This comment from Dr. Robert Brown at Duke University is elevated from a comment to a full post for further discussion. Since we have a new paper (Shepherd et al) that is being touted in the media as “certain” using noisy data with no stable baseline, this discussion seems relevant.
So wait, you are saying that fossil fuels do not cause warming, but that if we shift away from them to clean energies, there is a risk of the earth cooling? Uh, could you just think that through and try agan?
No, that’s just some people on the list who are “certain” — with no more grounds than those of the warmists — that the Earth is about to cool. In the long run, of course, they are correct — the current interglacial (the Holocene) is bound to end at some point soon in geological time, but that could be anytime from “starting right now” to “in a thousand years” or even longer. Some are silly enough to fit a sine function to some fragment of data and believe that that has predictive value.
The problem is that nobody knows why the Eocene ended and the Pleistocene (the current ice age) started, and nobody knows exactly where and why the Pliestocene is a modulated series of glaciations followed by brief stretches of interglacial.
There are theories — see e.g. the Milankovitch cycle — but they have no quantitative predictive value and the actual causal mechanism is far from clear. So we do not know what the temperature outside “should” be, with and/or without CO_2. We do know historically that the Little Ice Age that ended around 200 years ago was tied for the coldest century long stretch of the entire Holocene — that is, the coldest for the last 11,000 or so years (where it might surprise you to learn that the Holocene Optimum was between 1.5 and 2 C warmer than it is today, without CO_2).
So the fact of the matter is that there is a risk of the Earth cooling — in fact, there is a risk of a return to open glaciation, the start of the next 90,000 year glacial era — but it is not a particularly high risk and we have no way to meaningfully do much better than to say “sometime in the next few centuries”. CO_2 might, actually, help prevent the next glacial era (or at least, might delay it) but even that is not clear — the Ordovician-Silurian ice age began with CO_2 levels of 7000 ppm. That is around 17 times the current level, almost 1% of the atmosphere CO_2 — and persisted for millions of years with CO_2 levels consistently in the ballpark of 4000 ppm. If the Earth’s climate system (which we do not understand, in my opinion, well enough to predict even a single decade out let alone a century) decides it is time for glaciation, I suspect that nothing we can do will have any meaningful effect on the process, just as I don’t think that we have had any profound warming influence on the Earth so far.
The fundamental issue is this. We have some thirty three years of halfway decent climate data — perhaps twice that if you are very generous — which is the blink of an eye in the chaotic climate system that is the Earth. There has been roughly 0.3 C warming over that thirty-three year stretch, or roughly 0.1 C/decade. It is almost certain that some fraction of that warming was completely natural, not due to human causes and we do not know that fraction — a reasonable guess would be to extrapolate the warming rate from the entire post LIA era, which is already close to 0.1 C/decade. It is probably reasonable to assign roughly 0.3 C total warming to Anthropogenic CO_2 — that is everything, not just the last thirty years but from the beginning of time. It might be as much as 0.5C, it might be as little as 0.1C (or even be negative), but the physics suggests a warming on the order of 1.2 C upon a complete doubling of CO_2 if we don’t pretend to more knowledge than we have concerning the nature and signs of the feedbacks.
At the moment there is little reason to think that we are headed towards catastrophe. When the combined membership of the AMA and AGU were surveyed — this is surveying climate scientists in general, not the public or the particular climate scientists that are most vocal on the issue — 15% were not convinced of anthropogenic global warming at all, and over half of them doubted that the warming anthropogenic or not would be catastrophic. It’s the George Mason survey — feel free to look it up. The general consensus was, and remains, that there has definitely and unsurprisingly been warming post LIA, that humans have caused some part of this (how much open to considerable debate as the science is not settled or particularly clear), that there is some chance of it being “catastrophic” warming in the future, a much larger chance that it will not be, and some chance that it will not warm further at all or even cool.
The rational thing to do is to continue to pursue the science, especially the accumulation of a few more decades of halfway decent data, until that science becomes a bit clearer, without betting our prosperity and the prosperity of our children and the calamitous and catastrophic perpetuation of global poverty and untold misery in the present on the relatively small chance of the warming being catastrophic and there being something we can do about it to prevent it from becoming so.
So far, if catastrophe is in the cards, the measures proposed won’t prevent it even according to those that predict it! In fact, it won’t have any effect on the catastrophe at all according to the worst case doom and gloomers. We could stop burning carbon worldwide tomorrow and if the carbon cycle model currently in favor with the CAGW crowd is correct (which I doubt) it would take centuries for the Earth’s CO_2 level to go back to “normal” — whatever that means, given that it varies by almost a factor of 2 completely naturally from glacial era to interglacial. In fact, according to that model the CO_2 levels will continue to go up as long as we contribute any CO_2 at all, because they’ve stuck an absurdly long relaxation time into their basic system of equations (one with very little empirical foundation, again IMO).
Again, I suggest that you reread the top article carefully. I actually do not think it is the best example of Monckton’s writing — a few people have noted that its tone is not terribly elevating, and I have to agree — but I sense and sympathize with his frustration, given the content of the article. There is a stench of hypocrisy that stretches from Al Gore’s globe-hopping by jet and his huge house and large car all the way to a collection of people with nothing better to do who have jetted to Doha to have a big party and figure out how to continue their quest for World Domination, hypocrisy with king-sized blinders that seem quite incapable of permitting the slightest bit of doubt to enter, even when bold predictions like those openly made in the 2008 report come back to bite them in the ass.
I myself am not a believer in CAGW. Nor am I a disbeliever. The only thing that I “believe” in regarding the subject is our own ignorance, combined with a fairly firm belief that there is little reason to panic visible in the climate record, and that is before various thumbs were laid firmly on the scales. Remove those thumbs and there is even less reason to panic.
My own prediction for the climate is this. We will probably continue to experience mild warming for another ten to twenty years — warming on the order of 0.1C per decade. It will probably occur in bursts — the climate record shows clear signs of punctuated equilibrium, a Hurst-Kolmogorov process — most likely associated with strong El Ninos (if we get back to where strong El Ninos occur — the last couple have fizzled out altogether, hence the lack of warming). In the meantime, we will without much additional effort beyond existing research and the obvious profit incentives drop the cost of solar power by a factor of four, and it will become at least competitive with the cheapest ways of generating electrical power. We will also have at least one major breakthrough in energy storage technology. The two together will cause solar to become more profitable than coal independent of subsidy, for much but not all of the world. Without anybody being inconvenienced or “doing” anything beyond pursuing the most profitable course, global consumption of carbon will then drop like a rock no matter what we do in the meantime.
Beyond twenty years I don’t think anybody has a clue as to what the temperature will do. I don’t even have a lot of confidence in my own prediction. It wouldn’t surprise me if it got cooler, especially if the Sun enters a true Maunder-style minimum. Nor would it surprise me if it got warmer than my modest prediction. But either way, I think roughly 500 ppm is likely to be the peak level of CO_2 before it comes down, and it may well fail to make it to 500 ppm, and even the catastrophists would have a hard time making a catastrophe out of that given 0.3 C of warming in association with the bump from 300 to 400.
We could make it more likely to cut off before 500 ppm — invest massively in nuclear power. Nuclear power is actually relatively cheap, so this is a cost-benefit win, if we regulate them carefully for safety and avoid nuclear proliferation (both risks, but less catastrophic than the inflated predictions of the catastrophists). But I don’t think we will, and in the end I don’t think it will matter.
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Doug Huffman says:
December 3, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Here is a graph, a graphic, of the current, as of 3 Dec, monthly Smoothed Sunspot Numbers and of their 2009 consensus predicted numbers.
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Doug, I’ll bet forty quatloos that there will be a second peak in the sunspot number or an extended, several yr plateau.
OK, fifty quatloos.
Earth did not go directly from the Eocene (56-34 mya) to the Pleistocene Epoch. The Oligocene (34-23 mya), Miocene (23-5.3 mya) & Pliocene (5.3-2.6 mya) intervened.
I applauded Dr. Brown’s original comment when it appeared, but did not comment on it at the time. Further, I agree with every comment that 30 years’ data is never going to give us an adequate picture of what is happening: indeed, given that we know that there is a powerful (approximtely) 60-year cycle in most if not all of Earth’s climatic data, the very choice of a 30-year period as indicative of anything at all seems an egregious cherry-pick designed to induce worry: by definition, it will give us around 30 years worrying about increasing temperatures followed by around 30 years worrying about cooling.
Whether the temperature in 2100 has increased or decreased from that in 2000 depends entirely on whether the (approximately) 1000 year cycle has peaked, or still has a little way to go. If the former, then we should find that temperatures a century from now will be firmly descending, maybe, though not necessarily, into the next inevitable glaciation; if the latter, then my estimate would be that they should be around the same or a (very) little warmer. In (what I regard as) the unlikely event that it is significantly warmer, we may by then be able to discern whether the excess temperature is due to human activity or to some as yet unknown natural cause – my money would be on nature every time, since I don’t share the warmist belief that we are a defining influence on climate.
As a rank, though not entirely uninformed, amateur, I expect something between stasis and cooling for the next 20 years or so. The 30 years’ ‘warming’ after that (assuming the sun doesn’t decide to give us a Maunder minimum) should reveal from its magnitude whether the longer cycle has peaked or not, to be confirmed by the following 30 years’ cooling. Sadly, since I am already on the unfashionable side of 60, I doubt that I shall ever get much closer to the truth of the matter than I am now: the one thing I do not expect to see is any degree of warming over the rest of my life.
With the statement that “The only thing that I ‘believe’ in regarding the subject is our own ignorance, combined with a fairly firm belief that there is little reason to panic visible in the climate record”, I wholly concur. The climate worry-warts would do well to heed Socrates’ observation that “all that I know is that I know nothing”: the older I get, the more I know, the more truly that statement rings.
The global climate models stand refuted by the temperature record of the past fifteen years, in my view. A resumption of warming is the hope and prayer of the modelers, but there is no basis for such an expectation now that the principles of radiation physics are shown to be erroneously applied to our atmosphere. In short, the verdict is in on the GCM’s. What now is the reason for forecasting a resumption of warming?
There are too many subjects in one article. Dr. Brown is not showing evidence why he doesn’t believe in the predictive value of cycles. I do think that with the coincide of 2 cycles global cooling until 2040 or further is a plausible prospect.
Re Alex and the George Mason study. He says 97 percent and 85 percent “agreed” about the human cause. However, I bet none of those scientists could prove it or produce a detailed study proving it. So we wait for a measurement.
A good summary is here:
http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html
They present the results summarized many different ways, some of them internally inconsistent, but they nevertheless make it very, very clear that the “consensus” on CAGW is at best a very thin one. A majority, for example, believe in “moderate” AGW that will do damage, but yet when you add in the 16% that don’t even believe in AGW due to GHGs at all, it doesn’t leave the right remainder for those that they also claim believe in “catastrophe”.
Note well the mistrust of the media! Climate scientists are neither generally dishonest nor fools, but neither are they immune to the constant hammering and disproportionate reporting of every negative event magnified to the falling sky, every positive event completely ignored.
Of course this survey isn’t the only survey and I mistrust them all given the money on the table. Witness the “surveys” conducted by the media in the last election. Only University sites and one or two private individuals got it all unequivocally right (notably U of Illinois, using Bayesian methods to process all of the surveys put together, that was damn near perfectly on the money, slightly underestimating Obama’s eventual margin). We sadly live in a time when not one of the major news services can be trusted to be objective on political or social issues, and most are so yellow in their journalism that it is openly revolting. Or so think I. Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley are all turning in their graves.
Nothing like the “over 90%” usually portrayed in the media, not even among climate scientists. Of course not. They know better. And note well, this surveys their beliefs in spite of the “support” everybody imagines that they are getting. I have a lot of faith in the overall honesty of most scientists. They live on Earth the same as everybody else, and science as a profession demands far more than the usual modicum of ethical behavior because time will make a fool of you if you make a mistake, and a bad mistake can be and often is a career-ender. I think there are a lot of climate scientists that are a bit out on a limb at the moment, sorry that they let the media and religious zealots among their colleagues frame what they all frankly think is a very uncertain discussion.
rgb
Try this link for the George Mason survey …
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/TV_Meteorologists_Survey_Findings_%28March_2010%29.pdf
I accept Dr Brown’s observation that the IPCC’s Working Group reports are more nuanced than the Summaries for Policymakers
However, climate science would be better served if Dr Brown himself were to write the Summary for Policymakers for the forthcoming AR5 !
As someone once said something that I think sums up the science of climate modeling rather well:
A very thoughtful essay Anthony, and undoubtedly your guess is as good as anyone’s, probably better. But from what I can understand, no-one can model in any meaningful way a complex system without having even the most rudimentary understanding of many of variables involved.
Agree with that but when does the agw theory become falsifiable?
Who knows? The George Mason survey indicates that a majority of climate scientists think maybe in 20+ years from now. I personally think this is a lower bound. Note well that there are climate events that could alter this — if the climate pops 0.5 C back onto the catastrophic track in a single year that would certainly influence a lot of people, and if it drops 0.3 C back to pre-1980 levels over the next five years as the solar cycle winds down that will also influence a lot of people. But falsify? That requires a theory and a basis for the statistical analysis to obtain a meaningful p-value on the null hypothesis. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, probably not in my lifetime. I don’t even think we’ll resolve the solar issue in less than one, maybe two more solar cycles, and then there is waiting for the various decadal oscillations to work through their phases and finally there is the great unknown, what the temperature really ends up doing.
I mean this quite seriously. When I say we don’t know what global temperature will do, not at the 30% confidence level let along the 95% confidence level, I mean it, quite literally. I think the assignments of confidence at all in the matter are completely bullshit, utterly meaningless. I truly believe that it is quite possible for the temperature to go back up — and maybe even probable, over time — in spite of the last stretch of basically near-neutral fluctuations. Is there anyone on this list that seriously thinks, within anything like certainty, that we are about to trend up or trend down? I think it is damn near a coin flip, but probably a biased-up coin flip because CO_2 levels are continuing to rise, and unless the GHE from them is actively canceled, something not even sane skeptics would generally assert, we can expect 0.1 to 0.2 C per decade from that alone.
That’s the null hypothesis, right there. Not “no warming”, not “excessive warming with high climate sensitivity” — just pure CO_2 driven warming, at the computed rate of roughly 1.2 C per doubling of CO_2 mixed with whatever natural variation mother nature produces. Resolving that predicted signal from the natural noise is basically impossible on the 33 years of data we have. At fifty years maybe. At seventy five years probably. But it might well take a full century of satellite observation to really work out a fully functional climate model, to get enough data on all the permutations of the global oscillations, enough measurements of the state of the ocean, enough knowledge of what the sun is doing and so on to work it out.
But these numbers are partly dependent on how much we spend, as one might imagine. Revive NASA, start spending serious money on space research once again, visit the planets and establish permanent observatories on their moons and probe their atmospheres with permanent floating probes, disincentivize bullshit and politicized results, get serious about studying the sun (not that they aren’t serious now) — maybe they CAN work it out in 20 years. But that so very much depends on what the climate actually does no matter what we spend.
rgb
rgbatduke said @ur momisugly December 3, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Presumably, by “temperature” you mean here “the temperature of Earth”. Since Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium (yet, thank the Deity du jour), I don’t see how it can have “a temperature”. Sure I can average the temperatures measured for a litre of air from the Atacama Desert and Cairns in far north Queensland, but this does not address what drives climate which is energy. Even if those two air samples are exactly the same temperature, they differ in energy content and mass. Ditto for a litre of seawater from the Maldives compared with a litre from the Atlantic just off the West coast of South America. Averaging temperatures of what are different substances seems to me more akin to numerology than physics, especially when there are so many different averages from which one can choose.
So, I can say with some confidence that, in the absence of humans, the temperature of Earth would be non-existent in the absence of any human to imagine such a quantity.
Nice piece BTW.
I’ll tell you what will come to an end soon, and by soon I do not mean on a geological scale. And some things will be getting hot for some, while some things will be getting cold for many more.
The ability of near bankrupt western nations to borrow money to pay their irresponsible rate of borrowing, and the ability of their citizens to service their nation’s debt though tax increases only.
Between the irresponsible approach to fiscal management taken by government, and their insane desire to drive companies offshore with high energy costs and other green snafus, the end is of life as we know it is indeed nearing – that is the end of affluence, progress and every thing else the western nations know and value.
Thank you Dr. Brown for a most refreshing and interesting read, both in this post and your subsequent comments. Your intellectual honesty shines out, illustrated by your use of the word dunno. I dunno why it, or its equivalent, is so seldom expressed or even hinted at by so many scientists these days. Or perhaps we all do?
Took the words right out of my mouth. Hats off to you Dr. Brown. WUWT is so sane and rational. WUWT is so attuned to scientific method and the empirical realm.
Ever consider managing a political campaign, Anthony?
The global climate models stand refuted by the temperature record of the past fifteen years, in my view. A resumption of warming is the hope and prayer of the modelers, but there is no basis for such an expectation now that the principles of radiation physics are shown to be erroneously applied to our atmosphere. In short, the verdict is in on the GCM’s. What now is the reason for forecasting a resumption of warming?
I have no idea what this even means. What “principles of radiation physics” are being erroneously applied to our atmosphere? Please separate the predictive value of the GCMs from whether or not there is a greenhouse effect or AGW, as they are not the same thing. The GCMs could be wrong but AGW might still be true. The GCMs could accidentally predict the right answer sometimes with errors, so that AGW could be false. What is certain is that the GHE exists, and warms the Earth compared to a reasonably well established baseline. The warming predicted due to the increase in CO_2 alone is 1.2 C per doubling, give or take a bit. That warming can be increased or decreased by feedback, but the null hypothesis (since we don’t have any compelling evidence for either one) is to assume that it is the only average, anthropogenic change, although honestly with human based aerosols and particulates and so on in place even this is probably false too.
Many people on the list are certain that temperatures will drop with the solar cycle. I am not. I think it plausible, even somewhat likely that they will given the data, but there are huge uncertainties in the data and many arguments over its meaning. All one can really be certain of at this point is that atmospheric CO_2 will almost certainly continue to increase, at least until some form of cooling overwhelms any CO_2 driven warming and the ocean becomes more receptive of CO_2.
If we are too ignorant to build a good climate model that can reliably predict CAGW, we are certainly too ignorant to build a good climate model that can reliably refute it as well. To do either one requires more data, more time, and more knowledge. Which we will get. In part by waiting and seeing if in fact warming does resume at a good clip, or the temperature does remain basically flat, or the temperature does in fact plummet.
That’s why they call it “research”, because we don’t know the answer yet and have to find out. Otherwise we call it “engineering”.
rgb
Red Baker said @ur momisugly December 3, 2012 at 2:30 pm
Stick around long enough and you will find that they do…
The current ice age began ~2.5 million years ago and has not ended. We are currently enjoying an interstadial between glacial episodes.
Lots of luck on the 4 x fall in solar costs, likewise the energy storage breakthrough, both of which are required to make solar somewhat useful. For 40 years, ever since the first “oil crisis”, there has been much expensive research on energy storage and the end result is lithium rechargeable batteries which are better than lead acid chemistry but only by a factor of 3 and none at all in terms of watt-hours/ kilogram per dollar (I’m talking about what you can actually buy and use safely, not lab curiosities or the incendiary grenades used by the RC model airplane people). Other technologies unlikely ever to make prime time include fuel cells which despite well over 100 years of knowledge and development and much money spent 50 years ago aren’t in everyday widespread use at low cost
mpainter said @ur momisugly December 3, 2012 at 3:23 pm
It strikes me as odd that those who fear a warmer climate also hope and pray for such to occur. Especially them that live in the higher latitudes.
Earth did not go directly from the Eocene (56-34 mya) to the Pleistocene Epoch. The Oligocene (34-23 mya), Miocene (23-5.3 mya) & Pliocene (5.3-2.6 mya) intervened.
But if I recall correctly — and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong because I’m trying to know things in at least a half a dozen distinct fields here and at some point things get diluted — the temperature over that 50 million year period went from very warm — the 4-5 C warmer that warmists consider “catastrophic” — to much cooler by the start of the Pliocene (2-3 C warmer), then cooled more or less to where we are now, where we cycle between this “critical” temperature in the interglacials to 5 to 10 C cooler during the glacials (gradually decreasing with time — the earlier shorter cycles weren’t as cold at their peak coldness).
Let’s see, I know I’ve got a link somewhere… oh yes, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
Well, OK, there is some structure in there too. Structure that once again I doubt is understood.
rgb
On: Truth is the Daughter of Time
Data indeed points to the near future cooling in the North West Europe.
North West Europe, with the longest and the most accurate records, temperatures rise or fall is determined by a chain of events:
North Atlantic currents regime in the subpolar gyre (the engine of heat transport in the N. Atlantic) controls warm waters down-welling in the winter time, releasing several hundred W/msq of energy, which in turn moves the Icelandic Low and diverts the polar jet stream. In the summer months the Icelandic Low follows the ice retreat with the rise in the insolation to the north of Iceland, outside the subpolar gyre’s region, hence its summer effect is still cyclical but less dominant.
Result of this is:
350 years of no summer warming
350 years of slow steady winters’ temperature rise.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MidSummer-MidWinter.htm
Why would the North Atlantic currents regime change?
All indications are that the North Atlantic currents regime is under influence of tectonically highly active mid-Atlantic Ridge, which exibits some correlation with the solar activity:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/FP.htm
be aware, it may be pseudo or crank ‘science’, regardless what the data show!
That’s it Dr. Brown, now you’ve gone and done it! You clearly have way too much common sense for Duke. Please move your office to NC State.
Go Wolfpack!
People who are interested in surveys of climate scientists are not demonstrating an interest in climate science or any science. If you talk to a scientist, he/she will tell you about data, methods, new hypotheses confirmed along the way, hypotheses disconfirmed along the way, and similar matters because that is what makes up the science. To ask a scientist, even a climate scientist, what he thinks of the AGW hypothesis is something like asking a professional coach what he thinks of the score in the game just played. The first thing that will pop into the coach’s mind is that you have no interest in the game or how he/she coaches it and he/she will answer with some platitude.
If a stranger asks me what I think of the AGW hypothesis, I reply that there seems to be a little warming. If pressed, I say that there could be more than a little warming. I do this to avoid a boring discussion with someone who thinks that he can hold forth on the topic of climate change. And I do it to be popular at dinner.
Thanks Dr Brown , your comments often are posts in their own right and always enlightening.
rgbatduke says December 2, 2012 at 6:21 pm: “but the physics suggests a warming on the order of 1.2 C upon a complete doubling of CO_2”
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No, not THE physics, some people suggest that.
rgbatduke says December 2, 2012 at 6:21 pm: “The general consensus was, and remains, that there has definitely and unsurprisingly been warming post LIA, that humans have caused some part of this”
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I see, consensus, why am I not surprised?
Well, it is not true what you are saying about “general consensus”. It is rather the opposite what is true.
If we look at this study (http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf) carefully, we can see that 70% of the more than 10,000 scientists from relevant fields polled confirmed neither “global warming”, nor “caused by humans”. I would not call 30% a “general consensus”.