Deal with climate reality as it unfolds
Special to Financial Post May 23, 2012
By Dr. Bob Carter
Over the last 18 months, policymakers in Canada, the U.S. and Japan have quietly abandoned the illusory goal of preventing global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, an alternative view has emerged regarding the most cost-effective way in which to deal with the undoubted hazards of climate change.
This view points toward setting a policy of preparation for, and adaptation to, climatic events and change as they occur, which is distinctly different from the former emphasis given by most Western parliaments to the mitigation of global warming by curbing carbon dioxide emissions.
Ultimately, the rationale for choosing between policies of mitigation or adaptation must lie with an analysis of the underlying scientific evidence about climate change. Yet the vigorous public debate over possibly dangerous human-caused global warming is bedeviled by two things.
First, an inadequacy of the historical temperature measurements that are used to reconstruct the average global temperature statistic.
And, second, fueled by lobbyists and media interests, an unfortunate tribal emotionalism that has arisen between groups of persons who are depicted as either climate “alarmists” or climate “deniers.”
In reality, the great majority of working scientists fit into neither category. All competent scientists accept, first, that global climate has always changed, and always will; second, that human activities (not just carbon dioxide emissions) definitely affect local climate, and have the potential, summed, to measurably affect global climate; and, third, that carbon dioxide is a mild greenhouse gas.
The true scientific debate, then, is about none of these issues, but rather about the sign and magnitude of any global human effect and its likely significance when considered in the context of natural climate change.
For many different reasons, which include various types of bias, error and unaccounted-for artifacts, the thermometer record provides only an indicative history of average global temperature over the last 150 years.
The 1979-2011 satellite MSU (Microwave Sounding Units) record is our only acceptably accurate estimate of average global temperature, yet being but 32 years in length it represents just one climate data point. The second most reliable estimate of global temperature, collected by radiosondes on weather balloons, extends back to 1958, and the portion that overlaps with the MSU record matches it well.
Taken together, these two temperature records indicate that no significant warming trend has occurred since 1958, though both exhibit a 0.2C step increase in average global temperature across the strong 1998 El Niño.
In addition, the recently quiet Sun, and the lack of warming over at least the last 15 years — and that despite a 10% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide level, which represents 34% of all post-industrial emissions — indicates that the alarmist global warming hypothesis is wrong and that cooling may be the greatest climate hazard over coming decades.
Climate change takes place over geological time scales of thousands through millions of years, but unfortunately the relevant geological data sets do not provide direct measurements, least of all of average global temperature.
Instead, they comprise local or regional proxy records of climate change of varying quality. Nonetheless, numerous high-quality paleoclimate records, and especially those from ice cores and deep-sea mud cores, demonstrate that no unusual or untoward changes in climate occurred in the 20th and early 21st century.
Despite an estimated spend of well over $100-billion since 1990 looking for a human global temperature signal, assessed against geological reality no compelling empirical evidence yet exists for a measurable, let alone worrisome, human impact on global temperature.
Nonetheless, a key issue on which all scientists agree is that natural climate-related events and change are real, and exact very real human and environmental costs. These hazards include storms, floods, blizzards, droughts and bushfires, as well as both local and global temperature steps and longer term cooling or warming trends.
It is certain that these natural climate-related events and change will continue, and that from time to time human and environmental damage will be wrought.
Extreme weather events (and their consequences) are natural disasters of similar character to earthquakes, tsunami and volcanic eruptions, in that in our present state of knowledge they can neither be predicted far ahead nor prevented once underway. The matter of dealing with future climate change, therefore, is primarily one of risk appraisal and minimization, and that for natural risks that vary from place to place around the globe.
Dealing with climate reality as it unfolds clearly represents the most prudent, practical and cost-effective solution to the climate change issue. Importantly, a policy of adaptation is also strongly precautionary against any (possibly dangerous) human-caused climate trends that might emerge in the future.
From the Financial Post via Dr. Carter in email correspondence
Bob Carter, a paleoclimatologist at James Cook University, Australia, and a chief science advisor for the International Climate Science Coalition, is in Canada on a 10-day tour. He speaks at Carleton University in Ottawa on Friday.
A fan of *MORE* discourse:
I read your post at May 24, 2012 at 1:13 pm.
The long quotation you provide is drivel. In real science observations trump any theory.
Bob Carter always sticks to demonstrable facts. His sense trumps nonsense.
Richard
Well that’s a pity. Cutting emissions would appear to have been a uniquely successful policy. There has been no statistically significant warming for at least a decade. Wow! Success or not? Now that we can control the climate by modulating carbon dioxide emissions it seems a shame to give up on such a self-evidently successful path.
In case you need it,
/sarc
Fan, a theory may be beautiful, but if data coming in doesn’t support that theory it needs to be modified or dropped altogether. Love the data not the theory.
Can’t possibly be correct there is not pole in the middle and only extremists are ever correct.
An excellent summation BUT :
Nonetheless, a key issue on which all scientists agree is that natural climate-related events and change are real, and exact very real human and environmental costs. These hazards include storms, floods, blizzards, droughts and bushfires, as well as both local and global temperature steps and longer term cooling or warming trends.
These hazards are weather events not climat. Had he said ENSO, AMO, MJO I would not have complained at all.
Bob Carter has always brought rational and clear thinking to the debate and for that he has been attacked and ridiculed in the MSM. Somewhat unfairly.
Unfortunately, in the US, there are ongoing, mostly hidden, governmental efforts to ignore the point of view expressed by Dr. Carter. The efforts to suppress the studies on the cost and availability of power n the heartland due to EPA coal regulations, the Fish and Wildlife Service exemptions for windmills from endangered/protected species, the overwhelming biased assumptions incorporated into research funding, the diversion of military fuels to biomass-based energy, and the coercive efforts of the Feds on state government environmental regulations are combining to dramatically distort our energy supplies and to increase US energy costs. The rationale is two-fold: climate change and energy security. Governmental incentives all favor economically (and environmentally) damaging activities.
It is likely that appropriate publicity on just the impact of existing/pending regulation on cost and supply of electric power would dramatically swing the election and the future direction of US policy. The other countervailing force is sheer economics. When the true costs of alarmism become evident to all, there will be a backlash.
I applaud Bob Carter’s FP article only to the extent that he is speaking as an objective scientist to policy makers about climate science findings/assessments. I appreciate his logical reasoning and the basic thrust of his empirical findings. Thank you Dr. Carter.
But, I disagree with Bob Carter to the extent that in his FP article he is projecting overhyped and artificially stereotyped views onto the beneficial extreme spectrum of climate scientist proponents who are voluntarily active in the open, free and very rigorous discourse on climate science. I find his views in his FP article to that effect are inappropriate to say the least. I think Carter significantly weakened his FP article in that regard.
Also, I disagree with Bob Carter to the extent that in his FP article he is advising policy direction at the same time he is providing scientific findings/assessments. To me that kind of apparent conflict of interest situation he expresses is a fundamental reason we have arrived at our current irrational policy situation wrt CAGW from burning fossil fuels. I suggest the profession of scientists is best served when scientists, as scientists, does not overlap the profession of policy advisors/makers as policy advisors/makers; and vice versa.
John
I hope his life assurance is up to date! Could be in for a rough time.
As said by “Temp” there is a tone in this article that is worrying. I have generally liked Bob Carter’s stuff but here is something of a centrist positioning going on. It is like the politicians who try to occupy the middle ground by calling a plague on both houses.
Perhaps this is another piece in the disintegration of the skeptic camp, as the warmist campain fails and the realisation dawns that CO2 thing is irrelevant, it would be natural for the skeptics to divide.
I hope I am wrong.
If “all competent scientists” start by dealing with AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE, they’re all wrong. The actual data doesn’t do much to support the idea. Until you can prove that ANY single influence controls the whole atmosphere, all reasoning based on average global temperature is circular. It’s an assumption that must be independently proved first.
I agree with Bob Carter.
Climate change. There is none.
And we should be damn glad it is a few tenth of a degree warmer now that in the Little Ice Age.
I am still waiting for anyone, any source, to show me some meaningful, out of the local norms, change in a local climate anywhere on this globe. I have looked for three years and still can find none. Some parameters are up, some down, at any given moment but locally they are in the normalcy of the last 2000 years locally. I don’t live in Missouri but “Show Me” anyway.
This charade has been, once again, renamed, but the corruption still remains, and this must be rooted out for the future generation’s sake. I will rule-out no one as members of this crime against humanity, much life has already killed by their actions, humans included.
I could take issue with some of the fine details and tone of the article. But the fact is, the main thrust of this discussion is right on the money.
It’s scientifically, practically, economically, and politically solid!
Thank goodness a few souls are finding the courage to speak up in the MSM.
PaulH from Barcelona says:
“My take on his post is that he has recognised that in order to make progress we have to allow scientifically-bereft, yet zeitgist-tuned politicians to save face. Such is the realpolitik of an imperfect real world.”
Yeah… I know that in the end that many of these religious nutjobs are going to not only walk for what is clearly massive fraud, embezzlement and a host of other ethics related stuff. To many will keep their jobs as well. Unless we can at least fire and disgrace many of them they will reform and be at it again. Global warming is nothing but a modern day eugenics movement. If real punishment isn’t put out on these people they will come back and at some point win. They are far to close right now for comfort to making all they’re dreams come true. Next time maybe the last time… and next time maybe just 10 years away.
Is there info on when/where else in Canada he is speaking? I tried, but didn’t find anything.
“Despite an estimated spend of well over $100-billion since 1990 looking for a human global temperature signal, assessed against geological reality no compelling empirical evidence yet exists for a measurable, let alone worrisome, human impact on global temperature.”
This is a metaphorical breath of fresh air, sweetly relished after a hard day of shoveling out the chicken coop!
The only statement of his that appears debateable is this: “human activities (not just carbon dioxide emissions) definitely affect local climate, and have the potential, summed, to measurably affect global climate”
That they affect local climate is indisputable, but the idea that summed, you could possibly suss out a manmade signal seems highly doubtful.
Only about .29% of the earth is inhabited by humans, and about 6 1/3 % of the earth is agricultural. Whatever tiny amount UHI adds to warmth globally would barely be measurable. Agriculture is as likely or more, to provide a cooling effect from evapotranspiration. Some pollutants have a slight warming effect, others cool.
“Climate change takes place over geological time scales of thousands through millions of years,..”
Do we actually know this to the level of an assertion? Do we know for sure that the global climate could not tip into an ice age in only a few hundred years?
Probably not. You can look at e.g. the Vostok ice core (or other proxy) data and judge for yourself the timescale of the hot-cold transition. Actually, I would have said that the transition back to glaciation in general has been quite rapid for the last million years of glaciation cycles, but the period and other things have been changing as well and the record we have is itself probably only indicative and not necessarily as quantitative as the curves (without error bars, sigh) suggest.
As I’ve remarked a few times on the list, from the point of view of empirical (not “theoretical, model based”) stability analysis, there is zero evidence of a still-warmer metastable climate phase in the Pliestocene (within the last 5 million years, say). The current interglacial is ALREADY as warm is it appears possible for it to get before some known or unknown feedbacks regulate and limit temperature rise.
There is ample, compelling evidence that in spite of the unknown or known feedbacks that have us in a warm interglacial interval (the Holocene) at the moment, there is a pernicious and much colder glaciation phase that is a lot more stable and temporally dominant. Basically the Earth has spent around 85% of the last million years some 5-6C colder than it is right now. If you rolled a die to determine the climate, only the 1 face would denote warm interglacial — the other 5 faces would all be icy cold.
The way dynamical phase transitions like this (usually, generically) work is that there is a nonlinear equilibrium curve in some critical parameter (or parameter set), one that folds back underneath itself in an unstable branch connecting two stable branches. In the overlap region of the fold, you could be in warm phase OR cold phase, either way stable, depending on your recent history — if warm stay warm, if cold stay cold. But as the parameters shift around, the system eventually finds itself near the fold creases themselves. At those points one of the two solutions typically disappear — they become “imaginary” solutions or have other problems that say “no stable solution here”. Drive the parameters past those points, and the system will literally drop out of the now UNstable phase and relatively rapidly transition to the (now only) stable phase.
How long it takes really depends on many things. How much energy the system has to gain or lose to re-equilibrate around the now-dominant single stable branch. How long it takes the energy to redistribute itself and go where it can actually be lost. How much the shape of the stability sheet itself changes as the system evolves in time, losing or gaining heat, re-self-organizing its dominant dissipation modes as the temperature differentials they operate across change.
The one unmistakeable message of Vostok is that whether it takes 100 years or 1000, there comes a point fairly quickly — within 100 years or even less — where it becomes clear that the system has at least entered the tipping domain, where it is plunging towards the cusp of the vanishing fold. If the parameters that pushed it there reverse, it isn’t unlikely that the system will pull back to the formerly stable phase (and this sort of bobble is clearly visible in the record — the LIA is a low-rent version of it, although I don’t think it really pushed all that far down the side). But then there is that invisible line — cross it and you go steadily downhill (or uphill) as the colder (warmer) it gets positively feeds back to colder (warmer) still until you hit the stable sheet again.
The real danger here is the following scenario. Let’s assume that non-ice-based albedo variation is the missing elephant in GCMs — the non-ignorable cause. We won’t worry about what makes global bond albedo vary — we’ll just use the empirical observation that around 15 years ago it dropped by close to 7% (after being historically high for most of the 80s and 90s) and that a 7% drop in albedo — all things being equal — corresponds to a drop in the pre-GHG greybody baseline temperature (the thing GHE warming supposedly proceeds “from”) of roughly 2C. If GHE warming proceeds from the greybody base (something nearly everybody agrees is at least mostly/partly the case then it is very reasonable to infer that we’ve just started to lose heat accumulated in the entire global climate system during the low-albedo period, en route to a gradual cooling off of 1-2C.
How gradual? Nobody really knows. Remember, albedo variation isn’t even taken seriously and entered as an empirical parameter, at least not as far as I know — it is part of the “climate sensitivity parameter” that is supposed to include the effects of albedo and much else, and if anything it is estimated to provide net warming, although that argument is tough to really justify in the face of 2C in greybody OFF THE TOP before all that crap kicks in. Empirically, there appears to be a 10-30 year lag that is part of the “self-re-organization” that has to occur before the Earth loops through some of the short-term heat reservoirs (I’m not talking about the really short term ones that do year to year, I’m talking decadal) and one can start to seriously move heat. We’re well into that, but it isn’t that surprising — still — that there has been little overt cooling, rather just as emerging stabilization post 1999, temperatures that aren’t going up or down but are just meandering around. The PDO just inverted (first time in 30 odd years), the NAO is always wonky and may or may not invert soon, and ENSO is ENSO, looking a bit woozy itself with a double Nina just passed and a still undetermined future this year.
Might as well read chicken entrails as try to predict the response of four or five coupled chaotic oscillators being driven by a noisy energy source — right after taking one of the main control knobs of the oscillators and giving it a jerk to the left a couple of notches. Hell, if the small intestine loops up instead of down it could get warmer in response, seriously! Or the butterfly could pick, beating its wings down in Brazil (pick for ten years from now, but pick).
IF it starts getting cold systematically — starting Maunder Minimum (IF that is a cause of the albedo shift) and we start to lose the 2C in earnest, we are probably still fine — although the LIA happening today would be far deadlier than any observed or reasonble outcome of moderate further warming, given the lack of reason to expect a “still warmer phase” out there to tip over to — and the Holocene will probably continue — unless/until the long time-scale variation in albedo — actual significant growth in glaciation — starts to occur. When the Northern ice pack starts to march south AND the Southern pack grows to the North, that’s very likely one of the key critical parameters in the actual cold phase transition. Pass the critical point and ice will grow (increasing the mean albedo further still) year to year, until latitude and insolation limit its further creep.
If we get there, the transition might still take 100-300 years to complete and re-equilibrate in cold phase, but it will get colder systematically, year after year, a few hundredths of a degree or more per year. In a decade, maybe 0.2-0.4C. The latter is really racing — it would get scary cold, scary fast, but we’re far from that point.
rgb
2C is not “ice age”
A fan of *MORE* discourse says:
May 24, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Of course, physical theory must be based on experience
It’s not Dr. Carter’s version of science that is “eccentrically circumscribed”.
Hoisted on own petard, then?
Because now they’ve got the power they were looking for. Mission accomplished. Now they have to get rid of the growing group of people that could attack them with real numbers. By taking away the power of the opposition by using the numbers of the opposition you kill the opposition. But always remember the new power structure is in place for when they need it . We just have to wait for the new Reichstag burning.
So then, the battlefield is only morphing into:
“Instead, an alternative view has emerged regarding the most cost-effective way in which to deal with the undoubted hazards of climate change.”
They will be insisting on perceived changes around us as proof that we need to build higher dikes, inact laws removing people from shorelines, i.e., massive relocation of infrastructure due to imaginary effects they see happening right now.
I get the upside to the article, however, this statement alone intimates the psychology is the only thing that has changed.
Indeed climate change and bad weather has always been with us.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/bad-weather/
All I ever ask Warmists is to provide evidence that man-made co2 caused most of the recent warming.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2012/05/new-paper-finds-water-vapor-feedback-is.html
@temp. “Unless we can at least fire and disgrace many of them they will reform and be at it again.” 100% on target! And prosecute. It’s not about helping them to “save face.” This is a disease that must be taken out from the roots, or it sprouts its Medusa heads again.
I wouldn’t start on that victory lap yet. I’ve always contended that CAGW’s ends was nigh because citizens of the world recognized that it was merely a way of increasing taxes, & more lately, of stifling capitalism’s economic growth.
Dr Carter says that governments have realized a move toward “the most cost-effective way… to deal with the undoubted hazards of climate change…” is “choosing… adaptation…” He’s saying that there’s still a drive to increase taxes! Governments are still going to use “climate” to increase government spending. We are still screwed!
temp says: (May 24, 2012 at 12:28 pm)
“This moron is basically trying to caste himself as somehow “centrist” by smearing the “evil deniers” as being “extremist” because somehow we want evidence, facts, data.”
Better take a look at this presentation. It may change your mind about him.
In my opinion he’s a hardcore skeptic on AGW and a big supporter of the scientific method.
“Over the last 18 months, policymakers in Canada, the U.S. and Japan have quietly abandoned the illusory goal of preventing global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
Of course they will quietly abandon the goal. If they admit that they are doing this they will be decimated in the polls.