[note, footnote links will only work if you go to original article ~ ctm]
The following is Patrick Frank’s controversial article challenging data and climate models on global warming. Patrick Frank is a Ph.D. chemist with more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. He has previously published in Skeptic on the noble savage myth, as well as in Theology and Science on the designer universe myth and in Free Inquiry, with Thomas H. Ray, on the science is philosophy myth.A Climate of Belief
The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable
by Patrick Frank
“He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”
— John McCarthy1
“The latest scientific data confirm that the earth’s climate is rapidly changing. … The cause? A thickening layer of carbon dioxide pollution, mostly from power plants and automobiles, that traps heat in the atmosphere. … [A]verage U.S. temperatures could rise another 3 to 9 degrees by the end of the century … Sea levels will rise, [and h]eat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. Disease-carrying mosquitoes will expand their range. And species will be pushed to extinction.”
So says the National Resources Defense Council,2 with agreement by the Sierra Club,3 Greenpeace,4 National Geographic,5 the US National Academy of Sciences,6 and the US Congressional House leadership.7 Concurrent views are widespread,8 as a visit to the internet or any good bookstore will verify.
Since at least the 1995 Second Assessment Report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been making increasingly assured statements that human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) is influencing the climate, and is the chief cause of the global warming trend in evidence since about 1900. The current level of atmospheric CO2 is about 390 parts per million by volume (ppmv), or 0.039% by volume of the atmosphere, and in 1900 was about 295 ppmv. If the 20th century trend continues unabated, by about 2050 atmospheric CO2 will have doubled to about 600 ppmv. This is the basis for the usual “doubled CO2” scenario.
Doubled CO2 is a bench-mark for climate scientists in evaluating greenhouse warming. Earth receives about 342 watts per square meter (W/m2) of incoming solar energy, and all of this energy eventually finds its way back out into space. However, CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, most notably water vapor, absorb some of the outgoing energy and warm the atmosphere. This is the greenhouse effect. Without it Earth’s average surface temperature would be a frigid -19°C (-2.2 F). With it, the surface warms to about +14°C (57 F) overall, making Earth habitable.9
With more CO2, more outgoing radiant energy is absorbed, changing the thermal dynamics of the atmosphere. All the extra greenhouse gasses that have entered the atmosphere since 1900, including CO2, equate to an extra 2.7 W/m2 of energy absorption by the atmosphere.10 This is the worrisome greenhouse effect.
On February 2, 2007, the IPCC released the Working Group I (WGI) “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) report on Earth climate,11 which is an executive summary of the science supporting the predictions quoted above. The full “Fourth Assessment Report” (4AR) came out in sections during 2007.
Figure 1 shows a black-and-white version of the “Special Report on Emission Scenarios” (SRES) Figure SPM-5 of the IPCC WGI, which projects the future of global average temperatures. These projections12 were made using General Circulation Models (GCMs). GCMs are computer programs that calculate the physical manifestations of climate, including how Earth systems such as the world oceans, the polar ice caps, and the atmosphere dynamically respond to various forcings. Forcings and feedbacks are the elements that inject or mediate energy flux in the climate system, and include sunlight, ocean currents, storms and clouds, the albedo (the reflectivity of Earth), and the greenhouse gasses water vapor, CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons.
In Figure 1, the B1 scenario assumes that atmospheric CO2 will level off at 600 ppmv, A1B assumes growth to 850 ppmv, and A2 reaches its maximum at a pessimistic 1250 ppmv. The “Year 2000” scenario optimistically reflects CO2stabilized at 390 ppmv.
The original caption to Figure SPM-5 said, in part: “Solid lines are multi-model global averages of surface warming (relative to 1980–99) for the scenarios A2, A1B and B1, shown as continuations of the 20th century simulations. Shading denotes the plus/minus one standard deviation range of individual model annual averages.”
Well and good. We look at the projections and see that the error bars don’t make much difference. No matter what, global temperatures are predicted to increase significantly during the 21st century. A little cloud of despair impinges with the realization that there is no way at all that atmospheric CO2 will be stabilized at its present level. The Year 2000 scenario is there only for contrast. The science is in order here, and we can look forward to a 21st century of human-made climate warming, with all its attendant dangers. Are you feeling guilty yet?
But maybe things aren’t so cut-and-dried. In 2001, a paper published in the journal Climate Research13 candidly discussed uncertainties in the physics that informs the GCMs. This paper was very controversial and incited a debate.14But for all that was controverted, the basic physical uncertainties were not disputed. It turns out that uncertainties in the energetic responses of Earth climate systems are more than 10 times larger than the entire energetic effect of increased CO2.15 If the uncertainty is larger than the effect, the effect itself becomes moot. If the effect itself is debatable, then what is the IPCC talking about? And from where comes the certainty of a large CO2 impact on climate?
With that in mind, look again at the IPCC Legend for Figure SPM-5. It reports that the “[s]hading denotes the plus/minus one standard deviation range of individual model annual averages.” The lines on the Figure represent averages of the annual GCM projected temperatures. The Legend is saying that 68% of the time (one standard deviation), the projections of the models will fall within the shaded regions. It’s not saying that the shaded regions display the physical reliability of the projections. The shaded regions aren’t telling us anything about the physical uncertainty of temperature predictions. They’re telling us about the numerical instability of climate models. The message of the Legend is that climate models won’t produce exactly the same trend twice. They’re just guaranteed to get within the shadings 68% of the time.16
This point is so important that it bears a simple illustration to make it very clear. Suppose I had a computer model of common arithmetic that said 2+2=5±0.1. Every time I ran the model, there was a 68% chance that the result of 2+2 would be within 0.1 unit of 5. My shaded region would be ±0.1 unit wide. If 40 research groups had 40 slightly different computer models of arithmetic that gave similar results, we could all congratulate ourselves on a consensus. Suppose that after much work, we improved our models so that they gave 2+2=5±0.01. We could then claim our models were 10 times better than before. But they’d all be exactly as wrong as before, too, because exact arithmetic proves that 2+2=4. This example illustrates the critical difference between precision and accuracy.
In Figure 1, the shaded regions are about the calculational imprecision of the computer models. They are not about the physical accuracy of the projections. They don’t tell us anything about physical accuracy. But physical accuracy — reliability — is always what we’re looking for in a prediction about future real-world events. It’s on this point — the physical accuracy of General Circulation Models — that the rest of this article will dwell.
h/t dbstealey
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One thing that doesn’t get mentioned often enough is that the greenhouse efficiency of CO2 is not linear. It only absorbs infrared radiation in two or three narrow frequency bands (two if you don’t count the one which overlaps with water vapor). When the center of those bands approach saturation adding more CO2 doesn’t change much as only the unsaturated fringes of the bands have any additional absorption capacity. That’s why for most of the earth’s history there has been up to and over 10 times the atmospheric CO2 concentration and it didn’t cause a runaway greenhouse. It takes exponentially more CO2 to maintain a linear ramp in its capacity to absorb IR.
So the 100 ppm of CO2 increase (280 to 380) since the beginning of the industrial age has 10 times less GH effect than the 100 ppm that went before it and that has 10 times less effect than the 100ppm that preceded it. The first 100ppm does the lion’s share of the GH warming.
Put another way, the “damage” (I prefer to call it a benefit) has already been done. Limiting CO2 emissions at this point is the same as locking the barn after the horse has been stolen.
This is rather well known to physics literates including climatologists. The problem is that the measured (if you can trust the accuracy of the global temperature record which is a matter of great doubt in its magnitude) global average temperture increase is much greater than 280ppm to 380ppm can account for. So the dedicated warmists came up with an ad hoc hypothetical positive feedback mechanism that goes like this: added CO2 raises the temperature X amount which raises water vapor content by Y amount which causes an additional 2X of warming. If this were true then the oceans would have boiled off long ago. What the warmist moonbats won’t admit even in the face of the overwhelming, incontrovertable evidence of no runaway greenhouse ever happening is that there’s a negative feedback associated with rising temperatures. We get ice ages but we don’t get the opposite of them. The so-called majority of climatologists have created GCM models that are devoid of the actual cause of the relatively tiny amount of global warming in the last several decades.
Not being a person to argue with reality it’s global cooling that has me worried. There’s a tipping point alright. A tipping point that plunges the planet into ice ages and the current interglacial period is historically long in tooth. Any cooling, any reduction in CO2, is going to adversely effect agricultural output. On my scale of risk vs. reward a few inches of sea level rise over the next 50 years is a lot easier to deal with than 25% less food to feed 50% more people. Global starvation vs. migrating a literal stone’s throw further back from the high tide point. Doesn’t seem like a difficult choice to make.
Gail Combs,
I have made a very simple model of the Earth’s climate system. For the forcing function, I used Flux data (previous to 1947, I modeled the Flux from Sun Spots). The model runs from 1749 to 2011 in Mathematica; a graph of the result is available.
If any one is interested, contact me at jlurtz@basicisp.net.
I must have missed Gneiss’s posting from June 23, 2010 at 7:16 am. I think he is right, which of course refutes the seminal message of Patrick Frank’s article.
And I love it when someone expresses scepticism about [~SNIP~] that Stephen Goddard always posts soccer results.
Dave Springer says:
June 23, 2010 at 10:43 am
“One thing that doesn’t get mentioned often enough is that the greenhouse efficiency of CO2 is not linear……….”
No doubt, we didn’t have a chance to hammer that home before they moved the goalposts again to the water vapor malarkey, as you mentioned. Once someone is able to show them how that, too, is wrong, they’ll simply contrive some other fanciful machination for warming, originally caused by CO2, our byproduct of energy use.
Models are but an artifact, invented by a few, to introduce wrong ideas, just apparently scientific, to naive and simple people, so as to create the impression that they need to be “protected”, but by whom, by the all knowing, all powerful STATE (state=THEY): “We will protect you from Global Warming/Climate Change, all that you got to do is….”(….while we just see what you have in your wallet)
In a Progressive Marxist state, loyalty can and must only be manifest towards one entity: the State. There can be no other competitor for the attention or the needs of the individual, because there can be no individuals
http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/
Following this logic we arrive at the conclusion that all those who oppose the current CREED must be and will be removed, and we will see this actually happening.
Roald,
“This is true but it doesn’t follow at all that the models are wrong, as you suggested. The models are the best things we have and we can’t wait 100 years to see if they’re accurate or not. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that some changes (e.g. sea level rise, Arctic melt) are running faster than predicted by the 2007 Assessment Report.”
Your caveat makes no sense. If it turns out that the models are indeed completely 100% inaccurate (regardless of their precision), are YOU going to be around to tell all of our great-great grandchildren that we wasted trillions of dollars which they now have to repay, all based upon output of models which had no relation to reality? Really? Just on the off-chance that they MIGHT be right?
What if in the 1600s people had made a really catastrophically stupid decision which had a devastating effect on future generations based upon models which said that the Sun orbits the Earth? I am quite sure you would not currently appreciate any faulty decision which they had made based upon that (at the time thought to be accurate) model of the solar system.
The FACT is that currently scientists don’t really understand all of the variables involved in climate all that well, nor do they understand all of the interactions between those variables very well. Any model based upon a poor understanding of variables and a poor understanding of the behavior of the variables can’t possibly be a very good model, except by pure accident.
So please, in 100 years, tell our great-great grandchildren that we spent trillions of dollars which they now have to repay because of decisions made based on models which were based on a poor (at best) understanding of the system being modelled. Be sure to tell them it was the best we had available at the time, and be sure to tell them that based on these models, we thought that we HAD TO act, or the results would be catastrophic. I am sure they will understand that 100 years from now.
You must have missed the memo. Humans are responsible for the global cooling that happened from 1940 to 1980 too. Anthropogenic aerosols were the cause of that, particularly sulfer from (what else) burning of fossil fuels. Even more insidious was the sulfers took the form of acids which causes the infamous acid rain which was predicted to end plant life as we know it. A global cooling acid/rain scare reached its zenith in the mid to late 1970s. When the cooling stopped it was replaced for a decade or two with an ozone hole scare where the treat was all land animals were going to die due to excessive ultraviolet radiation exposure. When that scare was debunked the global warming scare took over and that brings us to today where after a couple decades of it being the fashionable extinction of mankind scenario it too is on its way out. In the midpoints we had some other “big things” to be scared about. In the 1950s and 1960s it was nuclear holocaust with a sprinkling of population explosion.
It just seems some people just can’t be happy unless they believe there’s some kind of global disaster on the horizon of a kind which is preventable if we could just mend our evil ways. In the meantime real threats persist which we can’t do much about. Big asteroid strikes and super-volcano eruptions come to mind. The one threat that bothers me and which we could do something about is Coronal Mass Ejections. They happen much more frequently than asteroid strikes and super volcanos. The last big one was in 1859. It melted telegraph wires and the aurora borealis was strikingly visible in southern Florida. It it hit today it would fry our electrical grid so badly it would take months to get it minimally repaired and years to fully repair. In the meantime there would be no electricity. Distribution of goods and services, water and sewer, refrigeration, emergency health care, transportation, police and fire departments, would all come to a screeching halt. Epic disaster of biblical proportion. We can work to protect our national power grids so that damage, death, and destruction is greatly minimized but no one is doing anything. It’s not a fashionable disaster scenario I guess. I think to be fasionable with the gullible public at large everyone has to feel there’s some small part they can each play like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact flourescents. Sometimes I think, as a species, we’re too stupid to survive.
Dr. Lurtz says: June 23, 2010 at 10:50 am
“I have made a very simple model of the Earth’s climate system. For the forcing function, I used Flux data (previous to 1947, I modeled the Flux from Sun Spots). The model runs from 1749 to 2011 in Mathematica; a graph of the result is available.”
Would you call that a forecasting model; or the application of a hypothesis to illustrate a correlation implicit in the hypothesis?
Are you able to run from 1749 to 2010 if your data stops at 1900?
If so how accurate are the results?
Using the Flux from Sun Spots as a constant re-evaluation (reality limit) parameter you seem to be following reality, not forecasting reality.
Anthony,
Your readers might enjoy these:
About Algore: http://weaselzippers.us/2010/06/23/al-gore-bloated-global-warming-fear-monger-cheating-husband-sexual-deviant/
About CA’s AGW law: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-climate-initiative-20100623,0,216211.story
Slightly OT.
I’ve been piecing together a very simple climate simulation model. I started out with patch of ground on the Earth’s equator, and considered how it would heat and cool if there was no atmosphere. I’ve now added in a simple atmosphere, with clouds floating on the top of it, and have been considering how this affects my patch of ground.
What I could really do with is some formula which states how much solar or terrestrial radiation is absorbed by this atmosphere, given its depth and density and composition (and anything else which may affect absorption). I’ve come across something called Beer’s equation, but that seems to deal with both absorption and scattering. I just want the absorption. Once I’ve got this, I can figure out the temperature change in the atmosphere.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
The author puts into words exactly what each of us, or most of us. Intuitively felt as we watched all the hand waving going on over the last twenty years. Most of us are not certifiable climate scientists; but, we’re at least as smart as most of team members. We just don’t chose to earn our livings that way.
Combine that intuitive response with discomfort at all the arm-twisting that was evident since before Kyoto and you have a very “alarmed” state of skepticism setting in.
Then, because they know that we know they’re not wearing any clothes, the name calling starts…
Why does CO2 drive the climate on Planet Earth?
You need to have a forcing variable that you could accurately predict to lead the illustration of the hypothesis (in my opinion a model does not need to be lead if it is complete). Solar activity, clouds, winds, ocean currents and geomorphology are very difficult to forecast and any projections based on such forecasts would need to have a big set of iff’s attached.
The two simplest things to choose as a forcing variable are population and C02; which is driven by population. Both can be reasonable well forecast as the illistrations leader.
However population would be a hard sell so they settled on CO2, because it is easy and they are lazy. That is why CO2 drives the climate on Planet Earth, laziness.
Not A Carbon Cow says:
June 23, 2010 at 9:39 am
Peter,
He is making the point that the model can never produce a correct answer, however much accuracy improves.
==============================================
No he is making the point that no matter how precise the models are they will continue to be inaccurate.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm
There are two major questions in climate modeling – can they accurately reproduce the past (hindcasting) and can they successfully predict the future? To answer the first question, here is a summary of the IPCC model results of surface temperature from the 1800’s – both with and without man-made forcings. All the models are unable to predict recent warming without taking rising CO2 levels into account. Noone has created a general circulation model that can explain climate’s behaviour over the past century without CO2 warming.
—————————————————————————————
Above is an answer to the verifiability of climate models.
Are they accurate enough to know that we will have climate change?
And are they accurate enough to know the degree of climate change?
Hindcasting does give a strong indicator of the model’s ability to reasonably recreat energy balance in the earth’s atmosphere. This has been shown over and over on many websites. Taking co2 out of the equation in modeling and all models fail to reproduce the temperatures of the past. Put co2 back in and the hindcat is resonably accurate.
Roald says:
June 23, 2010 at 10:24 am
I’d appreciate if you stopped putting words in my mouth. I know perfectly well that Arctic melt doesn’t contribute to sea level rise but thermal expansion and glacier melt does.
And how’s the rate of sea level rise working out for you Roald? Seems to have dropped from 3.2mm/yr to 1.5mm/yr over the period of the satellite record. What’s going on there?
@PeterB in Indianapolis
Perhaps I expressed myself poorly. What I meant was that even without the models there’s a lot we can tell about climate. In the northern hemisphere, July is warmer than January, and Chicago is usually colder than Houston. And even without GCMs we know we have a problem with global warming.
An uncertainty of more than 100°C/century is obviously ludricous. It seems that Frank mistakes errors in absolute values with errors in a trend. But don’t let facts get in the way of beliefs.
Jeff Green:
Climate models can not predict today’s climate even by inputting all prior climate data. Until they can make validated predictions they should not be used to promote CAGW.
But since models are about all the alarmist crowd has, that’s what they’re stuck with. You play the hand you’re dealt. Too bad the planet doesn’t agree with the models.
I like global scorching, I hate being cold
Roald says:
June 23, 2010 at 12:05 pm
And even without GCMs we know we have a problem with global warming.
We know that Warmists have a problem with global warming. Thinking, more rational people, not so much.
Grumpy Old Man says:
June 23, 2010 at 10:16 am
What we have to fear is another ice age
NO!, for God’s sake, NO!, we MUST FEAR NOTHING but the ones who make us fearful with the sole purpose of stealing from us the fruits from our personal labour, and turn us into their slaves or soldiers protecting what they stole from ourselves.
Roald says: June 23, 2010 at 12:05 pm
“What I meant was that even without the models there’s a lot we can tell about climate. “
“In the northern hemisphere, July is warmer than January” If we are restricting the comparison to years within limited timeframes. There are Julys in history that are cooler than some Januarys in history.
So “In the northern hemisphere, July is warmer than January”, is not actually a fact, but a reasonable assumption for a specified time frame.
“Chicago is usually colder than Houston.”, this contains the word “usually”, so it is a matter of opinion what the term “usually’” means in this context since there is no time frame given, therefore this too is not a fact but an opinion.
“And even without GCMs we know we have a problem with global warming.”, and that is simply an option, which “we” do not agree with.
“An uncertainty of more than 100°C/century is obviously ludricous.”
That is a problem that the computer software being used to illustrate the CAGW hypothesis needs to correct. So that is a fact the “we” agree on.
I would have said atrocious rather than ludicrous.
Roald says:
June 23, 2010 at 10:24 am
“I’d appreciate if you stopped putting words in my mouth. ”
I think you said;
“Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that some changes (e.g. sea level rise, Arctic melt) are running faster than predicted by the 2007 Assessment Report.”
Why is Arctic melt of importance in conjunction with “e.g. sea level rise” , with a comma in between? Unless the intention that we should couple them together to a global alarm regarding CO2?
You are claiming climate sensitive is high regarding CO2? We claim you are wrong.
There is no reason to mention sea level rise. Unless you can turn off that vulcano.
Therefore we can claim that Thermal expansion of the ocean comes from increased temperature, CO2 or no CO2.( As opposite to indirectly via CO2’s mythical forcing effect on H2O to give mythical temperature increases. Invented by some clever person, just to match the invented hockeystick. Man made CO2’s effect is very,very small. Cancelled out on a cloudy day, you might say)
And Arctic melt; We claim CO2 has very little to do with it. You claim the opposite.
The models ? It has been no statistical significant global warming for….is it 15 years now? Or was it since 1975? We are now going into a cooling period.
Hence, the models are wrong, and it seems climate sensitivity is a myth.
We claim there is both positive and negative feedback from clouds. Clouds are the most important factor . You claim its CO2.
So far the real world does not support the CO2 hypothesis.
It supports that Clouds is the dominant factor. With delay effects from oceans.
RE: Dave Springer says:
June 23, 2010 at 10:43 am
And taking it in reverse, with a reduction in ppCO2, at some point a “cliff” is reached and the Earth becomes a very nasty place. We are much closer to that cliff now than we were 100MYBP.
idlex says:
June 23, 2010 at 11:28 am
Sir, you should have the black body radiation formula.
Wein’ Law
Beer’s is good
Kirshoff’s Law
specific heat formula
specific charts for various gases and water
These will get you started. But understand the black body radiation formula used is really for a cavity. So we use it wrong.
Jeff Green says:
June 23, 2010 at 11:46 am
Jeff,
You should probably read the paper that was posted. You’re simply showing what he posited. The reason why the IPCC drew all the models on the same graph is to lend the appearance of accuracy. They don’t even color code the model graphs so you can’t tell one from the other. So which ones were more correct than the others? What are they advocating? That we should average errant models to reflect reality? Really, read the paper.