The IPCC, 1990: "Detection of the Greenhouse Effect in Observations" – at odds with the 1988 Senate testimony of Dr. James Hansen?

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Truth shall out. Well, usually, anyway.
=============

Bob @ 1:27 AM
Nice.
===

You chaps need to read “Slaying The Sky Dragon” and get properly sceptical/Realist -less of the lukewarmer at WUWT. There IS NO greenhouse effect from CO2. This whole theory is impossible according to the laws of thermodynamics!

“If the global warming becomes sufficiently large, we will eventually be able to claim detection simply because there will be no other possible explanation.”
This reasoning has been used in the UK for quite some time to the point where it is presented as evidence. In panel discussions and television interviews, the only evidence, other than their favourite models of course, proffered by the likes of the Government Chief Scientist, Sir John Beddington and his predecessor Sir David King is that global warming is happening and it must be due to anthropogenically produced carbon dioxide “because we can’t find any other reason.”
Perhaps I too would sell my soul to the CAGW Devil for £165,000 per annum.

“The magnitude of this warming is broadly consistent with the theoretical predictions of climate models, but it remains to be established that the observed warming (or part of it) can be attributed to the enhanced greenhouse effect.”
“Natural variability of the climate system could be as large as the changes observed to date but there are insufficient data to be able to estimate its magnitude or its sign.”
“Global-mean temperature alone is an inadequate indicator of greenhouse-gas-induced climatic change.”
“The fact that we are unable to reliably detect the predicted signals today does not mean that the greenhouse theory is wrong or that it will not be a serious problem for mankind in the decades ahead.”
That refutes Hansen’s testimony.

I have yet to see one model that accurately matches the global temps between 1980 and 2010 (the latest 30 year period).

I keep saying it, I would fire Hansen in a New York minute. I know he is under civil service rules, but he is a fraud and an incompetent. This thread only reinforces that belief.

stevo – ” Only in media circles , actually ” Wrong . I heard this bandied about in classes in college in the early 70’s . Furthermore , the late Steven Schneider was a big proponent of the impending ice age at that time . He was even on tv saying so – it was that show with Leonard Nimoy , I forget the title . I’m sure that someone here can find a link – it’s probably on youtube .

Smokey:
“And the WWF provided a large part of the IPCC’s supporting information, which turned out to be non-peer reviewed eco-propaganda.”
You’ll have no difficulty then, in furnishing say, three substantive IPCC assertions or conclusions based on the grey literature….
>>”You can claim that Hansen was right, but that’s just putting lipstick on a pig”
Hansen’s model projections were astonishingly accurate, [his 1988 testimony was based on an early iteration of GISS Model E, the climate sensitivity used was around 4.2, which is higher than more recent estimates; this has little effect during the first few decades of the projection, but if the modern value of circa 3C is correct, then the projections will tend to read higher than reality over time, which is exactly what is observed.]
Dr Hansen’s core contribution, of course, lies in his peer-reviewed science, which informs his political views. Correct me if I am wrong but nobody has ever laid a glove on aforementioned science. What we do see, every time his name comes up, is an amazing ad hominem display of bile: in this thread alone, apart from the porcine reference we have ‘fraud’ (twice), ‘incompetent’, ‘liar’. He has also been likened to Adolf Hitler in comments here at the Science Blog of the Year.
Free expression of opinion, and all that, but you might like to consider the impression this creates.

Tim Curtin – many thanks, I appreciate it! I cannot get the email link to work. I hope the moderator can help make the link.
Gene Zeien: many thanks, I will have a try and would be interested to see the link if you can find it. I have worked annual lags and a 5 year distributed lag model. Not knowing enough about the physics I assumed that CO2 mixing would not be instantaneous but would be homogenised over a maximum of 5 years. I suspect Hansen may have just regressed emission ppm against T anomaly – given the nature of the stochastic processes involved that would almost certainly throw up a spurious result. Using 1959 – data forwards I can manage a polynomial regression that gives an R2 > 0.8 – totally meaningless of course. There is an interesting paper by Paulo Cesar Soares (2010) Warming Power of CO2 and H2O: Correlations with Temperature, Changes in International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, 1, 102-112. He comes to a similar result but sadly I suspect he has incorrectly handled the pre- ’59 Co2 data incorrectly so his results may not be quite as robust as he thinks. However, I am pretty sure that there is no significant correlation on any reasonable lag although I am open to being proven wrong. A zero correlation does not automatically rule out any causal link between T and CO2 but it does suggest that any link is so tenuous that it is not revealed in the data. At the moment all the data says – if taken at face value – is that temperature is drifting upwards and so are CO2 emissions. But so too are the average salaries of vicars. Hard to see any causality there!

Steven Mosher,
Are you aware of any models that accurately predict 1990 to present? If so, could you give us the reference? I have used multivariate models and they were helpful in determining the portion of the variance in a dependent variable that was contributed by each of several explanatory variables. However, the ones I used were static, not dynamic. Do dynamic climate models include classical multivariate analysis? Sorry for the basic questions, just trying to learn a little.

Will said:
“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.”.
I think you missed the point of the paper that I linked to.
Kirchoff’s Law refers to radiative physics but in the climate system that is not enough being only a part of what goes on.
There is an additional energy transfer system involving evaporation and the hydrological cycle and its effect is to supplement the surface cooling over and above that to be expected from Kirkhoff’s Law.
As a result, instead or reaching radiative equilibrium at a higher temperature the accelerated energy loss reduces or neutralises the increase to a higher temperature.
The atmospheric heights change due to the faster energy loss from the surface so radiative equilibrium is achieved at a different height for little or no temperature change at the surface.
The ocean skin warms a little and the air circulation systems shift a miniscule distance from more CO2 induced energy in the air but the faster upward energy transfer from more evaporation, conduction, radiation and convection negates any significant temperature increase above or below the ocean skin.

I’m having a tough time arguing against CAWG these days, I keep cracking up laughing, the poor believers are so naked these days it’s comical, I find many of them will agree we also need to ban the spread of dihydrogenmonoxide before its too late.
Soon I shall politely invite my local politicians to publish the science upon which they base the idiotic social policies they are pushing, after all the debate is over eh.
The IPCC is much like the CRU emails a gift that keeps on giving.

Sky: thanks for your comment. I have been principally focused on the post 59 data looking for dependency in short run temperature volatility. Your results, if they hold up are very interesting indeed, and tend to support one conclusion of Soares’ paper. It’s not easy in this field I know but I do hope you can get your work published.
Note to Stephen Mosher: your comment to Chris on multi-pattern optimal fingerprinting (I think that is what you meant) was intended as a put down but perhaps a little more robust than the method would support. As Hasselmann (1997) says: ‘the term attribution can still be interpreted only in the limited sense of consistency, since the possibility cannot be excluded that the retrieved signal can be explained by other forcing mechanisms not considered in the analysis’.

Bill Illis -“I have a database of the TAR multi-model predictions and they are actually the worst made yet”
Bill – which of these assertions is false?
1. The TAR models projected an increase under scenario A1F1 of 0.32C 1990-2010.
2. The actual trend increase was indeed 0.32C (HADCRUT)
3. A1F1 is the scenario closest to actual emissions over the period.
Hansen’s 1988 model was programmed with a climate sensitivity that is now estimated to be too high, the fact that the projections are tracking high – after several decades of accuracy – confirms that the IPCC estimate of climate sensitivity is likely correct.
The period since 2003 is way too short to be a useful measure of predictions:, even so the observations are well within 95% of the model runs ( the grey band )
Your second chart appears to be an update of IPCC AR4 figure TS26. Except the IPCC plots smoothed annual values while the ‘update’ seems to switch to monthly, which obviously show much greater variance. Given the fuss made around here about splicing different values into the same plot this seems an odd move. This presumably explains why it shows temperatures plunging in 2010 when plotting the annual average – as used in the original IPCC chart – would show the second or third warmest year in the record. Naughty.
The IPCC chapter from which the graph is taken has this:
“Previous IPCC projections of future climate changes can now be compared to recent observations, increasing confidence in short-term projections and the underlying physical understanding of committed climate change over a few decades. Projections for 1990 to 2005 carried out for the FAR and the SAR suggested global mean temperature increases of about 0.3°C and 0.15°C per decade, respectively.[10] The difference between the two was due primarily to the inclusion of aerosol cooling effects in the SAR, whereas there was no quantitative basis for doing so in the FAR. Projections given in the TAR were similar to those of the SAR. These results are comparable to observed values of about 0.2°C per decade, as shown in Figure TS.26, providing broad confidence in such short-term projections.”
cheers!

Phil Clarke says:
March 19, 2011 at 8:31 am
The cut-off period for submission of TAR model runs was early 2000. It was published in 2001. So all of your comparisons to 1990 are not really valid. They had all the actual temperature data up to 1998 or 1999 or so to work with and, thus, the 1990 to 2000 number is a “hindcast” not a projection.
Secondly, the numbers you linked to are, in fact, 10-year averages – the average of 2000-2010 for example, not the year 2010.
So, we can go back and put IPCC Tar climate model projections on the same baseline as Hadcrut3 today (which turns out to be the same baseline that IPCC Tar used 1961-1990) and what do we get.
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/8867/ipcctarvshad3feb11.png
One has to be careful with the IPCC because they are very careful in making sure it is hard to check their projections.

Phil Clarke asks “Anyone want to discuss any of the science in Hansen’s papers?” Why not? First up, Hansen’s staffers Schmidt, Ruedy, Miller and Lacis, (JGR 2010 draft) found that “With a straightforward scheme for allocating overlaps, we find that water vapour is the dominant contributor (c50% of the effect) [of atmospheric long-wave absorbers], followed by clouds (c25%) and then CO2 with c20%”. That is a rather striking departure from the “science” in IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapters 2 and 9, which find that with better than 90% certainty all GHGs (excluding water vapour) account for “most” (must equal more than 50%) of humans’ “substantial warming influence on climate” (p.671). So within 3 years of AR4 Hansen’s team have reduced the role of CO2, by far the largest contributor to the GHGs in WG1, to a mere 20%.
However, Schmidt & co go on to say: “In a doubled CO2 scenario, this allocation is essentially unchanged, even though the magnitude of the total greenhouse effect is significantly larger than the initial radiative forcing, underscoring the importance of feedbacks from water vapour and clouds to climate sensitivity.” So now the story is that GHGs cause feedbacks! Where is the evidence for that?
The truth is that Hansen’s team has never published any econometric analysis establishing their attributions of temperature change to changes in atmospheric GHGs, especially CO2, for the very good reason that they cannot. Why do they never test their models against the data AND report the results? Again, because multivariate regressions of the relative roles of CO2 and water vapour find no role for CO2 in raising temperature and therefore none for raising water vapour.
However simple chemistry tells us that combustion of hydrocarbon fuels releases both CO2 and H2O, in the ratios of 2:1, but the RF of the latter is at least 50% higher than for CO2. Why do the IPCC, Hansen, and Schmidt NEVER publish the formulae for that combustion? The formulae prove that H2O is not a feedback but a direct outcome from hydrocarbon combustion.
Now tell us what’s wrong with getting more water along with CO2 and with temperature increases of even the IPCC’s 3 oC by 2100, given that all crops everywhere have higher yields when it is warmer, wetter, AND there’s more CO2.

My posts are taking an age to appear so this is probably my last contribution to this thread. I’ll confine myself to a few errors of fact.
Firstly, thanks to Bill for confirming that the TAR 1990-2010 temperature trend projections were spot on. It is not the case, though, that the models are tuned using historical trend data, as stated in Rahmsdorf et al 2007:-
‘Although published in 2001, these model projections are essentially independent from the observed climate data since 1990: Climate models are physics-based models developed over many years that are not “tuned” to reproduce the most recent temperatures,…”
Secondly, the chart of HADCRUT monthly temperatures versus ensemble AR4 projections does not make a lot of sense. The individual model runs do show a lot of the stochastic variability (aka weather) but this gets averaged out in the combination process. So one can cherry-pick a monthly anomaly of 0.2 in a La Nina period, say and claim this proves the models are ‘out’, when the more appropriate comparison of smoothed average year for the corresponding year would be more than 0.5C. Unconvincing.
Tim, you’ve managed to discuss ‘Hansen’s’ science without mentioning a single paper of his, which rather makes my point. You’ve also confused the constituent contributions to the greenhouse effect with the consequent warming after a single component is increased. The water vapour feedback has been observed and measured and is as predicted by the models, (Dessler et al 2008 http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2008b.pdf ). Attribution is discussed at RC here http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/attribution-of-20th-century-climate-change-to-cosub2sub/ and there is a rich literature on model-data comparisons. You could start with the CMIP project.
Bye for now.

“The trends are probably most useful to think about, and for the period 1984 to 2009 (the 1984 date chosen because that is when these projections started), scenario B has a trend of 0.26+/-0.05 ºC/dec (95% uncertainties, no correction for auto-correlation). For the GISTEMP and HadCRUT3 data (assuming that the 2009 estimate is ok), the trends are 0.19+/-0.05 ºC/dec (note that the GISTEMP met-station index has 0.21+/-0.06 ºC/dec). Corrections for auto-correlation would make the uncertainties larger, but as it stands, the difference between the trends is just about significant.
Thus, it seems that the Hansen et al ‘B’ projection is likely running a little warm compared to the real world, but assuming (a little recklessly) that the 26 yr trend scales linearly with the sensitivity and the forcing, we could use this mismatch to estimate a sensitivity for the real world. That would give us 4.2/(0.26*0.9) * 0.19=~ 3.4 ºC. Of course, the error bars are quite large (I estimate about +/-1ºC due to uncertainty in the true underlying trends and the true forcings), but it’s interesting to note that the best estimate sensitivity deduced from this projection, is very close to what we think in any case. For reference, the trends in the AR4 models for the same period have a range 0.21+/-0.16 ºC/dec (95%). Note too, that the Hansen et al projection had very clear skill compared to a null hypothesis of no further warming”
Realclimate update to model-data comparisons.
“Given that the Scenario B radiative forcing was too high by about 5% and its projected surface air warming rate was 0.26°C per decade, we can then make a rough estimate regarding what its climate sensitivity for 2xCO2 should have been:
dT/dF = (4.2°C * [0.20/0.26])/0.95 = 3.4°C warming for 2xCO2
In other words, the reason Hansen’s global temperature projections were too high was primarily because his climate model had a climate sensitivity that was too high. Had the sensitivity been 3.4°C for a 2xCO2, and had Hansen decreased the radiative forcing in Scenario B slightly, he would have correctly projected the ensuing global surface air temperature increase.
The argument “Hansen’s projections were too high” is thus not an argument against anthropogenic global warming or the accuracy of climate models, but rather an argument against climate sensitivity being as high as 4.2°C for 2xCO2, but it’s also an argument for climate sensitivity being around 3.4°C for 2xCO2. This is within the range of climate sensitivity values in the IPCC report, and is even a bit above the widely accepted value of 3°C for 2xCO2.
Skeptical Science. http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction-advanced.htm

OK Phil, let’s go back to Hansen, Lacis, Ruedy, Sato, and Helene Wilson 1993, How sensitive is the World’s Climate? (1993) – it’s a splendid production, great photos, innumerable graphs with curves in synch, but not a single regression report. Two of its authors (Lacis & Ruedy) co-authored the Paper by Schmidt et 2010 that I discussed above.
Hansen et al 1993 make this statement: “If the amount of CO2 in the air increases, the atmosphere becomes more opaque, temporarily reducing thermal emission to space”. Phil you must admit that is the core belief of Hansen et al, so I hate to tell you there is no evidence to support that statement.
Let’s try it on data from NOAA (NREL) for New York/JFK from 1960 to 2006.The R2 (0.001) and t (1.01)statistics inform us there is no statistically significant relationship between atmospheric CO2 and opacity of the air.
But the next set of results show us that changes in atmospheric CO2 and Opacity levels also have no impact on annual mean minimum temperatures, whereas changes in atmospheric water vapor “H2O” (aka precipitable water vapor at NOAA) have an enormously powerful impact (t = 9.64; R2 = 0.69). Funnily enough, Team Hansen has NEVER in their thousands of papers decrying the CO2 emissions from hydrocarbon combustion studied the chemical formula for that combustion, which indicates that at least a third by mass of the total emissions is “H2O”.
The next results show that sky opacity is strongly associated with changes in “H2O”, t=2.12, and again not at all with changing atmospheric CO2 (t=0.35).
Finally, If WUWT had the space I could show very similar results across the whole of the USA from Hawaii to Alaska to California and New Orleans.
Phil, where are you based, and I will do it for you, or you can access the data yourself from
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old-data/nsrdb/1961-90/dsf/data and http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old-data/nsrdb/1991-2005/statistics/data
Well, that’s climate science for you. There is an old saying “those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. In this context it should read “those who can do real science do it, those who can’t, teach climate change”.
Some of the results I mention here are in my paper now up at http://www.lavoisier.com.au
To conclude: none of Team Hansen’s myriad papers do the basic statistical work needed to qualify them as scientific.

Re post from Brian H
Thanks. I do hope to see my arguments subjected to criticism. (I was myself surprised at what turned up once I’d started collating.)