CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON of BRENCHLEY
DELEGATES at the 18th annual UN climate gabfest at the dismal, echoing Doha conference center – one of the least exotic locations chosen for these rebarbatively repetitive exercises in pointlessness – have an Oops! problem.
No, not the sand-flies. Not the questionable food. Not the near-record low attendance. The Oops! problem is this. For the past 16 of the 18-year series of annual hot-air sessions about hot air, the world’s hot air has not gotten hotter. There has been no global warming. At all. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
The equations of classical physics do not require the arrow of time to flow only forward. However, observation indicates this is what always happens. So tomorrow’s predicted warming that has not happened today cannot have caused yesterday’s superstorms, now, can it?
That means They can’t even get away with claiming that tropical storm Sandy and other recent extreme-weather happenings were All Our Fault. After more than a decade and a half without any global warming at all, one does not need to be a climate scientist to know that global warming cannot have been to blame.
Or, rather, one needs not to be a climate scientist. The wearisomely elaborate choreography of these yearly galah sessions has followed its usual course this time, with a spate of suspiciously-timed reports in the once-mainstream media solemnly recording that “Scientists Say” their predictions of doom are worse than ever. But the reports are no longer front-page news. The people have tuned out.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC), the grim, supranational bureaucracy that makes up turgid, multi-thousand-page climate assessments every five years, has not even been invited to Doha. Oversight or calculated insult? It’s your call.
IPeCaC is about to churn out yet another futile tome. And how will its upcoming Fifth Assessment Report deal with the absence of global warming since a year after the Second Assessment report? Simple. The global-warming profiteers’ bible won’t mention it.
There will be absolutely nothing about the embarrassing 16-year global-warming stasis in the thousands of pages of the new report. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
Instead, the report will hilariously suggest that up to 1.4 Cº of the 0.6 Cº global warming observed in the past 60 years was manmade.
No, that is not a typesetting error. The new official meme will be that if it had not been for all those naughty emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the world would have gotten up to 0.8 Cº cooler since the 1950s. Yeah, right.
If you will believe that, as the Duke of Wellington used to say, you will believe anything.
The smarter minds at the conference (all two of us) are beginning to ask what it was that the much-trumpeted “consensus” got wrong. The answer is that two-thirds of the warming predicted by the models is uneducated guesswork. The computer models assume that any warming causes further warming, by various “temperature feedbacks”.
Trouble is, not one of the supposed feedbacks can be established reliably either by measurement or by theory. A growing body of scientists think feedbacks may even be net-negative, countervailing against the tiny direct warming from greenhouse gases rather than arbitrarily multiplying it by three to spin up a scare out of not a lot.
IPeCaC’s official prediction in its First Assessment Report in 1990 was that the world would warm at a rate equivalent to 0.3 Cº/decade, or more than 0.6 Cº by now.
But the real-world, measured outturn was 0.14 Cº/decade, and just 0.3 Cº in the quarter of a century since 1990: less than half of what the “consensus” had over-predicted.
In 2008, the world’s “consensus” climate modelers wrote a paper saying ten years without global warming was to be expected (though their billion-dollar brains had somehow failed to predict it). They added that 15 years or more without global warming would establish a discrepancy between real-world observation and their X-boxes’ predictions. You will find their paper in NOAA’s State of the Climate Report for 2008.
By the modelers’ own criterion, then, HAL has failed its most basic test – trying to predict how much global warming will happen.
Yet Ms. Christina Figurehead, chief executive of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, says “centralization” of global governing power (in her hands, natch) is the solution. Solution to what?
And what solution? Even if the world were to warm by 2.2 Cº this century (for IPeCaC will implicitly cut its central estimate from 2.8 Cº in the previous Assessment Report six years ago), it would be at least ten times cheaper and more cost-effective to adapt to warming’s consequences the day after tomorrow than to try to prevent it today.
It is the do-nothing option that is scientifically sound and economically right. And nothing is precisely what 17 previous annual climate yatteramas have done. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
This year’s 18th yadayadathon will be no different. Perhaps it will be the last. In future, Ms. Figurehead, practice what you preach, cut out the carbon footprint from all those travel miles, go virtual, and hold your climate chatternooga chit-chats on FaceTwit.
Support CFACT’s mission here.
“….Really? Sounds exactly like communists propaganda to me. This is their favourite topic, “military-industrial complex’s owners”. …. According to my information, America defended South Vietnam from being taken over by the North Vietnamese communists….”
Geez Greg, I was going to pick out rgb’s phrase there too, except to put if forward as a great truth!
I was actually thinking about a statistic that I read right after the war that suggested that just about exactly 50 cents out of every dollar spent on Viet Nam was looted and never actually went to fighting the war. Everybody had their hand in the till, all the way down to servicemen who were disassembling whole jeeps and shipping them home. Our troops are still being shot and blown up with ordinance stolen during the Viet Nam war.
Personally, I think Communism is stupid, but I also think that in the particular case of Viet Nam, we should have been fighting on the other side (or not fighting at all). Remember that the war was started to rebel against French Imperialism. Read a bit about how that went. The government of South Viet Nam was so corrupt that we at the very least acquiesced in the assassination of its president early in our involvement in the war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngo_Dinh_Diem. Otherwise we would have lost the entire army. Naturally, we replaced one corrupt puppet with another and then tried to fight a war that wasn’t a war with rules that weren’t rules that prevented us from having any possible chance of winning. If we could have invaded North Viet Nam, we could have one the war in a month or two. Of course, we might have triggered world war three, thermonuclear style, but so it goes. Otherwise we had zero chance — the best we could have hoped for was a Korea-like stalemate, and look at how successful that has been!
Of course, we probably should have been fighting on the other side in Cuba as well, or at least, if we had behaved ethically before the Cuban Revolution and actually opposed the open and revolting exploitation of the economy by organized criminals and rich landowners and promoted democracy and social justice there, perhaps the revolution would never have been necessary.
Nixon, bless his ruddy little soul, had the right idea. Get out of an unwinnable war, make friends out of our enemies, change the world. Yes, he got Cambodia wrong — everybody wants to win — but he was nothing if not a realist and knew when to fold the hand.
Our country has a sad, sad history of having one standard of freedom and human rights for its citizens, and another one altogether for nations that have something that we want, be it oil or sugar or diamonds or uranium or wood. We also have a sad history of treating communism per se with the same sort of religious perspective seen in the great Global Climate Debate. McCarthyism might yet rear its ugly head and bite “deniers” in the ass — some idiots actually call for treating deniers as “traitors” on slashdot and once you have that sort of madness infecting the masses, it only takes a thin pretext for the witch trials to begin.
rgb
Thank you Mr. Monckton for the Doha summation. It made my day. And thank you Dr. Brown for your insightful comments. I have one question, now that this thread is just about done. Have you ever caught a Roosterfish? 🙂
Isn’t it interesting that nobody has suggested stopping the production of fossil fuels? The focus is always on controlling the consumption, i.e. controlling the people not the corporations. Surely it would be much easier to simply tell Saudi Arabia to stop producing oil. It is 60% of the production. There are fewer producers than there are consumers, so it is easier to control the producers.
Actually, the really interesting thing is that everybody wants somebody ELSE to tell them what they can do, and generally they really want that somebody else to tell somebody else. For example, Al Gore calls for draconian legislation and expensive measures to control energy consumption and save the world, but does so owning a huge house and driving a huge car and flying in huge jets all over the huge world. Do as I say, not as I do. England, as Gail has pointed out, is a particularly sorry example, returning the entire country to WWII-like levels of energy privation because “it is the right thing to do”. If it is ever proven that it is the wrong thing to have done, there will be heads that roll, quite possibly literally, galore. I have no idea how we would “tell Saudi Arabia to stop producing oil” — last time I looked it was a sovereign nation selling a valuable commodity to a world with a huge demand for it. We could, of course, at any time stop buying Saudi oil — the day we are all willing to see gas prices spike up through the roof and our own economy to come crashing down.
That’s the tricky thing about the CAGW argument. They have made it so extreme that in order to “save the world” we need to take infinitely draconian measures now, literally stop burning carbon tomorrow and MAYBE we’ll only end up with an endurable catastrophe in 100 years instead of end of world 4 or 5 degree warming, a return to the Eocene with a land run in Antarctica to replace the shorelines lost to the rising sea. The price we pay is that those infinitely draconian measures are a catastrophe now, one that would be measured out in human lives and misery every single day, as not one single aspect of American civilization would withstand the shutting down of the oil spigot for real. Our entire cultural and economic infrastructure is based on rapid, cheap transportation, and even if we wanted to (which we don’t) we couldn’t rebuild it into an alternative WITHOUT using rapid, cheap transportation in the meantime, over multiple decades.
We are now thoroughly damned if we do, damned if we don’t, and damned if we do (take active measures now) is certain and immediate where damned if we don’t is highly uncertain, however “certainly” its proponents attempt to portray it. Obama is often demonized, but so far I think he has been entirely reasonable in almost completely ignoring the CAGW nutters (who have to vote for him anyway, who are they going to vote for otherwise when at least he will make some investments in e.g. alternative energy while still working to make the US oil independent). We aren’t supporting the oil and coal industry because we love them or hate them — we love the freedom and wealth that oil and coal buy us in the form of cheap energy and transportation to drive our entire economy. Provide an alternative to burning coal that is cheaper, that’s fine. Try to give up burning coal in favor of more expensive alternatives, that is directly equivalent to reducing wealth and security for every single person that does so.
Cost benefit analysis is really all that matters, and we all vote with our everyday choices. Americans aren’t “evil” — if they fail to vote for the draconian measures needed to avoid the predicted catastrophe, it is because they very reasonably doubt that catastrophe. And they are wise in doing so. By polarizing the discussion and framing it in terms of catastrophe, the CAGW advocates have actually created a huge obstacle to their own success, one that will never come down while total LTT warming is 0.1C/decade no matter how “alarming” they try to make natural disasters supposedly caused by “climate change” in the meantime.
rgb
I have read that some 95+ % of the extra energy (extra from energy imbalance) goes down into the oceans. So in my mind we should perhaps be looking more to the oceans and less upp in the air. Perhaps even so that even if we would have had a really huge rise in average air temps it would still be more relevant to stay focused on the oceans.The air is secondary in the end. Also the current sea level rise points upwards and that fact should make us pulling the handbrakes of both coastal exploration aswell as trying to fix the heat balance. With this in mind I think that those who works pro heat storage and ocean level rise should reconcider their standpoint.
Hopefully you’ve read some of my remarks above that contradict both of these suggestions, but here is a more focused reply. First, we have decent data on SSTs for the last 33 years as well — read Bob Tisdale’s extensive posts on them or buy his inexpensive book. We have very decent data for perhaps a decade or a bit more — before that it is dicey even in the satellite era because SSTs don’t describe what is happening in the bulk where this heat is supposedly going. Average SSTs are not terribly distinct from lower troposphere temperatures and show absolutely no signs of running away, and it is far too early to say what is happening to total oceanic heat content as we don’t even have one whole solar cycle as a baseline and our sampling in ARGOS is still somewhat indifferent. The major changes in SSTs are strictly associated with the ENSO, IIRC, and SSTs have been remarkably flat over the same time interval post-1998 that LTTs have been flat.
As for SLR — look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
The graph isn’t “skeptic” propaganda, it is the actual mix of tide gauge data all the way back to 1870 spliced in a not-quite-apples-to-apples manner to satellite data on the end about 20 years ago. Surely you will agree that there is absolutely nothing remarkable in this graph. The level of the sea has risen by 9 whole inches in 140 years. At least five stretches of ten to twenty years are visible in the data where it has risen at precisely the rate the satellite data suggests that it is rising today — permitting us to argue that the rate is rougly 2 mm/year plus or minus 1 mm/year due to entirely natural, non-CO_2 forced factors! It is utterly impossible to statistically resolve the SLR behavior of any point in this curve from the rest — if I chopped the curve into pieces are reassembled it so that the current rise occurred in the 30s and the 30s rise occurred today, you wouldn’t even notice unless you knew the data like the back of your hand (and it would change nothing).
So I’m sorry, but this is bo-ring. Wake me when there is some actual evidence of a crisis in SLR. A rise rate of 3 mm a year is normal, in the precise sense that if you pick a random year between 1870 and the present, the odds of the slope of the SLR curve at that point being 3mm/year are around 1 chance in 3. Even if 3 mm/year persisted throughout the entire next century, it would represent only around 12 inches of SLR by 2100.
There are very good reasons to think that it will not speed up, but even if it does there is plenty of time — decades at least — to do something about it.
rgb
Robert A. Taylor says:
December 2, 2012 at 10:34 pm
Werner Brozek says:
but gave the page number as 23; the correct page number is 123.
Please see the table of contents for page 20:
3. Stratospheric temperatures…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..20
Those blue pages follow “ Stratospheric temperatures” on page 20.
For some reason, they have a skinny S in front of the page number and you may have thought this was a 1. But page 23 is correct for this quote.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
Referring to this image, it’s amazing to me that there are people who thinking warming in a system with noise should be defined in terms the difference in temperatures at the end points of the interval being considered. In a system with noise, you should use metrics like OLS trend to estimate warming or cooling.
One should also examine sensitivity to the end-points of the interval, as well as other factors influencing the uncertainty in the trend estimate. Measures that lack uncertainty bounds are point of fact meaningless, and I can image fewer measures that would be noisier than simply taking the end points of an interval to use in concluding “no warming”.
P. Solar:
It’s much less silly to use a straight line to determine a linear trend (after all that’s what a linear trend is defined in terms of) than to simply take end points. Anyway, there is a point to using linear trends to analyze more complex systems. You don’t pick only one time interval to analyze, you look at how the length of the period affects the trend. Nobody assumes one value by itself is very meaningful.
If you have “strong repetitive cycles” then these affect the uncertainty in the estimates of secular linear trends [the secular linear trend is the trend you should get in the absence of short period climate oscillations], but standard methodology exists to estimate the influence of these (e.g., econometric methods like ARIMA or, my preference, Monte Carlo based methods). Again though, even with that issue, this is a much more robust estimator than a simplistic comparison of end points.
Dan Pangburn says:
December 2, 2012 at 11:11 pm
To avoid bias, I average all five.
Are you aware that woodfortrees does this automatically for 4 of the sets, namely GISS, Hadcrut3, RSS, and UAH? Then one can find the longest time for a 0 slope using a combination of all four. It turns out to be since December 2000 or 11 years, 9 months (goes to August). See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2000.9/plot/wti/from:2000.9/trend
The reason it goes to August is due to the fix that UAH made a month or two ago. So while UAH is now the latest, the combination still apparently uses the old UAH values.
P.S. spvincent says:
December 2, 2012 at 9:08 pm
Yes, I agree that different times and different data sets give different results. But to repeat what someone else said, there is no significant warming on any set since 1995. Right?
I think rgb was referring to the owners of the industrial manufacturers FOR the military – not the military themselves….
More specifically, I was referring to the group referred to by one Dwight David Eisenhower in a fairly famous speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
Enjoy. This is one of several “shadow governments” we have that diminish our true political and economic freedom. Another one is organized crime, especially drug-related crime. In fact, since post world war II drug money has been relentlessly been laundered and used to buy into the military industrial complex, at this point a lot of the owners of the MIC are people who made their nut importing drugs and investing their freshly washed income into the market, where it buys them respectability, political power, high level protection, and of course substantial compounded wealth and income in its own right. Yet another is the Catholic Church (in particular, although several others e.g. Latter Day Saints and the Baptists wield similar amounts of tax sheltered wealth and disproportionate elective power).
I only brought it up because these shadow government groups are the ones that Gail — mostly correctly — observes are the ones to profit from things like wars, foreign aid (inappropriately designed), and CAGW. Halliburton is a rather famous and obvious example from the Iraq war. I doubt that we will ever know how many tens of billions of dollars were funneled into Halliburton out of the hundreds of billions borrowed and spent on this war — the up-front amounts IIRC were order of twenty billion, but I’m sure that the reality was probably many times that by the time the eye loses the pea under the many shells available in a war-torn and enormously corrupt foreign power. Then there are the indirect profits to the oil industry resulting from the “incidental” effects on the oil marketplace due to the war — profits best described as the wholesale rape of the American people and trashing of the entire economy for half a decade, coincidentally timed to a dramatic reduction in the capital gains rates that permitted a much faster rotation of money through the money pumps of the marketplace so that the rich could get richer selling each other well-laundered stones (see e.g. Bain Capital).
I’m sorry I’m such a cynic, but my father (the same Dorris D. Brown who wrote the aforementioned IADP book on agriculture in India) was a Harvard Ph.D. in economics who taught me economics — occasionally with a rod and with hand-maintained spreadsheets — starting when I was as young as ten years old and he funded me in a “business” raising chickens to produce money I then (had to) invest in the market. Along the way I learned — the hard way — that copper is a wartime commodity that rises in price while there is a high demand for shell casings and then falls when the war that needs the shell casings ends. After that eye opener it became relatively easy to track the hundreds of billions we spend on the MIC even when there is no war, so that we will have it if there ever is one, to the extent that whenever a whole decade goes by without one we start one to restore it to health. Always for the best of reasons, of course.
It is getting harder to do so. We’re down to only two or three venues that can rationally sustain a US military interventions post the cold war. Iran has been well-prepared and is hanging there like a ripe fruit, ready to pick as Afghanistan and Iraq wind down (assuming that we don’t involve ourselves in Syria). North Korea is always a fallback option but it is batshit crazy and might cost even the MIC more than it bargained for when it nukes Tokyo or San Francisco in retaliation (and interrupts the highly profitable trade arrangements with China in the process). I strongly suspect that the next “war” is going to be a war to save the earth from global warming, complete with artificial markets ready to manipulate to divert vast sums of taxpayer money into “repurposed” MIC pockets.
Too bad we cannot actually declare a REAL war on the entire MIC itself, and do things like legalize drugs (boom, instant loss of a half trillion or so per annum in global illicit income and all of the wealth and power it buys), destroy North Korea and Cuba by starting to freely trade with them, and end the implicit tax subsidy of religions. But whoever tried would be assassinated in short order.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
December 3, 2012 at 6:55 am
did I leave anything out?
Yes, I believe you missed some. See:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/19/crowdsourced-climate-complexity-compiling-the-wuwt-potential-climatic-variables-reference-page/
Climate scientists have “fudged” the numbers every year for the past 30 years. These are the adjustments made to raw data, as well as the incremental increases done by switching from one temperature proxy to another in the creation of the famous hockey stick graph. Now that everyone has their thumb on the scale and cannot push it up any higher, it is logical that the official “global temperature” sooner or later would have to plateau. We are there. They are done. The temperature can only drop now due to normal variations in climate. They certainly recognize this and will be pushing harder than ever to affect the economy crippling changes they have proposed all along. The next five years are critical. If they do nothing, it all goes away with dropping temperatures. We can still win this.
So if we’ve seen no statistical warming since 1995 but the purveyors of these various data sets continue to make adjustments upwards, doesn’t that indicate the real temperature trend is downward?
And if so, by how much?
Are we facing catastrophic foodstuff curtailment without prior notification by the very people that should be telling us the truth?
Inquiring minds want to know.
In this respect I have challenged anyone, even dr. Brown, to provide me with the balance sheet, as referred to at the end of the above blog post.
, it is your friend when looking at linear trends. At the moment, the climate seems not to be doing much of anything — multiple La Ninas, weak El Ninos when they happen at all, a weak solar cycle, the longest stretch without a category 3 or better storm making landfall in the US in recorded history, reduced frequency and energy in last year’s tornadoes, and nearly flat temperatures both LTT and SST (and with that, who really cares about HADCRUT, although it’s pretty flat too). So no, the world is not “cooling”, nor is it “warming”, not at any statistically significant level. It is boringly flat, although the current plateau is at the end of 400 years of on-average warming at an unremarkable and not-particularly dangerous rate that might well continue since we don’t have any good idea why it got cold in the LIA or why it has warmed subsequently in the first place.
Dearest HP,
I wouldn’t dream of it. The point I make with regard to your posts is twofold. First of all, you assert knowledge that “the world is currently cooling” that I do not think is justified any more than it is justified to conclude that it is currently warming. Learn about
Second, it is a mistake to assert that the CO_2 greenhouse effect “does not exist”. That’s simply nonsense, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out and will continue to point out. Read Perry’s work. Top of atmosphere spectrographs are direct — mind you, direct — evidence of the GHE and its connection to GHGs. TOA compared to BOA spectrographs even more compellingly so. The physics is well-known and thoroughly understood, and takes absolutely nothing out of the 19th century — it is understood at the level of molecular QED and there isn’t the slightest bit of doubt that it exists. It does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, the first law of thermodynamics, or any other such nonsense. One can easily build a trivial model that demonstrates the latter — one that one can solve with paper and pencil (or pen), not a computer.
With that said, as Dick Lindzen (and many other quite competent physicists) have pointed out, the magnitude of the direct CO_2-linked GHE warming on reaching 600 ppm by the end of the century is around 1.2 C, where at least 1/3 of this and probably more has already happened. This is hardly catastrophic. Catastrophe comes not from the CO_2-linked GHE, but from a hypothesized positive feedback from stronger GHGs, notably water. This is where the last fifteen years has been a complete disaster for climate theories and models. First of all the water content of the stratosphere dropped by roughly 10% four or five years ago, roughly coincident with the drop in solar activity of the current weak solar cycle. Wrong direction, in the worst possible place, in the toplevel greenhouse blanket, and as far as I know still not well understood. Second, the CO_2 levels have increased substantially but the temperature has not over the last fifteen years, and the average gain over the last 33 years is entirely unremarkable and become less remarkable with every passing year. What this is doing is forcing the gradual reduction in the estimates of climate sensitivity, especially in models that probably overestimated it in the first place.
In a nutshell, we are seeing only the warming one might expect from the CO_2 increase alone, to the extent that one can imagine separating this “signal” from the natural, and unknown, climate “noise”. This has forced people who still have confidence in their models to attribute more and more of the current flatness to a natural downturn that is canceling the gain from CO_2 and water vapor feedback, but their own models prevent them from looking for a “signal” in the form of reduced solar activity (because that has almost zero impact on insolation) and they are thus scrambling about looking for indirect evidence of some kind of occult “warming” e.g. ice melt, accelerating SLR, increased violence of storms to justify the cancellation of two increasingly divergent terms. This has the smarter ones — and there are plenty of smart ones — to hedge their bets and openly consider the possibility that the entire model is wrong, but of course that doesn’t alter the political landscape that overstates the risk in each successive AR even as that risk systematically declines.
As Lindzen and Roy Spencer both point out, net feedback could rather easily turn out to be within a hair of complete neutrality. Or (as you seem to favor, although I cannot for the life of me imagine any evidentiary basis for the belief) net negative. Or very weakly positive. Even the arguably biased participants in the IPCC’s process are starting to reject the more extreme positive values as being definitely excluded by the good data of the last 33 years, while I don’t think that the evidence that it is completely neutral or net negative has any particularly strong basis either. The probability of disaster is systematically reducing with every year of essentially flat temperatures, and if ENSO is indeed fizzling and the solar maximum has indeed either been reached or almost reached, even the most ardent of CAGW enthusiasts has to worry some about the prospects of any sudden increase in temperature. After all, they too can read the graphs — the only major temperature increase in the modern/satellite instrumental record happened during a particularly strong ENSO in coincidence with a string of arguably stronger than average solar cycles (leaving open the question of whether or not they were “Grand Maxima” as at least one researcher seems to conclude). Now that phenomena like the MWP and Roman Warm Period have been rehabilitated, so that a 1000 year cycle is once again visible in the data, they also have to be worry about how much of the current upturn is part of that cycle (which they do not understand and cannot predict).
At this point we are at a bit of a crossroads. If the current near-neutral temperatures persist, or if temperatures actively drop (as you perhaps wishfully thinking insist that they will) there will be at first an orderly retreat, then a panicked retreat from the predictions of disaster. We may already be seeing a bit of this — I detect more than a hint of moderation appearing in the comments coming out of warmist scientists even as the press continues to if anything increase its exaggerated reporting of climate “extremes”. If 15 or 16 years is a problem, imagine 20. They are, and they know that even though they do not understand and cannot predict why, the global climate is at least somewhat less likely to get substantially warmer on the downhill side of the current solar cycle, and that could be starting any time now. It could be seven or eight years before there is any reasonable chance of a substantial upturn, although they could get lucky and have a butterfly wing warming episode at any time. Why not? It’s a chaotic system! The same damn butterfly could beat its wings backwards, though… and then there is the pesky probability of a Maunder Minimum and/or a major volcanic eruption or other cooling event. Their scientific and political credibility is on the line, and nature is not cooperating.
On the other hand, if they are right, at some point we’ll have another substantial 0.2C or more “instant” warming event to catch the temperature up to the high feedback predictions, and this will happen in spite of confounding things like the lack of a strong ENSO or high solar maximum. The problem there is that over the period where we have good data, this sort of thing pretty much has never happened — they are trusting in two terms in all of their complicated climate models to trump everything else and force the system up in a way that has not been observed.
This could happen, because they could still be right. We have nothing like the evidence required to prove their models or theories wrong. Truth is the daughter of time and all that. Wait and see, and in the meantime it is better to not make egregious predictions without carefully stating that they are egregious and somewhat unlikely to be correct no matter what they are, little better than educated guesses and be thought an overcautious fool than to state with complete conviction and certainty that the weather is going to do precisely this over the next decade and very likely remove all doubt at the end of it.
I myself have no idea what the climate will do. My best guess is pretty much the same as it has been doing — slowly warming at a non-alarming rate that gets some small part from anthropogenic stuff and the bulk of it from slowly varying stuff and nonlinear multivariate effects that I certainly do not understand, only note in the historical record as a centuries-long trend with no known cause and hence with no good reason to believe will suddenly change. I wouldn’t be surprised if it cooled some. I wouldn’t be surprised if it warmed more than I expect. At this point I would be somewhat surprised if it warmed a lot more than I expect. I think catastrophe is rather unlikely.
In this belief I actually think that I agree with the bulk of real climate scientists. Some might think it will warm a bit more, some a bit less, but continued non-catastrophic warming is emerging as a very weakly supported consensus opinion. Another few decades of observation should turn it into real science one way or the other, maybe even with a sound foundation and predictive skill.
In the meantime, do not panic, and hold onto your wallet!
rgb
dr Brown says
This is why I think that we simply don’t have enough data to understand the climate system. You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip or spin gold out of straw or turn inadequate data providing insight into a chaotic system into a meaningful and unique model.
Henry says
I know we are in the same army, against our mutual enemy, ignorance, but I have to set you straight here. You (and all climate scientists) don’t get it right because you keep looking at the wrong parameter. You still don’t get it that means won’t give you the right answer until it is far too late…..
If you (i.e. the climate scientists) had studied maxima more intense as all the (noisy) means you guys would all have figured it out, long ago, as I did, here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
This is not a model. This is a fit. There is no “smoothing” here. If you look a bit below the global fit you can see that the fit for Anchorage (luckily) proves that it is probably the best fit. Namely, if I had to use the binomial fit (r squared= 0.998, which is unbelievable HIGH) things would be looking a lot worse.
Either way, we are cooling. And my tables say the speed of this cooling is at its highest rate, just about right now. We will drop now by as much as maxima are dropping because earth’s energy stores are depleted now. We already changed sign in 1995. We will drop 8 x 0.035 = ca. 0.3 degrees C globally by 2020. All the lost ice in the arctic will be back by 2035. Mark my words.
The world is not ready for it, because there are too many people ignorant on the whole subject….
The sad story is, that as we enter 2013, and where the world should prepare itself for climate change due to (natural) global cooling,
for example, by initiating more agricultural schemes at lower latitudes (FOOD!),
and providing more protection against more precipitation at certain places (FLOOD!),
the media and the powers-that-be are twiddling with their thumbs, not listening to the real scientists, e.g. those not making any money and nice journeys out of the gravy train that “global warming” has become.
(I am a hobbyist)
Henry@drBrown
Thanks for your reply, it seems we posted both at around the same time, but mine is bedtime now. We will pickitup again tomorrow.
If you (i.e. the climate scientists) had studied maxima more intense as all the (noisy) means you guys would all have figured it out, long ago, as I did, here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
This is not a model. This is a fit. There is no “smoothing” here.
Dearest HP,
I don’t think you know what the term model (in statistics) means. In the spirit of that “combatting ignorance” that we are both engaged in, I will once again try to educate you, although empirically it is pointless. Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_model
Then read this:
http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/673/
(grab the preprint) focussing your attention on the first figure, where Koutsoyiannis fairly clearly illustrates the fallacy of fitting finite blocks of data with arbitrary functions.
To summarize, when you fit data to a presupposed curve, that is precisely the definition of a statistical model. When you fit a finite, carefully cherrypicked segment of data that happens to result in a good fit to your presupposed model (while ignoring all of the other data that does not work or might even lead to results that contradict it, you are doing a really, really bad job of building a statistical model. When there isn’t the faintest shred of underlying causal mechanism to motivate the particular choice of the functional form you are fitting, you are doing a meaningless job of building a statistical model. Finally even if you had done everything correctly — started with a physically motivated, defensible functional form for the fit, fit it without prejudice to all of the available data and not just the data where the fit seems to work, and still got a decent fit, the statistical model you ended up with would be no better as a predictor of the future than the physics or other causal arguments underlying the fit form, and you would be ill-advised to bet the ranch on the extrapolation of that fit to arbitrary future times unless the physical system involved was particularly simple and linear, in particular not so strongly nonlinear that it is chaotic.
To conclude, the model you have proposed without any underlying physical justification, fit to a tiny, cherrypicked fragment of all of the available climate data, that fails to hindcast the arbitrary past and remains untested against the arbitrary future is a veritable poster child for things one should not do in climate science or any other part of science involving data analysis. As I have pointed out to you, in considerable detail, before.
Surely you don’t think that your sine function extrapolates all the way back to the start of the holocene, for example. Or back to the LIA. Or back to the MWP. Or back to 1940. Because rather obviously, it does not!
So why in the world do you think that it extrapolates forward? What is special about the sine function? What physical mechanism is it capturing? Where is evidence that that mechanism has been present, consistently, from time out of mind?
rgb
What a great thread!
If I may, I’d like to present my summary of the science and how it has evolved to date. No disrespect to rgbatduke intended or implied:
The Physicist and the Climatologist
Climatologist; I have a system of undetermined complexity and undetermined composition, floating and spinning in space. It has a few internal but steady state and minor energy sources. An external energy source radiates 1365 watts per meter squared at it on a constant basis. What will happen?
Physicist; The system will arrive at a steady state temperature which radiates heat to space that equals the total of the energy inputs. Complexity of the system being unknown, and the body spinning in space versus the radiated energy source, there will be cyclic variations in temperature, but the long term average will not change.
Climatologist; Well what if I change the composition of the system?
Physicist; See above.
Climatologist; Perhaps you don’t understand my question. The system has an unknown quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere that absorbs energy in the same spectrum as the system is radiating. There are also quantities of carbon and oxygen that are combining to create more CO2 which absorbs more energy. Would this not raise the temperature of the system?
Physicist; There would be a temporary fluctuation in temperature caused by changes in how energy flows through the system, and perhaps a change in temperature distribution from surface to top of atmosphere, but for the long term average of the system as a whole… see above.
Climatologist; But the CO2 would cause a small rise in temperature, which even if it was temporary would cause a huge rise in water vapour which would absorb even more of the energy being radiated by the system. This would have to raise the temperature of the system.
Physicist; There would be a temporary fluctuation in the temperature caused by changes in how energy flows through the system, but for the long term average of the system as a whole… see above.
Climatologist; That can’t be true. I’ve been measuring temperature at thousands of points in the system and the average is rising.
Physicist; The system being of unknown complexity, it may be due to one or more cyclic variations that have not completed, or are coincidental, and a few thousand measuring points across an entire planet are insufficient in any event, even if you have thousands of years of data, which you don’t. Unless the energy inputs have changed, the long term temperature average would be… see above.
Climatologist; AHA! All that burning of fossil fuel is releasing energy that was stored millions of years ago, you cannot deny that this would increase temperature.
Physicist; Is it more than 0.01% of what the energy source shining on the planet is?
Climatologist; Uhm… no.
Physicist; Rounding error. For the long term temperature of the planet… see above.
Climatologist; Methane! Methane absorbs even more than CO2!
Physicist; See above.
Climatologist; Clouds! Clouds would retain more energy!
Physicist; See above.
Climatologist; Ice! If a fluctuation in temperature melted all the ice less energy would be reflected into space and would instead be absorbed into the system, raising the temperature. Ha!
Physicist; The ice you are pointing at is mostly at the poles where the inclination of the radiant energy source is so sharp that there isn’t much energy to absorb. Anyway, removing the ice would expose water that is warmer than the ice which would then radiate more heat to space, cooling the planet and…. see above.
Climatologist; Blasphemer! Unbeliever! The temperature HAS to rise! I have reports! I have measurements! I have computer simulations! I have committees! United Nations committees! Grant money! Billions and billions and billions! I CAN’T be wrong, I will never explain it! Billions! And the carbon trading! Trillions in carbon trading!
Physicist; gasp! How much grant money?
Climatologist; Billions and billions…. Want some?
Physicist; Uhm…
Climatologist; BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
Climatologist; Hi. I used to be a physicist. When I started to understand the danger the world was in though, I decided to do the right thing and become a climatologist. Let me explain the greenhouse effect to you…
Pat:
If 350 is the safe level, how did life ever survive when the level was over 2000?
Patricia Ravasio (@patravasio) says:
December 2, 2012 at 12:19 am
The problem is that your so called clean energy sources aren’t clean in the first place and are expensive and unreliable to boot.
rgbatduke:
Thankyou for your very fine series of posts in this thread. Much of what you have written I applaud, some I would discuss, and a little I would dispute. But overall your posts are outstanding. Thankyou.
I write to support an argument which you provide at December 3, 2012 at 6:55 am where you say
I wholeheartedly agree and have been saying much the same for a long time. For example, I posted the following on WUWT some years ago.
The basic assumption used in the models is that change to climate is driven by change to radiative forcing. And it is very important to recognise that this assumption has not been demonstrated to be correct. Indeed, it is quite possible that there is no force or process causing climate to vary. I explain this as follows.
The climate system is seeking an equilibrium that it never achieves. The Earth obtains radiant energy from the Sun and radiates that energy back to space. The energy input to the system (from the Sun) may be constant (although some doubt that), but the rotation of the Earth and its orbit around the Sun ensure that the energy input/output is never in perfect equilbrium.
The climate system is an intermediary in the process of returning (most of) the energy to space (some energy is radiated from the Earth’s surface back to space). And the Northern and Southern hemispheres have different coverage by oceans. Therefore, as the year progresses the modulation of the energy input/output of the system varies. Hence, the system is always seeking equilibrium but never achieves it.
Such a varying system could be expected to exhibit oscillatory behaviour. And, importantly, the length of the oscillations could be harmonic effects which, therefore, have periodicity of several years. Of course, such harmonic oscillation would be a process that – at least in principle – is capable of evaluation.
However, there may be no process because the climate is a chaotic system. Therefore, the observed oscillations (ENSO, NAO, etc.) could be observation of the system seeking its chaotic attractor(s) in response to its seeking equilibrium in a changing situation.
Very importantly, there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP). All the observed rise of global temperature in the twentieth century could be recovery from the LIA that is similar to the recovery from the DACP to the MWP. And the ~900 year oscillation could be the chaotic climate system seeking its attractor(s). If so, then all global climate models and ‘attribution studies’ utilized by IPCC and CCSP are based on the false premise that there is a force or process causing climate to change when no such force or process exists.
But the assumption that climate change is driven by radiative forcing may be correct. If so, then it is still extremely improbable that – within the foreseeable future – the climate models could be developed to a state whereby they could provide reliable predictions. This is because the climate system is extremely complex. Indeed, the climate system is more complex than the human brain (the climate system has more interacting components – e.g. biological organisms – than the human brain has interacting components – e.g. neurones), and nobody claims to be able to construct a reliable predictive model of the human brain. It is pure hubris to assume that the climate models are sufficient emulations for them to be used as reliable predictors of future climate when they have no demonstrated forecasting skill.
Richard
Truthseeker says:
December 1, 2012 at 8:28 pm
“All true from the good Lord, but how do we stop the gravy train?”
One cannot fight entertaiment propaganda with science as I have tried to point out in other posts. Those “scientists” who are on the gravy train do not care about science and will never be convinced. The voting public do not understand science. We need to fight false science with entertaining propaganda with the other side of the story. A tough job, to say the least, with the leftists in media and Hollywood pushing the AGW bandwagon. But it’s the only way to make headway. See the movie “Idiocracy” for some idea as to how this could be done. Movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” sell an agenda to the public. Our agenda needs to be sold. Too little CO2 means a dead planet, no photosythesis. Would make a great basis for a futuristic movie with good scare tactics which sell well. Presentations that are less science and more entertainment like Algore’s.
@davidmhoffer says:
December 3, 2012 at 11:58 am
Good one LOL!
…and many thanks to rgbatduke for his many fine and, as usual, illuminating posts.
@Andrew and MikeB,
The question about trends from 1950; it’s a step change in 1997-98 with the super el-nino that did it. I can’t see anyone else having made that point, but Bob Tisdale frequently shows that the ocean temps have gone up in step-changes. One in 1997-98 (not sure of the exact timing). So the trend starting in 1997 is flat, as the start point is elevated. There has been no significant warming from a high point in 1997-98. I note that we haven’t hit any significant new high points regardless of el-nino’s since then.
Very importantly, there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP).
Replace “caused” with “is correlated with” and I agree, but let us also agree that correlation is not causality and in fractal chaotic oscillators periodicity is usually “quasi” periodicity — almost an accident that, as you note INITIALLY (before calling it a cause) — might not have anything whatsoever to do with any cause other than the particular non-Markovian history of the system.
It’s kind of scary, how little we can be certain of, but one still has to be very cautious about jumping on fourier components supported by at most a few cycles of very noisy data with huge error bars.
rgb
@DirkH:
So because factors x,y, and z can all result in global warming, it’s impossible to quantify the contributions made by each? Has it not occurred to you that people have looked at the reasons why there has been warming in the last 50-odd years? Well it turns out they have. Solar output did not increase during that period, and changes in the temperature profile of the atmosphere (troposphere temperatures rise while those in the stratospheric fall) match those predicted to arise from increased levels of greenhouse gases.
@P. Solar
The “statistical artefact” is not the data points themselves, but the negative trend in the regression line caused by the inappropriate use of statistical routines that include those data points.
And to pretend, as you seem to do, that CO2 levels have no significant effect on climate is to throw away several hundred years of work in physics and chemistry. There’s not a single reputable climate scientist in the world who would agree with you.
@kadaka
The point was to demonstrate the inadvisability of using trends over short periods as a predictive method, since so much depends on the start and end points. It’s not me who is claiming that this data proves a warming trend over this period (although the data is certainly suggestive) but rather it’s the authors of the Open Letter who are claiming that this data disproves any warming trend. Which it most certainly fails to do.
And any error might equally well be on the high side.
@Werner Brozek
No I do not agree that there has been no significant warming since 1995. I’m not quite sure what your basis for that assertion is (nor why you chose 1995 as the start point) but in every dataset I look at there’s a long term increase over that period.
rgbatduke:
Thankyou for the response to me which you provide at December 3, 2012 at 2:07 pm.
I apologise for the confusion caused by my lack of clarity. Of course, I agree that correlation does NOT indicate causation. I attempted to outline a series of different possible interpretations of climate behaviour. One of those possibilities is that the existence of apparent climate cycles may be an indication of real climate cycles and – if so – then the ~900 year cycle did cause the RWP. DACP, MWP, LIA and the PWP. Alternatively, one or none of the other possibilities which I stated may be true.
The important point is that nobody knows what – if anything – actually governs climate behaviour.
Richard