New global water vapor findings contradict second draft of IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5)
Guest post by Forrest M. Mims III
I was an “expert reviewer” for the first and second order drafts of the 2013 Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 5 (AR5). The names and reviews of all the reviewers will be posted online when the final report is released. Meanwhile, reviewers are required to not publish the draft report. However, the entire second draft report was leaked on December 13, 2012, without IPCC permission and has subsequently received wide publicity.
My review mainly concerns the role of water vapor, a key component of global climate models. A special concern is that a new paper on a major global water vapor study (NVAP-M) needs to be cited in the final draft of AR5.
This study shows no up or down trend in global water vapor, a finding of major significance that differs with studies cited in AR5. Climate modelers assume that water vapor, the principle greenhouse gas, will increase with carbon dioxide, but the NVAP-M study shows this has not occurred. Carbon dioxide has continued to increase, but global water vapor has not. Today (December 14, 2012) I asked a prominent climate scientist if I should release my review early in view of the release of the entire second draft report.
He suggested that I do so, and links to the official IPCC spreadsheet version and a Word version of my review are now posted near the top of my homepage at www.forrestmims.org.
The official IPCC spreadsheet version of my review is here. A Word version is here.
A PDF version (prepared by Anthony from the Word version) is here: Mims_IPCC_AR5_SOD_Review
A relevant passage from the AR5 review by Mimms (added by Anthony):
The obvious concern to this reviewer, who has measured total column water vapor for 22.5 years, is the absence of any mention of the 2012 NVAP-M paper. This paper concludes,
“Therefore, at this time, we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”
Non-specialist readers must be made aware of this finding and that it is at odds with some earlier papers. Many cited papers in AR5 have yet to be published, but the first NVAP-M paper was published earlier this year (after the FOD reviews) and is definitely worthy of citation: Thomas H. Vonder Haar, Janice L. Bytheway and John M. Forsythe. Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L15802, 6 PP., 2012. doi:10.1029/2012GL052094.
Just to say, Steven Mosher takes some of the flack undeservedly. As some of you know, I am as skeptic about the AGW as anyone, but despite that I communicate privately with Steven, and he has been very helpful with some of my work, which in the essence if correct would undermine the CO2 hypothesis.
” … simple many papers have been submitted and ACCEPTED but not published yet. So the papers are sent around to reviwers if you want them. The authors have to write the most up to date summary. If the paper misses the final date, then they have to decide what to do for the final draft. … ”
In days long gone by; it was said that a paper that was published had to pass the publication’s editor as a first step and then peer review as a second step. Then, after publication, the scientific community could over time evaluate the paper and respond accordingly. So if some erroneous paper did pass review and get published, it could be shot down by other scientists after it was published.
It looks like the UN organization wants to use papers not yet vetted by the full scientific community. I wonder why.
Steven,
No, I think it is you that is missing the point. AR5 allows papers to be cited that are only “submitted” rather than peer-reviewed, accepted and genuinely “in press” with methodology and data available to reviewers . In AR4, not only was WA2007 not published but nor was really accepted, with its methodology available to Expert Reviewers. It referenced another paper that was not even submitted. The published paper was significantly different to what was available to reviewers – despite what Briffa claimed.
It was far from the only problem. The dataset of Hegerl et al 2006 was refused disclosure to Stephen McIntyre, who Susan Solomon threatened to throw off the review just for asking. Tucked in was questionable Yamal data.
For the Expert Review to have any validity all the cited papers should be peer-reviewed with genuinely final preprints, data and methodology archived when the draft is reviewed. Of course it will be well out of date when published but you can’t have it both ways. AR5 can not be said to have been peer-reviewed. Moreover if the reviewers do not get to see the authors responses and the final text and an opportunity to appeal the text the whole exercise is a sham.
Mark Stoval:
It looks like the UN organization wants to use papers not yet vetted by the full scientific community. I wonder why.
You shouldn’t wonder. It is a well-recognized ploy that alarmist scientists use: they write a paper that gets rush-reviewed by pals and stuffed into the IPCC maw just before deadline and before it can be refuted by another paper. This is just one of the many notorious aspects of the IPCC which repells decent scientists. The whole thing stinks and should be abolished. It is the perversion of science.
This to be added to my previous post. Remember Joelle Gerghis and Gerghis et al? Their paper was the product of just such a tactic. It got shot down on Climate Audit and was withdrawn shortly afterward.Except for Climate Audit, it would have been incorporated into AR5 by their fellow “guerilla warriors” (as per Joelle Gerghis). Thus the authors of the IPCC pronunciamento.
It doesn’t matter what the papers say or what data was used/data selected/artificial or what the publishing date of the paper is.
The IPCC is going to cite and use more extensively those papers that support the global warming theory. They are going to cite/use papers which are contradictory to the theory in a very, very minimalist way.
It is the nature of the beast.
To understand what is being presented in IPCC reports, one has to go into depth about individual papers, and do your own research to see which papers are faking/selecting their results to prove whichever side of the argument they are promoting. Climate science is the least objective science there has ever been – in the history of science I mean.
The IPCC citing/using the papers which are the least objective in the history of science only means you need to do your own objective research and not rely on to any extent what is in these IPCC reports without personally having vetted it yourself.
Why is it like this? They believe. They have hitched their personal reputations to it. All 20,000 of them. They are willing to distort/select data if it means that the theory will survive for just one more day. They have kept it alive for 10 years past its best before date already. What they are doing has worked so far. If you are a sceptic, then you have to see that this is the case.
Bill Illis 4:56.
And the ipcc team will draw the farce out as long as they possibly can absorbing wealth and acting as the cover for this recycling of eugenics.
Too many people on planet= kill the poor.
And unless we destroy this beast it will be back in different guises for years.
Time for crimes against humanity trials, with UN staff as the defendants.
First trick of a scoundrel, wrap yourself in all thats good and true.
Given what I’ve seen so far in analysis of the draft AR5 by those far more expert than I, it seems unlikely we’ll see an AR6. Would be fun to be a fly on the wall at the next review of the current swag of reviewer comments, to be held in Hobart in January next, I believe. In the distance, I think I hear the faint sound of the retreat being played, notwithstanding there are platoons of front-line soldiers still firing blanks from their crusty muskets. I’m sure I saw Captain John Cooke exhorting his troops to stand firm, and Sergeant Steven Sherwood was demonstrating how to spin the arrow of his argument.
My guess six months ago was that by 2017, most AGW proponents would be backing away, and becoming the New Denialists (“no, no, I never said it was certain; I always argued that we should await more evidence” . . . ), and by 2020 there’ll be a number of key IPCC players writing their version of this sorry part of our scientific, political, and journalistic history, trying to salvage their reputations.
I applaud those who’ve recognised and spoken out early against the ignorance of many of the AGW arguments. Haven’t they copped such flack! I appreciate also those reviewers such as Alex Rawls for his release of the draft AR5, and for his and Forrest M. Mimms III for their analysis in their own fields. More reviewers will speak out, I’m sure, and the tide will steadily turn further.
But the battle is not over yet, and John Robertson (Dec 16, 2012 at 8.26pm) is quite correct. The beast must be destroyed. The current generation of decision-makers need to understand that they have been duped, and how they have been duped. The story needs to be told also to the next generation, for as John points out, this manic ignorance can return all too easily under a different guise.
@Steve: I’m sorry for my short sighted comments. I think your response does make sense.
If the IPCC would not take the latest papers into account, you would complain that the report is outdated. Whatever they do, here it will always be criticized.
@Victor Venema: You wrote”
Victor Venema says:
December 17, 2012 at 12:01 am
“If the IPCC would not take the latest papers into account, you would complain that the report is outdated. Whatever they do, here it will always be criticized.”
Is that a bad thing to be skeptical of a political organisation which wants to reduce our population in the most cruel way hurting the poorest people? Seriously Victor, could you make a cogent statement here?
In your blog you wrote “Almost any climatological measurement will not have a statistically significant trend over such a short period, but the story is even weirder.” However, the IPCC uses such short time correlations to conclude that CO2 was the cause of 95% of the warming. Then with this, they recommend to policy makers to destroy productivity of civilization.
You dropped by this site with some nonsense, I believe. So please, have some backbone and tell us what’s wrong. Again, make some cogent statement and school us, rather than complain.
@Victor Venema:
You also wrote: “In other words, they cannot say anything about the trend, because they have not even tried to compute it and estimate its uncertainty.”
Are you admitting that IPCC haven’t even tried to compute anything about Water Vapor? Why wouldn’t they? Water Vapor is the linchpin of their entire hypothesis of the catastrophic global warming caused by CO2 and water vapor. Why would they not try to find out if their hypothesis is true? You have a lot of explaining to do… or you have to admit you are a kludge. Sorry if I sound angry, but as a truth seeker, people like you are in the way of any kind or progress in science.
Dear Mario Lento, it is great being skeptical, would love to see more of that. It is less great to be unreasonable.
Mario Lento says:
The IPCC does not do any research, it just reviews the existing research. Could you refer to the original publication that used only correlation and did so on such a short time series to arrive at such a strong conclusion?
The problem of the NASA humidity dataset is not only that it is short, but also that it is inhomogeneous, the number and the type of the satellites that were used to produce this dataset changed during this 23 year period. It is strange that Mims thinks this is an important paper to compare to the other humidity trend estimates, while the authors themselves only recommend to use it to study seasonal to interannual (year to year) variability. One wonders if Mims read the article he is advocating.
Mario Lento says:
No, the word “they” in your quote refers to the authors of the short 23-year NASA dataset discussed by Mims in this guest post. Again, the IPCC does not do any research, it just reviews the existing research. Of course there is research on the trend in water vapor. This is performed using data from surface stations, ship observations and radiosondes (measurements of the vertical profile on weather balloons). These datasets have a length of many decades, up to more than a century and are thus much better suited to study trends. The strength of the NASA dataset is the spatial overview.
Victor Venema:
Your post at December 17, 2012 at 12:01 am asserts without any evidence
NO! That is falsehood!
The IPCC is rightly admonished for presenting a one-sided (i.e. biased) selection of papers as a method to provide a veneer of apparent science in justification of its political purpose. Indeed, many of the papers used in the AR4 were ‘grey’ literature which were NOT peer reviewed but were merely press releases from advocacy groups (i.e. WWF, Greenpeace, etc.).
The NIPCC Report was prepared as a method to ‘fill the holes’ in the selection of papers reported by the IPCC. The NIPCC reported peer-reviewed scientific papers alone (n.b. NIPCC did not use ‘grey literature’).
The IPCC is NOT criticised “whatever they do”. The complaint at the IPCC is undeniably true, and it is that the IPCC is selective, biased and political in its choice of papers to report. The complaint is NOT that IPCC information is “outdated”.
Simply, your post which I am answering consisted of only two sentences which present three falsehoods in what seems to be an attempt to deflect from discussion of the subject of this thread.
Richard
Victor Venema:
Your post at December 17, 2012 at 1:30 am says
It is true that “the IPCC does not do any research” but you misrepresent what the IPCC does do.
The IPCC reviews publications as a method to find papers which it can refer to in reports which support its agenda.
The IPCC is a political organisation and NOT a scientific one. It is an interGOVERNMENTal panel – not a scientific panel – and it uses a veneer of selected science as attempted justification for its objectives.
Richard
Dear Richard Courtney, all I can say is that in the field were I am knowledgeable, the homogenisation of surface climate data, the IPCC review seems to be a fair and balanced summary of the state-of-the-art. The review might be a bit too optimistic about the accuracy of the homogenised data, but I still have to do the research to proof that.
Victor Venema:
Your post at December 17, 2012 at 3:28 am says in total
Well, that explains why you support the IPCC bias.
The homogenisation of surface climate data is scientific nonsense.
Each team does it differently, using different assumptions, and they often alter their results. Thus, each team provides a time series which differs from every other team although they all claim to be providing the same metric. And each of those time series is often altered without explanation Please see
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
And don’t use the ‘not published in a peer-reviewed journal’ excuse: I have linked to the Parliamentary Submission which complains at how publication of the paper (draft as Appendix B) was prevented from publication by nefarious method.
Richard
Many thanks for this review and all the work that went into it. I maintain my suspicion that we cannot claim any meaningful trend in atmospheric water vapor data.
I’ve been studying how much the temps go up and down on a daily basis for over a year. Over the last 60 or so years the average daily temp swing is ~18/18F (up/down).
On clear day/night cycles in low humidity locations this can be as large as about 60/60F (~250 such days out of ~114 Million daily temp readings), most of these days are from the 70’s on, but there are more than about 10x the number of samples taken after ~1973 so this might not be significant.
But the real point is that atm water vapor on most days in most locations controls nightly cooling, not co2, and the average cooling hasn’t changed more than a degree or so (with no trend) over the last 60 years.
Dear MiCro, yes, the day to day variability in humidity and its influence on the size of the daily cycle (diurnal temperature range; DTR) is large. It is hard to compare this to the change in CO2 as this varies much less from day to day, but does show a long term trend together with humidity. The influence of CO2 on the DTR is only seen in the long run. There are a number of papers, I have mentioned 2 classics below, that do find that the DTR has decreased.
Easterling and colleagues found a decreasing trend in the DTR of about 0.8°C per century. An early study by Karl and colleagues a bit more. What dataset did you use? Any idea what you did differently to arrive at another and hopefully more accurate estimate?
Karl, Thomas R., and Coauthors, 1993: A New Perspective on Recent Global Warming: Asymmetric Trends of Daily Maximum and Minimum Temperature. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 74, 1007–1023. doi: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/1520-0477(1993)0742.0.CO;2“>10.1175/1520-0477(1993)0742.0.CO;2
David R. Easterling*, Briony Horton, Philip D. Jones, Thomas C. Peterson, Thomas R. Karl, David E. Parker, M. James Salinger, Vyacheslav Razuvayev, Neil Plummer, Paul Jamason, Christopher K. Folland. Maximum and Minimum Temperature Trends for the Globe. Science 18 July 1997: Vol. 277 no. 5324 pp. 364-367. doi: 10.1126/science.277.5324.364
What are the attributed standards for the measurable impact of Water Vapor? Doesn’t answering that question require included calculations for cloud feedbacks? How can IPCC AR5 do anything other than affirm the indeterminateness of future climate in their report? Where are the comparative analyses for atmospheric water vapor continent and soil moisture levels that are coupled with temperature feedbacks produced by the evaporative process. I honestly do not know how much effort is put into smoothing tropospheric and stratospheric heights in efforts to suppress differentiations created by evaporative and absorption feedbacks. Nonetheless, I am troubled by the panels effort to keep CO2 increases coupled with attendant increases in water vapor when their natural processes for production and absorption dispose me to believe that the weight of CO2 will only permit its concentration to rise when the amount of atmospheric water vapor decreases. (even when the measured change is smaller than 1 part per million)
This first link explains what I did, etc:
http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds/blog/global_annual_daily_temperatures_19292010-81063
I did find that I was dropping the data after the decimal point, and redid all of the graphs here:
http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds/blog/updated_temperature_charts-86742
Oh!-What-A-Smelly-Fish!-Is-It-Dead?-It-Must-Be!-Evidence-Is-Abundant says:
December 14, 2012 at 8:23 pm
I am watching … with interest.
Love the alias! – it makes a point eloquently all by itself.
Dear MiCro, unfortunately it takes a bit more effort to compute a reliable climate signal.
First of all, your hourly data is partially from synoptic reports. These are meteorological reports for weather prediction, as this data is communicated fast across the globe for all weather services to use for weather predictions, it is not validated (well) and will contain many outliers due to measurement and communication errors. Based on the dataset you used (I think), the UK MetOffice has generated a quality controlled dataset HadISDin which these outliers are removed. Another problem with this dataset is that is had many stations in the US and little stations elsewhere.
Still better would be to use the measured minimum and maximum temperature from climate stations, you can find them, e.g., in the GHCN data of NOAA or the new dataset of the International Surface Temperature Initiative.
Then there are jumps in the dataset due to changes in the instrumentation. In the beginning of your dataset in 1929, the temperature was probably recorded by a pencil that was attached to a bimetal strip on a slowly rolling bin with paper and later digitized; this device was probably placed in a Cotton Region Shelter. Nowadays automatic weather stations are used, which are often mechanically ventilated. You will have to remove such jumps, which is called homogenization. Or if you do not want to do that yourself, you could use the homogenized dataset of the GHCN.
Then between 1929 and now the number of stations has changed enormously, as you also show. If there is only a small tendency for stations to be more to the North or to the South, closer to the coast or higher or lower up the mountains, this will influence your “average climate signal”. Thus you should either use only stations that measured all the time, or you should normalise them by subtracting the average over a fixed period of a few decades (the way CRU does), or you should compute the difference from year to year and average those (the way NOAA does).
To compute a global average climate signal, you cannot directly average over all data. There are many more stations in the industrialised countries. If you compute a normal average you would only see the climate signal in those countries. The best way to solve this problem is by interpolating over the entire land surface, e.g. by kriging, but even simple linear interpolation may be sufficient. Alternatively you can compute the average signal of all stations within grid boxes (for example 1×1 degree or 5×5 degree latitude and longitude) and then average over these grid boxes.
I am curious what you will find after making such improvements to your method.
The fact that water vapor has not increased in step with increasing carbon dioxide is extremely important for the validity of the greenhouse warning theory. All IPCC calculations of warming require positive water vapor feedback. That is because absorption of outgoing long wave radiation by carbon dioxide will only give you a 1.1 degree Celsius temperature increase That is not enough to scare anybody. But the warming acts as a seed and allows more water vapor to evaporate. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas and its warming is added to the original greenhouse warming to give us those three, four or five degree warmings coming from the IPCC. But if there is no increase of water vapor with CO2 then there can be no positive water vapor feedback and all those forecasts of dangerous warming ahead are simply wrong. At this point, let me introduce the greenhouse theory of Ferenc Miskolczi. According to him, water vapor feedback is negative, not positive, and it will actually retard any warming from CO2 instead of boosting it. If you consider that there has not been any warming for the last 16 years while carbon dioxide increased you realize that greenhouse warming is really not working, and very likely because of that negative water vapor feedback. Miskolczi was laughed out when he introduced his theory but you really can’t laugh if the predictions from his theory come true. The only question is why now, why has this not happened before? The answer is that people really do not understand the temperature record as presented to us. I have studied the temperature record from satellites that started in 1979. I discovered that the global mean temperature from 1979 to 1997, an 18 year stretch, was constant. It is true that El Nino peaks and La Nina valleys of the ENSO system were present but their average evened out. There was no warming until the giant super El Nino of 1998 appeared. It brought much warm water across the ocean. This raised global temperature by a third of a degree in four years and then stopped. And there has not been any warming at all since then. That step warming of a third of a degree is the only warming within the last 32 years which leaves no time whatsoever for any greenhouse warming at all. This is all covered up in standard temperature curves which show a steady warming in the eighties and nineties when global mean temperature stood still. That warming is falsified. It appeared in GISTEMP, NCDC, HadCRUT3 and NOAA temperature curves. Interestingly, for whatever reason, this August both GISTEMP and NCDC decided to start showing the true temperature for this period while the others did not. There is much there that still needs to be straightened out, including covert computer processing that has left its traces on these temperature curves. In the meantime, the greenhouse theory as promulgated by IPCC must be considered non-functional.