IPCC Crushes Scientific Objectivity, 91-0.
By Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Unquestionably, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to build the scientific case for humanity being the primary cause of global warming. Such a goal is fundamentally unscientific, as it is hostile to alternative hypotheses for the causes of climate change.
The most glaring example of this bias has been the lack of interest on the IPCC’s part in figuring out to what extent climate change is simply the result of natural, internal cycles in the climate system. In Chapter 9 of the latest (4th) IPCC report, entitled “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”, you would think the issue of external versus internal forcing would be thoroughly addressed. But you would be wrong.
The IPCC is totally obsessed with external forcing, that is, energy imbalances imposed upon the climate system that are NOT the result of the natural, internal workings of the system. For instance, a search through Chapter 9 for the phrase “external forcing” yields a total of 91 uses of that term. A search for the phrase “internal forcing” yields…(wait for it)…zero uses. Can we really believe that the IPCC has ruled out natural sources of global warming when such a glaring blind spot exists?
Admittedly, we really do not understand internal sources of climate change. Weather AND climate involves chaotic processes, most of which we may never understand, let alone predict. While chaos in weather is exhibited on time scales of days to weeks, chaotic changes in the ocean circulation could have time scales as long as hundreds of years, and we know that cloud formation – providing the Earth’s natural sun shade – is strongly influenced by the ocean.
Thus, small changes in ocean circulation can lead to small changes in the Earth’s albedo (how much sunlight is reflected back to space), which in turn can lead to global warming or cooling. The IPCC’s view (which is never explicitly stated) that such changes in the climate system do not occur is little more than faith on their part.
The IPCC’s pundits like to claim that the published evidence for humanity causing warming greatly outweighs any published evidence against it. This appeal to majority opinion on their part is pretty selective, though. They had no trouble discarding hundreds of research papers supporting evidence for the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age when they so uncritically embraced the infamous “Hockey Stick” reconstructions of past temperature change.
Despite a wide variety of previous temperature proxies gathered from around the world (see figure below) that so clearly showed that centuries with global warming and cooling are the rule, not the exception, the Hockey Stick was mostly based upon some cherry-picked tree rings combined with the assumption that significant warming is a uniquely modern phenomenon.
As such, they rejected the prevailing “scientific consensus” in favor of a minority view that supported their desired outcome. I suspect that they do not even recognize their own hypocrisy.
As I have discussed before, the IPCC’s neglect of natural variability in the climate system ends up leading to circular reasoning on their part. They ignore the effect of natural cloud variations when trying to diagnose feedback, which then leads to overestimates of climate sensitivity. This, in turn, causes them to conclude that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations alone are sufficient to explain global warming, and so no natural forcings of climate change need be found.
But all they have done is reasoned themselves in a circle. By ignoring natural variability, they can end up claiming that natural variability does not exist. Admittedly, their position is internally consistent. But then, so is all circular reasoning.
Our re-submitted paper to the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled “On the Diagnosis of Radiative Feedback in the Presence of Unknown Radiative Forcing” will hopefully lead to a little more diversity being permitted in the global warming debate.
I don’t think the IPCC scientists are as opposed to this as are their self-appointed spokespersons, like Al Gore and numerous environmental writers in the media who get to over-simplify the climate issue without ever being corrected by the IPCC. Natural climate change continues to be the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and I suspect that some within the IPCC are slowly becoming aware of its existence.
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It would help, for the less scientific among us, to have a bit more information on some of the graphs that are presented. Roy Spencer’s article is right on the money and clearly this IS and 800 lb gorilla and needs to be given a run out of its cage. The graph of 2000 years of temperature anomalies is accredited to work by Loehle (2007) and mentions 18 previous proxies. Can we know what these proxies are? Are they ice core, tree rings, sediments etc? I am also still a bit hazy about the proxies used in the infamous Hockey Stick. A simple statement for laymen might help. Thanks to McIntyre we know a lot more about the Yamal tree rings, but what other proxies were used to creat the hockey stick? Are they adding new proxies as time goes by? Or are they just recalibrating their computer models to produce spagetti? Forgive my ignorance, but when arguing with AGW enthusiasts on the basis of their poor record of openness and transparency on core data we have to make sure that we have all the counter arguments and data sorted.
Richard Hill and Ted
Let us not place too much faith in the IPCC’s use of the phrase “Greenhouse gas forcing has *very likely* caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years”, with “very likely” corresponding to 90% confidence. This pseudostatistical interpretation has absolutely no mathematical basis because no statistical tests were ever performed. The “very likely” interpretation was simply a guess by a small group of very biased scientists pushing their agenda. The link to a confidence level (90 % is stated by the IPCC) was simply a ruse to provide the appearance of a scientific analysis.
Leaving aside the obsession with external factors, the use of this statistical con is perhaps the most unscientific feature in their reports. After years and years of advice by statisticians to scientists about doing properly planned analyses, it is truly a wonder that they were not jumped on by most in the scientific and statistical community. Please, never allow this so-called confidence level to have any credibility. Put simply, it has none.
Gerard: I agree. A more sophisticated search, using multiple terms, is needed to get an apples-to-apples comparison.
Ted (00:45:14) :
“No, BCC is right.”
Ted, you beat me to it. I was going to say something along the same lines.
We start with:
x = 1
y = x
z = y
Multiply x = y by x:
x2 = xy
Subtract y2
x2 – y2 = xy – y2
Simplify:
(x + y)(x – y) = y(x – y)
x + y = y
Since y = x
2x = y
And since y = z
2x = z
Therefore:
x + y + z = x + 2x + 2x
x + y + z = 1 + 2 + 2 = 5
But, x = 1 and y = x and z = y
Therefore:
1 + 1 + 1 = 5
Reply: Very cute. I won’t call out the sort of obvious trick. ~ ctm
Since we have a terminological expert in the house, explain me this.
Why, if I believe the climate has always changed am I a climate change denier? Yet I’m not if I believe the climate was constant until the 20th century.
Here is a link to a new statement from KVA (the Swedish Royal Science Academy):
http://www.kva.se/Documents/Vetenskap_samhallet/Miljo_klimat/Yttranden/uttalande_klimat_090922.pdf
In a way, it says exactly the same things as Dr Spencer (and many of us) do, that many natural factors (clouds, sun, ocean streams) and anthropogenic ones (aerosols…) have not been accounted for correctly.
However their conclusion is in part what one would expect from an academy like this in times like these, that we should move to mitigate…
On the other hand, they do call for more work in the area of climatology, satellite tech., paleoclimatology, because the understanding of the system is still low.
I think that their recommendations are mostly sound and logical. 🙂
Alan from Australia (02:58:24) :
Richard Hill and Ted
Let us not place too much faith in the IPCC’s use of the phrase “Greenhouse gas forcing has *very likely* caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years”, with “very likely” corresponding to 90% confidence. This pseudostatistical interpretation has absolutely no mathematical basis because no statistical tests were ever performed. The “very likely” interpretation was simply a guess by a small group of very biased scientists pushing their agenda. The link to a confidence level (90 % is stated by the IPCC) was simply a ruse to provide the appearance of a scientific analysis.
Leaving aside the obsession with external factors, the use of this statistical con is perhaps the most unscientific feature in their reports. After years and years of advice by statisticians to scientists about doing properly planned analyses, it is truly a wonder that they were not jumped on by most in the scientific and statistical community. Please, never allow this so-called confidence level to have any credibility. Put simply, it has none.
It is one of the first things I latched on when I started discussing in blogs on the skeptic side.
from the horse’s mouth, AR4 8.1.2.2 Metrics of Model Reliability
The above studies show promise
that quantitative metrics for the likelihood of model projections
may be developed, but because the development of robust
metrics is still at an early stage, the model evaluations presented
in this chapter are based primarily on experience and physical
reasoning, as has been the norm in the past.
If there is no likelihood, confidence levels are nonsense.
I have pointed this quote out several times, and none of the statisticians has replied to the negative. On the other hand, they do not seem to ascribe to this fact any catastrophic weight.
In my discipline, ( particle physics), where we continually fitted models to data, often using monte carlo simulations, lack of a likelihood function , or a chisquare per degree of freedom of the fit not near 1, meant that no statistical error bars could be ascribed and one had to go back to the drawing board.
I strongly suspect that if statistical error bars were given for the spaghetti graphs, they would be so large that the whole plot would be clearly nonsense, and that is the reason the likelihood function is not pursued. Relying on the experience and physical reasoning of modelers is much more productive of scary scenaria.
With respect to Dr Spencer, he doesn’t zero in on the real problem.
Which is,
Temperature measurements over the 20th century and specifically the use of minimum and maximum temperatures collected at highly non-random locations, together with even worse ocean temperature measurements, are given an entirely spurious precision as a measure of the Earth’s climate, and then fed into climate models which extrapolate this data out into the future resulting in an entirely spurious precision to future temperature predictions.
The truth is we don’t know how much the atmosphere warmed over the 20th century, nor have we any way of finding out. And this ignores the fact atmospheric temperatures are a poor measure of how much the climate has warmed. Not least because we know that the amount of heat lost to space by the Earth’s climate is a direct function of atmospheric temperatures.
And for those of you who think I am talking through my hat, why do the paleo temperature reconstructions from diverse sources almost all show cooling starting around 50 or so years ago? The so called Divergence Problem.
O/T…
Every morning I have my set of websites I scan, as most of us do. This morning a few clicks took me off my regular path and landed me on the Telegraph’s page where I discovered this article regarding nimby alive and well in Cal:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/6389384/Lizards-and-tortoises-hampering-Californias-solar-energy-efforts.html
More evidence that building even so called clean-green power sources will never be tolerated.
JimB
My bias (I’m biased, but not prejudiced — there is a difference) is to listen sympathetically to anything Dr. Spencer has to say. So it is perhaps telling that I also wondered if “internal processes” was the best term to search for. It seems to me that the historic term of art here would be “natural climate variability.” And it so happens that I have actually searched chapter 3 (where I would expect it to be discussed) of WG1 AR4 for this expression, or variants of it. And there are some references to natural climate variability in chapter 3, but any impartial observer would have to admit that they failed to take it seriously. At the end of chapter 3 is a lengthy bibliography, which contains very little reference to what would be “the relevant literature” on natural climate variability. If chapter 3 where a Ph.D. thesis, no respectable scholar overseeing the thesis would let it pass. It is clearly an example of rhetorical “special pleading” — selective citation of the literature to support a particular agenda. It is not a credible survey of the relevant literature. So while I might quibble with the choice of expression that Dr. Spencer chose to focus upon, I think his main point remains valid. Anyone who thinks AR4 is a complete and unprejudiced survey of the relevant literature has blinders on.
A Google Scholar search of the exact phrase “natural climate variability” turns up over 4500 scholarly articles on the subject. There is a substantial literature to suggest that (a) climate models do not capture natural climate variability very well, and (b) it is hard to extract any anthropogenic influence against the noisy background of natural climate variability. Was this given any serious consideration in AR4? Of course not. Just like all the papers that were ignored documenting the MWP, these papers were ignored because it didn’t fit “the narrative.”
So I agree with Dr. Spencer’s point, even if I might question the search term he used.
BCC (22:25:37) :
So now we’re playing the terminology cherry pick game.
Page 667 of the chapter in question: “Climate change may be due to internal processes and/or external forcings … A key objective of this chapter is to understand climate changes that result from anthropogenic and natural external forcings, and how they may be distinguished from changes and variability that result from internal climate system processes. ”
If you search for “internal processes” (a more generic term than “internal forcing”), “natural climate processes”, etc., you’ll find that, in fact, the IPCC does not pretend that these processes don’t exist.
I was intrigued.
I searched for “internal processes” 6
“external processes” 0
“natural external” 19
“natural internal” 21
“anthropogenic” 317
and the ones Spencer searched:
“internal forcings” 0
“external forcings” 65
So let us put some weights on this study.
365 +65=430
continuing, my laptop threw me on the submit 🙂
365+65-19=411
10 +21= 40
So the mention is 1 to 10 between presumed guilty and presumed innocent :).
sorry, that is 19+21 that is 40, not 1+1+1=5 :).
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter9.pdf
Here’s the key passage as I see it:
In all simulations shown in Figure
6.13, the late 20th century is warmer than any other multidecadal
period during the last millennium. In addition, there
is significant correlation between simulated and reconstructed
variability (e.g., Yoshimori et al., 2005). By comparing
simulated and observed atmospheric CO2 concentration during
the last 1 kyr, Gerber et al. (2003) suggest that the amplitude
of the temperature evolution simulated by simple climate
models and EMICs is consistent with the observed evolution
of CO2. Since reconstructions of external forcing are virtually
independent from the reconstructions of past temperatures, this
broad consistency increases confidence in the broad features of
the reconstructions and the understanding of the role of external
forcing in recent climate variability. The simulations also
show that it is not possible to reproduce the large 20th-century
warming without anthropogenic forcing regardless of which
solar or volcanic forcing reconstruction is used (Crowley, 2000;
Bertrand et al., 2002; Bauer et al., 2003; Hegerl et al., 2003,
2007), stressing the impact of human activity on the recent
warming.
So by ignoring all the studies whose reconstructions show a warmer medieval warm period, they are able to claim that the models and the reconstructions mutually reinforce each other. And by downplaying medieval temps, they can claim a good correlation with co2 and therefore the AGW hypothesis is strongest in explaining C20th temp rise.
Mann is debunked, Briffa is debunked. What’s left?
RACookPE1978 (23:25:37) : “You CANNOT use flawed and approximate computer simulations as “evidence” because I can also (and at much less cost than 79 billion dollars!) create a computer program that clearly proves 1+ 1 + 1 = 5.”
In 1968 I wrote my very first program as an exercise in my first high school computer class. We were using Focal. (anyone remember that language!).
I titled the program “Personality Analyzer”. The program asked for a persons height, weight, hair color, eye color, nationality and date of birth. Of course the only thing that mattered to the output was the person’s height because I wrote the program that way. Why? Because I knew the height of a person who was in the class that would see the results and I was playing a trick on him. When you put in his height as 69″ the personality analyzer spit out “slightly less intelligent, highly jealous with no athletic abilities”. Of course he got angry and I got a “A+”. It remains one of my better practical jokes.
John Finn (02:41:48) :
RACookPE1978 (23:25:37) :
…..
From 1905 – 1940, CO2 constant, temperature rose 4/10 of one degree.
From 1940 – 1975, CO2 constant, temperature fell 3/10 of one degree.
From 1975 – 1998, CO2 rose, temperature rose 5/10 of one degree.
From 1998 – 2009, CO2 rose, temperatures fell 2/10 of one degree.
What is the source which leads to this conclusion: “From 1998 – 2009, CO2 rose, temperatures fell 2/10 of one degree”
—…—…
Pick your month in 2009,
Pick what “trend line” you are going to accept for the spike in temperatures in 1998 – 2000. You can really make the short term numbers become you like.
May and June 2009 had a satellite temp anomaly of 0.0 C. Jan through Mar were right at 0.2 C. Sept was higher at 0.4 C. I chose 0.2 for a nominal 2009 temperature.
(On average in 2009, we are right about at the same general global temperature anomaly as we were in 1995.)
And (apparently) 1930 and 1945 as well. Surface temperature “records” publicized by GISS and HADGCRUT have been changed to uniformly lower all early 20th measurements made before 1972 by 0.2 to 0.3 degrees, while increasing post 1972 temperatures by about a little under 0.1 degrees.
The generally accepted anomaly in 1998 was highly distorted by the El Nino that year (0.7 degrees), so you have to extrapolate through that period to discuss any trends before or after 1998. Most writers have used 0.5 degrees for 1998, and a rise of 0.7 for the entire 20th century.
The idea of the climate as a chaotic system is something Dr. Spencer has mentioned previously, and in somewhat more detail than in this post. Yet, the implications are devastating to the AGW hypothesis.
If I have understood correctly, when a system exhibits chaotic behaviour, it never remains in a constant state, but continually bifurcates from one state after another, even if driven by a constant input. Dr. Spencer stated that for the oceans themselves, they exhibit chaotic cycles of hundreds of years in duration. If this is indeed the case, then that is all that is needed to explain the twentieth century warming trend. So, I don’t understand why the IPCC are so quick to dismiss “internal processes”.
Philip_B (03:48:37)
Well said, that man.
I would add that a lot of the predictions make use of proxies for temperatures, and divergence problem notwithstanding, their provenance is suspect to say the least.
I have often puzzled over the 90% claim that it was “CO2 wot dunnit.” Not being a climate scientist I am guessing here, but to arrive at any kind of probability value they would probably have to compare all past temperature estimates with past CO2 estimates to get the correlation, and compare those past values with the present values.
You could only get a value like 90% if the data you were working with showed flat temperatures and CO2 levels for thousands of years, and a big spike upwards in the twentieth century. Where would they have got data like that from?
“However their conclusion is in part what one would expect from an academy like this in times like these, that we should move to mitigate…” Patrick
Precisely. Nearly everyone seems to think that it is “prudent” to restrict carbon emissions. However, it is almost certainly not economically prudent or it would already have happened. The Great Depression was a major cause of World War II which killed 50 – 80 million and caused huge environmental damage.
Most scientists are economic ninnies is my experience. Science is simple compared to economics, IMO. But that makes sound economics very simple: Liberty plus enforcement of basic laws against fraud and theft.
TerryS:
I WILL call you out. In the step labeled “Simplify”, you divided by (x-y). But y = x = 1, therefore x – y = 0. You cannot divide by zero.
I grant, however, that this mathematical sleight of hand is no worse than the models that “prove” anthropogenic global warming.
The UK government is also lacking scientific objectivity in their recent ad campaign. However:
“A £6m government ad warning about climate change is to be investigated by watchdogs over claims it is misleading and too “scary” for children.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8317998.stm
Gene Nemetz (22:48:59) :
BCC (22:25:37) :
BCC,
I get the impression from people like you that you just want to tear down the reputation of people like Roy Spencer. Or, at the very least create doubts about them.
I think BCC just showed Spencer has tore down his reputation once again. Don’t shoot the messenger.
That IPCC story is an old one. Why not to apply some “external forcing” to its very existence. Why not some of the most important UN states stop it?. Do all countries agree with its crazy conclusions?