPCC not use the quantitative probability scale that it re-used last week, as in the IPCC's 95% probability headline. The body's flagrant disregard for the InterAcademy Council's findings and its reluctance to address the 15-year warming pause are symptomatic of a failure of leadership. The conclusion is unavoidable: The IPCC is unreformable and the Fifth Assessment Report should be the IPCC's last.

Mr. Darwall is the author of "The Age of Global Warming: A History," (Quartet, 2013).

Mathematical & observational proof that CO2 has no significant effect on climate

A recent comment at WUWT sets out the mathematical and observational proof that the effect of CO2 on climate is effectively nil.

The comment is a succinct summary of many recent posts here on the Hockey Schtick.

Bart says:

September 28, 2013 at 11:09 am

‘As Monk would say, “Here’s what happened”.’

That Monk is a smart guy. It’s been pretty obvious, actually, for a long time that the climate modelers had conflated the natural cyclical upswing with a sudden anthropogenic rise. But, the fact that the rise from approximately 1970-2000 was almost precisely the same as the rise from 1910-1940 gave the game away.

“This analysis shows that the real AGW effect is benign and much more likely to be less than 1 °C/century than the 3+ °C/century given as the IPCC’s best guess for the business-as-usual scenario.”

It’s actually pretty obvious from other data that it must be even less than that, and effectively zero. If we look at the relationship between CO2 and temperatures, it is apparent that to a very high degree of fidelity that

dCO2/dt = k*(T – Teq)

CO2 = atmospheric concentration
k = sensitivity factor
T = global temperature anomaly
Teq = equilibrium temperature

k and Teq are parameters for a 1st order fit. They may change over time, but are well represented by constants for the modern era since 1958 when precise measurements of CO2 became available.

This is a positive gain system – an increase in temperatures produces an increase in CO2 concentration. If we now presume that there is a positive feedback between CO2 and temperature, we get a positive feedback loop, which would be unstable.

There are other negative feedbacks, e.g., the T^4 radiation of heat. But, to maintain stability, these would have to be dominant, in which case the overall effect of CO2 on temperature would be negligible anyway. All roads lead to Rome –whatever the overall system response is, it must be such that the effect of CO2 on temperatures is effectively nil.

Now, a note on how the relationship above comes about. Atmospheric CO2 obeys a partial differential diffusion equation. The interface with the oceans sets boundary conditions. The boundary condition can be considered to obey something akin to Henry’s law (buffering processes complicate the actual relationship)

CO2(boundary) = Kh*CO2_Oceans(boundary)

The derivative of this is

dCO2(boundary)/dt = dKh/dt*CO2_Oceans(boundary) + Kh*dCO2_Oceans(boundary)/dt

Kh is a function of temperature, and thus can be expanded to first order as

Kh = Kh_eq + Kh_partial*(T – Teq)

where Kh_partial is the partial derivative of Kh to temperature. The oceans have been a net source of CO2 to the atmosphere. Assuming these are dominant, then

dCO2(boundary)/dt := (Kh_partial*dCO2_Oceans(boundary)/dt) * (T – Teq)

which is the form of the equation above with

k = Kh_partial*dCO2_Oceans(boundary)

In words, the influx of CO2 from the oceans produces a temperature dependent pumping action into the atmosphere.

The full dynamics are an atmospheric diffusion equation, with ocean boundary conditions as above, as well as a boundary condition with the land, which establishes a flow from the atmosphere into the miinerals and biota of the land, and an outflow from anthropogenic release of latent CO2. This is vastly simplified, of course, as the oceans contain their own biota and other CO2 absorbing processes. So, rather than division strictly into oceans and land, there is some overlap between the two reservoirs. In any case, though I have not yet worked out the details, it is clear where all this is heading. A very simplified ODE system model is

dCO2/dt = (CO2eq – CO2)/tau + H
dCO2_eq/dt = k*(T – Teq)

CO2 = atmospheric CO2
CO2eq = equilibrium CO2 established by the oceanic boundary condition
H = human inputs
tau = a time “constant”

The equilibrium CO2 is established by the interface with the oceans, and is relentlessly driven upward by temperatures above the equilibrium level. These feed into the atmospheric diffusion equation, which is being driven by human inputs, but is also being depleted by natural sinks which react in proportion to the CO2 level above equilibrium.

If “tau” is short, then H will be dramatically attenuated, and have little overall effect, and CO2 will track CO2eq. The actual dynamics are undoubtedly much more complicated, and “tau” would be more precisely modeled as an operator theoretic value which smooths the CO2 differential, leading to a “long tail” response, though not too long in the most significant components, as the data show that human inputs are being fairly rapidly sequestered.

But, this is effectively what the data show is happening. There really is no doubt about it. And, because of the positive feedback effect noted above, CO2 concentration cannot have a significant effect on temperature, because otherwise, we already would have maxxed out at some enormous level of CO2 and exceedingly high temperatures eons ago.

Physicist explains why increased CO2 has a trivial effect upon climate

Climate science in a Styrofoam cup

by Mal Wedd September 30, 2013 Quadrant Online

When I went to university to study physics, serious scientists observed patterns, developed hypotheses to explain them, developed experiments to test the hypotheses, and wrote papers on the experimental data to confirm or deny the hypotheses.

In this post-modern world of “science”, if you assert something loudly enough, often enough and with enough passion, you will gain a flock of supporters (aka consensus), your assertion will become fact, and all your dreams comes true. The IPCC's wish is that carbon dioxide is driving the planet’s climate, and no amount of historic temperature adjustment or uncooperative temperature trends is going to obscure its collective vision of the way things ought to be working.

The IPCC has one fundamental problem.

While at university, I had the thrilling experience of handling liquid nitrogen. There I was holding in my bare hands, a polystyrene cup filled with liquid nitrogen (quite rightly, not something that would be allowed these days). Despite being at −195.8°C, and only a few millimetres of polystyrene away from my 36°C fingers, I could feel barely a chill. A cold stubby of beer would have me swapping hands in minutes, but something nearly 200 degrees colder needed only millimetres of polystyrene to stop the rapid transfer of heat that is driven by large temperature differences. The cup was so effective, it would have made little difference if I had added another cup to double the thickness.

Global warming advocates usually forget that the Earth’s relationship with space is similar. Space is on average -270°C while the Earth is somewhere between 10 and 20°C. Just a thin layer of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere prevents the catastrophic loss of heat that would otherwise radiate out at night. Radiation from the sun, at some 5500°C, replaces the heat lost over night, and the whole system is in near balance. But CO2 absorbs only in a small proportion of the wavelengths at which this heat is trying to escape.

Only the green peak (CO2 absorption spectrum) on the right above actually does any work, and much of that overlaps with water vapour (blue line). Furthermore, most of its work is done when the concentration of CO2 is only 10% of what it is today. Thanks to Jo Nova for the chart.

Adding more CO2 now is like adding extra cups to insulate my hand from liquid nitrogen – it just makes little difference, no matter how hard IPCC wishes.

Actually the IPCC has two fundamental problems.

Water vapour is a far more powerful greenhouse gas. Even more importantly, it is extremely, nay colossally, difficult to model. The problem is the common misunderstanding of what water vapour is. If you can see it, it aint water vapour.

Steam and clouds are made up of tiny water droplets, formed when saturated water vapour condenses from gas to liquid form. Saturated water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, while clouds are an effective sun reflector that help to cool the Earth. Water vapour in the atmosphere is created mainly by evaporation of oceans, and is depleted by rainfall. Water vapour condenses into clouds when it experiences temperature drops or pressure increases (e.g. as it passes over mountains) or high concentrations of fine dust particles. It is so hard to model that the best weather forecasters in the world can’t reliably tell you “if you need an umbrella next Tuesday”. Yet the IPCC has the audacity to claim that it has 97% consensus of 95% confidence that we are causing more than 50% of dangerously climate warming, via CO2. Wishful thinking.

Of course the situation is much more complicated than this, as increased temperatures mean that the atmosphere can carry more water vapour, which can cause more greenhouse heat trapping. But water vapour content of the atmosphere is highly variable, and is driven by, among other things, cloudiness and solar intensity.

In fact, the IPCC has numerous fundamental problems.

The sun is about 4.5 billion years old and while we have been observing it for thousands of years, we have only in the last few years had the tools available to study it seriously. Now that we have the tools, every few months a new discovery is made and our superficial understanding of the sun takes one baby-step towards maturity. The IPCC may wish upon a star that our nearby star does not contribute significantly to our climate, but that is so fanciful that even Disney would not buy it.

Mal Wedd is a physicist who wishes upon a star that the IPCC’s latest report was full of science and devoid of post-modern assertion. Sigh.

Related: See also Dr. Roy Spencer's post today:

The Global Warming They Fear is NOT Based upon Physical First Principles

Thursday, September 26, 2013

How climate models dismiss the role of the Sun in climate

The IPCC attributes 20th century global warming primarily to CO2 on the basis climate models, claiming that the increase in solar activity during the 20th century was insufficient to cause the observed warming. Thus, it is claimed, CO2 is by default the only other possible cause of the warming [they don't know how to model ocean oscillations, so those are automatically & conveniently excluded as a cause].

However, climate models are programmed with solar forcing that is 5-13 times less than found by state-of-the-art solar activity reconstructions. For example, the NASA-GISS climate model uses the following solar forcing assumption:

which shows solar activity increased during the 20th century by only about 0.15 Watts per meter squared [W/m2]. Contemporary solar activity reconstructions, however, show that solar activity increased during the 20th century by 1.5 - 4 W/m2 or 10 - 26 times more than assumed by the NASA-GISS model. If one assumes 30% albedo and divide by four [an incorrect and simplistic assumption as demonstrated by Joe Postma], the GISS model uses up to ~5 times less solar forcing anomaly change in comparison to solar proxy data.

Reconstructed Total Solar Irradiance [TSI] shown in upper right graph shows an increase of ~ 4 W/m2 over the 20th century

Solar forcing based on these modern reconstructions is 1 - 2.6 times higher than the alleged forcing from increased greenhouse gases during the 20th century. In addition, climate models do not consider any of the multiple solar amplification mechanisms which have been described in the literature. Thus, the IPCC and others dismiss the role of the Sun in climate by conveniently assuming solar activity changed 5 - 13 times less than the research indicates.

In addition, since solar forcing was much higher than assumed by the models, this implies that CO2 forcing was significantly less than assumed by the models.

New paper finds warming leads to fewer floods

A new paper published in Nature finds "over the past 2,500 years, flooding in the Alps has been less frequent during warm summers than during cool summers." The paper adds to many other peer-reviewed publications demonstrating that flooding is less common during warm periods than cold periods, contrary to the claims of climate alarmists.

(a), Flood chronologies of the ten studied lakes. Bars represent individual dated flood deposits. (b), Combination of the ten individual lake records represented as a 50-year moving average of flood events. The resulting frequency values are normalized between no flood activity (0%) and the maximal value (100%). The standard deviation is indicated with grey bars. (c), Historical flood reconstruction from Northern Switzerland (50-year moving average, normalized between 0 and 100%)⁸. (d), Tree-ring-based Central European summer temperature reconstruction (50-year moving average)²¹. (e), Major glacial advances reconstructed from the Lower Grindelwald Glacier (Northern Switzerland) indicated with triangles²²; grey area marks period of large Alpine glacial extension²². Blue shaded bars indicate periods of high flood frequency that correlate with lower summer temperatures.

Researchers believe that the frequency of flooding can be expected to decline in the central Alpine region.

Warm Summers Coincide With Less Frequent Flooding

Sep. 26, 2013 — Over the past 2,500 years, flooding in the Alps has been less frequent during warm summers than during cool summers. This is the finding of a study supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and carried out by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), the University of Bern and the ETH Zurich. Their look into the past suggests that the frequency of flooding can be expected to wane in the central Alps.

Flooding represents a major natural hazard facing the people and infrastructures of the Alpine region. How is the frequency of such extreme events likely to change over coming decades with the climatic scenarios pointing to warmer summers and lower mean precipitation levels? The study of geological archives (lake sediments), as well as a comparison with periods of higher temperatures, can help to provide a response to this question. However, both instrumental data and historical documents only allow us to look back over the last few centuries.

Continuous data at regional level For the first time, a team of researchers from Eawag, the University of Bern and the ETH Zurich, led by Flavio Anselmetti and Adrian Gilli, has studied the full history of flooding in the northern Alps over the past 2,500 years (*). This involved analysing sedimentary flood deposits taken from ten lakes in the northern Alps and dating the deposits that were characteristic of flooding episodes. "These lakes are distributed across a wide area and are located at different altitudes. This enables us to reduce local effects and events, and to obtain an overall picture of the climate in the central Alps," explains Lukas Glur, the first author of the study. "We were able to identify thirteen periods with high flood frequency but we are unable to say anything about how intense they were."

The role of subtropical high-pressure zones Combining this data with the summer temperature curve for central Europe -- from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Land-scape Research (WSL) -- reveals a positive correlation between the peri-ods with most frequent flooding and cool summers. The researchers' interpretation of this correlation is based on a change in North Atlantic atmospheric circulation patterns. Warm and dry summers in the northern Alps are characterised by a northward movement of the sub-tropical high-pressure zone, which deflects the humid air towards northern Europe. Conversely, when this zone is less extensive, bad weather systems are located further south and push up against the north side of the Alps, triggering major precipitation events.

Based on current knowledge, climate change can be expected to favour an expansion of this high-pressure zone. Consequently, researchers believe that the frequency of flooding can be expected to decline in the central Alpine region. However, the study does not enable them to draw conclusions as to the intensity of individual floods.

Journal Reference:
Lukas Glur, Stefanie B. Wirth, Ulf Büntgen, Adrian Gilli, Gerald H. Haug, Christoph Schär, Jürg Beer, Flavio S. Anselmetti. Frequent floods in the European Alps coincide with cooler periods of the past 2500 years.Scientific Reports, 2013; 3 DOI: 10.1038/srep02770

As Its Global Warming Narrative Unravels, The IPCC Is In Damage Control Mode

As Its Global Warming Narrative Unravels, The IPCC Is In Damage Control Mode

By James Taylor, Forbes, 9/26/13

IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri is pictured next to an unidentified Arab official during a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Struggling to keep a discredited global warming crisis afloat, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair Raj Pachauri this week denied the well-documented plateau in temperatures during the past 15-plus years. Pachauri’s denialism contradicted his own admission earlier this year that there has been a 17-year plateau in global temperatures.

The IPCC is in full damage-control mode after it leaked advance copies of an upcoming Summary for Policymakers to what it assumed would be friendly journalists. The journalists, however, quickly realized the IPCC Summary for Policymakers contained several embarrassing walk-backs from alarmist statements in prior IPCC reports.

Two of the most embarrassing aspects of the Summary for Policymakers are (1) IPCC’s admission that global warming has occurred much slower than IPCC previously forecast and (2) IPCC is unable to explain the ongoing plateau in global temperatures. IPCC computer models have predicted twice as much warming as has occurred in the real world, and virtually none of the IPCC computer models can replicate or account for the recent lack of global warming.

Rather than acknowledge that perhaps IPCC overshot its predictions in past reports, Pachauri doubled down on denialism, claiming there has been no slowdown in the pace of global warming.

“I don’t think there is a slowdown (in the rate of temperature increase),” Pachauri told BBC News Monday

Pachauri’s astonishing denialism not only undercuts IPCC credibility, it also contradicts his own words earlier this year in an interview with the Australian. “The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises,” the Australian’s Graham Lloyd reported in February after interviewing Pachauri.

While Pachauri and the IPCC bureaucracy double down on denial, some IPCC scientists are acknowledging the scientific truth. IPCC Lead Author Hans von Storch, a climate scientist and professor at the Meteorological Institute at the University of Hamburg, acknowledged the ongoing temperature plateau in a June interview with der Spiegel.

“So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break,” IPCC Lead Author Hans von Storch told der Spiegel in a June 2013 interview. Storch said the IPCC will have tone down its climate models unless warming quickly and rapidly accelerates ”According to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero,” Storch told der Spiegel. “This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.”

“At my institute, we analyzed how often such a 15-year stagnation in global warming occurred in the simulations. The answer was: in under 2 percent of all the times we ran the simulation. In other words, over 98 percent of forecasts show CO2 emissions as high as we have had in recent years leading to more of a temperature increase,” Storch explained.

A cynic may point out that presenting objective scientific evidence was never the goal of the IPCC and global warming alarmists. Instead, it can be correctly noted, the goal is to scare people into implementing the energy restrictions and wealth redistribution prescribed as a cure for the mythical global warming crisis. As prominent global warming scientist/activist Steven Schneider advised:

“We’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

For IPCC chair Raj Pachauri, there is no balance. There is merely denialist propaganda that he hopes will blind people to the fact that global warming has, at a bare minimum, slowed down dramatically during recent years.

The problem for Pachauri and the IPCC is the IPCC’s own scientists, such as Hans von Storch, directly contradict Pachauri’s denialism. And it is not just scientists pointing out Pachaui’s denialism. Even the IPCC’s reliably sympathetic media allies are unwilling to run with Pachauri’s whopper about no recent slowdown in global warming. For example, here are a few recent headlines from some of the most alarmist-friendly media outlets in the world:

“Researching global warming’s pause,” reads a BBC News headline.

“A cooler Pacific may be behind recent pause in global warming,” reads aNational Public Radio headline.

“Why has global warming paused?” asks a Christian Science Monitor headline.

“What to make of a climate-change plateau,” reads a New York Times headline.

“Global warming has ‘paused’ because of natural causes but will continue to rise, scientists claim,” reads a UK Daily Mail headline.

To be sure, these reliably activist media outlets are not abandoning their catastrophic global warming agenda, but even they are forced to acknowledge what objective scientific evidence shows and what IPCC chair Raj Pachauri denies; global temperatures have plateaued for more than a decade and there has been, at a bare minimum, a pronounced recent slowdown in global warming.

Raj Pachauri and the IPCC are falling into the same trap that discredited Al Gore. Exaggerating the pace and impacts of global warming may provide some short-term propaganda value, but these tall tales will ultimately backfire. People are not stupid. Al Gore may have brought belief in a global warming crisis to new heights following his Hollywood movie production An Inconvenient Truth, but it took an informed public mere months to discover Al Gore and his global warming whoppers were nothing more than the latest incarnation of Joe Isuzu. Raj Pachauri and the IPCC are foolishly drag racing down the same deceptive path. One cannot watch this propaganda train wreck unfold without expectations that Pachauri will soon offer a mini-pony with every copy of the IPCC’s newest report.

IPCC chair Raj Pachauri may want us to deny objective scientific facts, but the IPCC’s own scientists, the general public and even Pachauri’s reliable media allies know better.

Review paper finds global Medieval Warm Period was significantly warmer than today, when CO2 was 'safe'

A new review paper from SPPI and CO2 Science finds, "Not wanting to acknowledge that the earth of a thousand or so years ago was likely as warm as, or even warmer than, it is currently - when the atmosphere's CO2 concentration was much lower than it is today (285 vs. 400 ppm) - the world's climate alarmists have been loath to admit there was an MWP anywhere other than in countries surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean. And so it is that the results of the several studies described above are of great importance to the ongoing global warming debate, as they greatly advance the thesis that the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] was indeed a global phenomenon, wherein temperatures throughout the world were significantly warmer than they have been anytime subsequently, and that there is thus nothing unusual or unprecedented about earth's current level of warmth, with the obvious implication that the maximum temperatures of the present simply cannot be attributed to the historical increase in the air's CO2 content."

For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here.

[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Climate alarmists have claimed for quite some time that late-20th-century and early-21st-century global temperatures were so high as to merit the word "unprecedented" when comparing them to temperatures of the past millennium or two; and they also claim that this achievement was both driven and sustained by the carbon dioxide or CO2 released to the air by mankind's burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil. But to maintain this dual contention, they have been forced to further contend that the well-known Medieval Warm Period was neither hemispheric nor global in scope, but merely confined to the much smaller region surrounding the North Atlantic Ocean. And they have also had to contend that the MWP was never really as warm as it had long been believed to be.

The results of the several studies described greatly advance the thesis that the MWP was indeed a global phenomenon, wherein temperatures throughout the world were significantly warmer than they have been anytime subsequently, and that there is thus nothing unusual or unprecedented about earth's current level of warmth.

'Political advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science'

A typical ad hom attack leveled against skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is that they are in the pay of big oil or some other nebulous evil entity, but the fact is that it is much more likely that activist scientists have a vested interest in promoting the alarm that provides grant money and other forms of 'compensation' or fame.

Here's a sad tale of a Cornell professor who pocketed $35,000 from an anti-fracking political group in advance to provide research that 'claimed fracking could push the world over a tipping point and send world temperatures irreversibly higher." The research appears to be deliberately based upon obsolete data, and was subsequently discredited by many independent researchers.

Excerpt:

In light of the controversy surrounding Howarth’s opinions, climate scientists are stressing the importance of keeping political views private. Tamsin Edwards, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, in a statement to the Breakthrough Institute said:

“I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate skepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence.”

Emphasizing the importance of retaining a distinction between science and politics, she explained, “In this highly politicized arena, climate scientists have a moral obligation to strive for impartiality. We have a platform we must not abuse…. Science doesn’t tell us the answer to our problems. Neither should scientists.”

Experts: Climate Scientists Have Obligation to Political Impartiality

By Mia Shaw 9/26/13

A recent study from the University of Texas-Austin, one of the most comprehensive on methane leakage from shale gas emissions to date, found that 99 percent of the greenhouse gas escaping from wells being prepared for production could be captured by state of the art equipment.

The study’s findings were celebrated by environmentalists, but immediately criticized by two Cornell University scientists, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea, whose 2011 study found fracking operations responsible for catastrophic levels of methane. Howarth claimed fracking could push the world over a tipping point and send world temperatures irreversibly higher, though many independent researchers have discredited his conclusions.

Howarth’s projections were deemed “absurd” by Michael Levi, director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council of Foreign Relations, who explained that most methane gas is either “delivered to sales” with no leakage or burnt off through flaring, diminishing its greenhouse impact.

Cornell geologist Lawrence Cathles also argued that Howarth appeared to have deliberately used 2007 data in his study, increasing his estimates by at least 10-20 times. The US Energy Department, University of Maryland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and the Worldwatch Institute rejected Howarth’s findings as greatly inflated.

According to Forbes contributor Jon Entine, Howarth’s opinions may have been influenced by the Park Foundation, an organization said to have poured millions of dollars into anti-fracking ventures in recent years:

“It’s more than likely Park money is funding organizations behind the coordinated response campaign to the Texas study and the attempt to smear the Environmental Defense Fund. Howarth has established money ties to Park.

Two years ago in an interview for an investigative story on Park and Howarth for Ethical Corporation, the Cornell professor blurted out to me that he was recruited by a Park Foundation family member who thought a university study criticizing fracking and challenging the ‘green credentials’ of shale gas would advance the cause… He pocketed $35,000 of Park’s money—before beginning his research.”

In light of the controversy surrounding Howarth’s opinions, climate scientists are stressing the importance of keeping political views private. Tamsin Edwards, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, in a statement to the Breakthrough Institute said:

“I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate skepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence.”

Emphasizing the importance of retaining a distinction between science and politics, she explained, “In this highly politicized arena, climate scientists have a moral obligation to strive for impartiality. We have a platform we must not abuse…. Science doesn’t tell us the answer to our problems. Neither should scientists.”

This article was originally published by IVN a non-profit news platform for independent journalists.

Never mind: IPCC claim of 750 million people killed by global warming within 22 years falsified by new paper

According to news reports based upon the IPCC AR5 report, global warming is going to "claim" 750 million people within the next 22 years due to decreased water supplies from the Himalayas. However, a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Geoscience last month [long after the cutoff date for inclusion] instead finds that water supplies from the Himalayas will increase during the 21st century.

Yet another example of why the journal Nature says, "The IPCC’s mega-assessments are out of date by the time they hit the streets," and AR5 will be dead on arrival.

Review paper finds no evidence warming has increased drought or climate variability

A new review paper from SPPI and CO2 Science concludes, "In summation, and in view of the numerous similar findings from across a wide and varying geographic area, it would appear that much of Canada has (1) experienced less-variable extreme moisture conditions, as both it and the rest of the world have emerged from the relative cold of the Little Ice Age and are now basking in the greater warmth of the Current Warm Period, and that (2) this finding appears to be independent of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration."

For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here.

[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Excerpts:

Knowledge of the past is extremely important when it comes to contemplating future climatic possibilities; for what's happened before can clearly happen again. Hence, this summary briefly reviews the history of Canadian droughts with respect to how they varied over the past several centuries in response to significant changes in global air temperature but very little change in the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, which exercise provides some idea of how Canadian droughts might possibly vary in the post-Little Ice Age world that is known as the Current Warm Period.

There is no solid evidence to conclude that climatic warming, if it occurred, has caused the Prairie drought to become more severe.

It is clear that 20th century warming, if anything, has led tomore stable climatic conditions with fewer hydrologic extremes (floods and droughts) than was typical of prior Little Ice Age conditions.

Hydro-ecological conditions after 1968 have remained well within the broad range of natural variability observed over the past 300 years, with the earlier portion of the record actually depicting "markedly wetter and drier conditions compared to recent decades."

In summation, and in view of the numerous similar findings from across a wide and varying geographic area, it would appear that much of Canada has (1) experienced less-variable extreme moisture conditions, as both it and the rest of the world have emerged from the relative cold of the Little Ice Age and are now basking in the greater warmth of the Current Warm Period, and that (2) this finding appears to be independent of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration.