I’m rather tired still from my trip, and so I don’t have the energy to get into a detailed read and analysis of this document which was posted up on the IPCC website just 14 hours ago. This is the first time I’ve seen this document, though others may know of it.
But, I’m sure WUWT readers will have some insight and we can look at it in more detail tomorrow.
WUWT reader Alan writes in an email:
Searching around the internet just now I chanced upon an IPCC document, listed as being posted 14 hours ago. Curiously, however, it isn’t a recent document at all, rather an IPCC pdf from 1990! I know the date from cross-checking and finding it mentioned in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1992. Anyway, its title is Detection of the Greenhouse Effect in the Observations, and it deals with the conditions needed to confirm that global warming is due to a human-induced enhanced greenhouse effect. In other words, the document admits that these conditions have not yet been established but — in Section 8.4, When Will The Greenhouse Effect be Detected — stipulates what MUST occur in the future in order to diagnose a human cause.
The document is here: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_08.pdf
Alan
In case the document disappears, I’ve also loaded it onto WUWT here:
ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_08 (PDF)
In my very brief scan, I found this section most interesting:
Note that in 1988, four* two years earlier, in his testimony before the US Senate, Dr. James Hansen said this in his opening remarks:
Source: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/06/23/ClimateChangeHearing1988.pdf
Mind you, this is only 10 years after the fiercely cold North American Winter of 77-78 in which ideas of another ice age were being bandied about in scientific and media circles.
Maybe, giving the benefit of the doubt, they are talking about different things, but there seems to be a significant profound confidence gap between Dr. Hansen’s testimony and that of the IPCC working group 1 on the ability to discern “global warming” in the surface temperature record. The disparity is striking due to the similarity of wording.
I’ll leave the rest in the hands of our capable readers for further discussion.
* Note: I made a mistake, originally saying 1992 in the title, which was the year the BAS report mentioned the 1990 IPCC FAR document. Corrected. – Anthony
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Interesting – but note that the co-authors comprise all the usual suspects, including James Hansen himself. The chapter was in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report of 1991. The mention of the “fingerprint” method of detection & attribution is fascinating, as that developed the fake “confirmation” of CO2 as the culprit in the Appendix in Hegerl, Zwiers et al in Solomon et al., Chapter 9 “Understanding and attributing climate change”, IPCC WG AR4 2007.
The 1991 co-authors of the FAR chapter are all very much in the business but not one has ever to my knowledge published any multivariate regression analysis, least of all in AR4, their fingerprint detection is solely model-derived.
My paper on this is about to be published online, possibly today, by Australia’s Lavoisier Group (www.lavoisier.com.au)
Well, the discrepancy is possibly the result of wishful thinking on the part of Dr. Hansen. If the good Dr. Hansen wishes to appear a messianic figure in world history, the warming must be there to save us from. If it turns out not to be there, of course, he could end up looking like a first class buffoon. And if major climate scientists he associates with are eventually shown to have fabricated evidence in any way to force a new world order upon us, he’ll go down in history with them as more Judas Iscariot than Jesus of Nazareth.
There are all kinds of curious claims made in the IPCC First Assessment Report (FAR 1990) that contradict prior claims and (mostly) later claims made by climate scientists. Most people are unaware of this because the IPCC refuses to post a full unabridged PDF version of the FAR on their web site. This makes it difficult to contrast and compare the FAR with subsequent assessment reports unless you own a hard copy.
Fortunately, a hard copy is easy to come by if you know where to look. Used copies are selling for $0.52 on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/ipcc-far
Out of the 35 authors, I’ll just term it the Hansen-Jones-Trenberth (HJT92) paper, I can’t seem to find the “Business-As-Usual Scenario” mentioned in HJT92 as being in an appendix #1. Does anyone happen to know where the appendices can be located?
Perhaps Dr. Hansen was speaking out of an alternate orifice.
It is also quite possible is that in 1990 the IPCC had not yet been fully corrupted by the bureaucrats, who by 1996 were re-writing whole sections of the IPCC reports to conform with the core IPCC mission (to “prove” a human cause for global warming).
Well, I think the more interesting sentence is the one below the yellow highlighting:
“. . . [I]f the global warming becomes sufficiently large, we *will be able to _claim_ detection* simply because there will be no other possible explanation.” [Emphasis added.]
Looks to me like someone’s really eager to attribute warming to CO2 in the typical non-disprovable way. I believe E.M. Smith pointed out not too long ago that there was a strong correlation between jet airplane flights and the “claimed” increase in temperature. Why don’t we “claim” that as the only possible explanation?
Me? I’m much more interested in scientific demonstration than claims.
This recent article proposes just such an alternative possibility to GHG warming that makes it very difficult to exclude natural low frequency variability as the cause of all the climate fluctuations observed so far:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/the_associate_of_albedo_and_olr_radiation_with_variations_of_precipitation_implications_for_agw.html
“We anticipate that a doubling of CO2 will act in a way to cause the global hydrologic cycle to increase in strength by approximately 3-4 percent. Our analysis indicates that there will be very little global temperature increase (~0.3oC) for a doubling of CO2, certainly not the 2-5oC projected by the GCMs.”
“It is possible for the troposphere to gain energy from increases in CO2 and to simultaneously enhance its radiation to space to largely balance out all or most of the CO2 energy gains. ”
“Observations of upper tropospheric water vapor over the last 3-4 decades from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data and ISCCP data show that upper tropospheric water vapor appears to undergo a small decrease while IR or outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) undergo a small increase. This is opposite to what has been expected from the GCMs. These models have erroneously exaggerated the magnitude of the water vaporfeedback. They have also neglected the strong enhancement of albedo which occurs over the rain and cloud elements.”
Furthermore it provides support from my original work from July 2009 which specifically diagnosed the speed of the hydrological cycle as a powerful countervailing factor against GHG warming:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3735
“Our Saviour – The Hydrological Cycle”.
Link not working, try this instead:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/the_associate_of_albedo_and_olr_radiation_with_variations_of_precipitation_implications_for_agw.html
There was no evidence of any significant post-WWII warming in 1988.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1940/to:1990/mean:13/plot/gistemp/from:1950/to:1987/trend
Most interesting – I have been working on the observation/attribution problem for some time now using the published ocean/air temperatures and CO2 emissions. It is reassuring to see that the IPCC document came to the view it did and I do not believe anything of significance has changed. First, statistically, it is almost impossible to establish any meaningful correlation between co2 and temperature. Both processes are non-stationary with the first having one unit root and the second two. Inducing stationarity in both series brings a close to zero correlation on all lags. Correlation does not imply causality but the absence of correlation is a tough problem to surmount for those who do believe there is an empirical relationship.
do I understand correctly that a 21 year old document has been published on an IPCC website within the last day ?
if so, i wonder why. is this kind of thing normal ?
EO
PDF documents generated from scans of the FAR WG documents have been up on the IPCC web site for some months now. Not sure if everything is there, but I downloaded copies of WG1, WG2, WG3, supplementary material and the 90-92 assessments at the beginning of February this year.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml
Bob – brilliant. My paper re correlation will not be up at http://www.lavoisier.com.au until tomorrow, but if you contact me (tcurtin [at] bigbl;ue.net.au) I will send it to you.
RE: Mike Fox
“. . . [I]f the global warming becomes sufficiently large, we *will be able to _claim_ detection* simply because there will be no other possible explanation.” [Emphasis added.]
Indeed. George Bernard Shaws’ comments on statistics seem rather pertinent here (in ascribing meaning to spurious correlation without actually knowing about cause and effect):
“Or, to take another common instance, comparisons which are really comparisons between two social classes with different standards of nutrition and education are palmed off as comparisons between the results of a certain medical treatment and its neglect. Thus it is easy to prove that the wearing of tall hats and the carrying of umbrellas enlarges the chest, prolongs life, and confers comparative immunity from disease; for statistics show that the classes which use these articles are bigger, healthier, and live longer than the class which never dreams of possessing such things.”
That is why the neglect by Mann to publish R2 statistics and the “hockey stick” from “red noise” demonstrated by MM; RyanO et al demonstration of absurd response of antarctic warming maps by Steig09 to small data changes are so damning – spurious correlation, all of them.
Mike Fox;
Beat me to it. What struck me was the gormlessly tendentious tone — fully into advocacy mode; how to sway and pacify the peasantry so they don’t ask
smartstupid questions.A Pox on ’em.
The statement after your highlighted paragraph in “8.1.4 Attribution And The Fingerprint Method” is classic non-Science “However, if the Global Warming becomes sufficiently large we will eventually be able to claim detection simply because there will be no other explanation”
non-Science (commonly pronounced ‘nonsense’) = illogical and without evidence; made-up; uninformed guesswork; unfounded political or religious assertion.
I thought that the evidence of AGW was the extra heat in the upper troposphere- you know that heat that we cant measure because it is not there, that undetectable heat mentioned on one of the deleted emails from Mann et al to Jones et al.
“In short, we have very lew adequately observed
data variables with which to conduct detection studies It is
important therefore to ensure that existing data senes are
continued and observational programmes are maintained in
ways that ensure the homogeneity of meteorological
records”
And that is thier problem. First, the surface station mix has been altered/discontinued/sensor changed and second a lot of data has been adjusted. The attempt to make non-uniform data over time spans satisfy demand for long-term data aquisition by adjusting has injected uncertainty. Circular progress.
If you cannot see the signal over the noise with the raw data, you cannot see it with adjustments.
Hoo boy.
“It is accepted that global-mean tempeiatuies have
increased over the past 100 yeais and aic now warmer than
at any time in the period of instrumental lecord This global
warming is consistent with the results ol simple model
predictions ol greenhouse gas induced climate change
However, a number ol other factors could have contributed
to this warming and it is impossible to prove a cause and
effect relationship”
And the failure to warm the past 10-15 yrs means that the Climate is right back to where they started: Can’t see the signal for the noise. It is now more likely than ever that the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse forcing is , at the very least, overstated. Continued cooling of the global mean temp. will destroy the AGW hypothesis as a meaningful theory…all except for one caveat:
AGW may act to delay/buffer the onset of the next Ice Age, but only by the narrowest of margins. Facing the prospect of an eventual 10C drop in global temps, a .3C gain is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Hansen’s claims were controversial at the time, and like many ground-breaking science results, they were not immediately accepted by the community. The IPCC reports are supposed to represent the consensus of the community. So, it should be no surprise that they did not simply regurgitate and uncritically accept the dramatic claims recently made, but used rather more cautious language. Why would you be surprised that IPCC reports are something rather more than cut-and-paste jobs of recent papers?
“Mind you, this is only 10 years after the fiercely cold North American Winter of 77-78 in which ideas of another ice age were being bandied about in scientific and media circles.”
Only in media circles, actually.
“…strong correlation between jet airplane flights and the “claimed” increase in temperature. Why don’t we “claim” that as the only possible explanation?”
Because it has no basis in physics.
Eternal Optomist
Yes your point is indeed “interesting”.
Things like that do not happen by chance.
The reason for the posting may be quite mundane and uninteresting.
On the other hand, it may not.
I do hope sombody can follow this up.
Small things sometimes prove to be most important.
1990 – IPCC report saying what must be established to be able to claim, Hansen two years earlier saying it has been. All this was in the flux of the IPCC being thoroughly organised to produce the global warming scare.
I did make an attempt when I first began exploring AGW to work out what was happening in those critical years, it was horribly complicated and I didn’t have the time to collate it properly into running time line as I was trying to explore all the other claims. It was from the 1995 IPCC report that the key paragraph showing there was no evidence of any human connection was excised from the following Summary report (which came out in 1996?), the Santer Chapter 8 becoming the official AGW line.
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Social/IPCC-Santer.htm
“Why did Santer, a relatively junior scientist, make the unsupported revisions? We still don’t know who directed him do so, and then approved the changes. But Sir John Houghton, chairman of the IPCC working group, had received a letter fromt he U.S. State Department dated November 15, 1995. It said:
It is essential that the chapters not be finalized prior to the completion of the discussions at the IPCC Working Group I plenary in Madrid, and that chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner following the discussion in Madrid.
The letter was signed by a senior career Foreign Service officer, Day Olin Mount, who was then Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. The Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs was former Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO). Wirth was not only an ardent adovate of man-made warming, but was a close political ally of then-President Bill Clinton and then-Vice President Al Gore. ”
These were certainly interesting times in the AGWScience push, when Singer and Seitz got stuck into defending RealScience. Some of the saga on http://www.hockel.com/gore.pdf
There’s also an interesting post from Vincent Gray on Climategate: ‘There was Proof of Fraud All Along’ (PJM Exclusive)
By Vincent Gray, November 27, 2009 http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/2540
The IPCC was established in 1988, Hansen is merely setting the scene for the conclusions manipulating AGW. The next years were the fight between real scientists who thought the IPCC was genuine scientific analysis, contributors and non-contributors, from their growing realisation that this was a con from the beginning, and those promoting the con who have used every dirty trick in the book to confuse the issue, to hide the con.
The IPCC’s website has published over the last months (don’t know the exact date) the First and Second assessement reports which were absent previously.
I first saw them on early february this year but I presume the move was made before.
Stephen Wilde says:
March 18, 2011 at 12:18 am
Thank you Stephen for this link.
Like I have been saying for many years, why is it always the “scientists” who are the last to catch on?
“It is possible for the troposphere to gain energy from increases in CO2 and to simultaneously enhance its radiation to space to largely balance out all or most of the CO2 energy gains. ”
Thanks to Kirchhoff’s Law I think it is not just possible, it is guaranteed!
Quote:
“Initially, the proportion of absorbed energy that isn’t re-emitted as radiation represents an amount of stored energy which raises the internal temperature (as thermally conducted rather than radiated in and out of objects inside the body such as a glass thermometer and the liquid inside the glass thermometer“OR PLANET”) – over and above what one would expect. The temperature continues to rise until the radiation emitted by the body is equal to the radiation absorbed by the body in spite of the bottleneck presented by the lack of emissivity. This state of balanced heat flow at elevated temperature is called thermal equilibrium, and is driven by Kirchhoff’s Law – which applies to all bodies.”
(“OR PLANET” mine obviously.)
This statement describes exactly what the so called “Greenhouse Effect” is meant to be responsible for. Yet the so “Greenhouse Effect” is actually Kirchhoff’s Law rebranded but with the inevitable associated cooling ignored/removed/hidden.
As an engineer, man and boy, the fallacies of the “Greenhouse Effect” hypothesis are glaringly obvious to me.
RE: Eternal optimist
IPCC only published the early reports in hard copy as web and pdf were not used widely (if at all) back in the early 1990s. They have scanned the earlier documents to pdf and put them on the web as a convenience. Maybe they could have done it earlier but perhaps nobody asked for it. Not really fair to criticise them for something quite helpful for those that can’t get hold of the original hard copies. I have the 1992 and 1995 reports in hard copy but couldn’t find a copy of the FAR for sale so I was pleasantly surpised when they turned up as scans at the IPCC website.