Dutch advice to IPCC: limiting the scope to human induced climate change is undesirable
Governments around the world have been asked by IPCC to think about the future of the IPCC. The Netherlands now sent their submission to the IPCC and made it available on the website of KNMI.
I would say Holland is fairly critical about how IPCC is operating right now. This part struck me as most interesting:
The IPCC needs to adjust its principles. We believe that limiting the scope of the IPCC to human induced climate change is undesirable, especially because natural climate change is a crucial part of the total understanding of the climate system, including human-induced climate change. The Netherlands is also of the opinion that the word ‘comprehensive’ may have to be deleted, because producing comprehensive assessments becomes virtually impossible with the ever expanding body of knowledge and IPCC may be more relevant by producing more special reports on topics that are new and controversial.
I agree with both points. The (almost) obsession of IPCC with greenhouse forcing has greatly limited progress in climate science in my opinion, so I am glad my government now raises this point. And in my (Dutch) book De Staat van het Klimaat I concluded that IPCC in AR4 had not succeeded to come up with a “comprehensive” report. I also agree IPCC should pay much more attention to controversial topics. The treatment of controversial topics in AR4 and also AR5 was and is unsatisfactory for two reasons: there is not enough space reserved to go into the necessary details and the author teams are almost always biased in favor of the consensus view and therefore not giving enough credit to minority views.
The Netherlands also want to make an end to the huge volumes IPCC is producing and replace it by shorter web based (special) reports:
More here:
http://www.staatvanhetklimaat.nl/2013/07/05/dutch-advise-to-ipcc-limiting-the-scope-to-human-induced-climate-change-is-undesirable/
@ur momisugly u.k. (us)
Ah presumed fellow ex-Pat you are no doubt referring to the First Law of Holes.
“When in a Hole stop digging”.
As an example of lack of knowledge concerning the First Law is currently in being perfectly executed by the present US Administration.
Pablo an ex Pat says:
July 5, 2013 at 7:46 pm
“Ah presumed fellow ex-Pat ….
========
Nope, dug in like a tick 🙂
I’m not leaving either : )
Adjust its principles?
How can an organization, demonstrably devoid of any principles, adjust them?
@John robertson –
Amen to that.
Latitude says:
July 5, 2013 at 11:47 am
why?….that’s not why they were created at all….
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation.”
Humans do induce climate change with a number of other interventions:
creation of dams
draining large regions
watering large regions, particularly for rice production
changing river deltas
burning forests
reforesting
building roads and cities
changing shorelines
……
there is a lot of scope in possible studies to keep climatologists busy as bees. It is just that money was given preferentially to incriminate CO2, i.e. energy use, with the result of higher energy prices, starving third world by turning food to gas, subsidizing useless and expensive technologies etc. etc. If I were not a firm believer that when lemming like stupidity can explain a situation conspiracies are not necessary , I would say there was a conspiracy to increase energy prices, where maybe even fossil fuel producers take part. They like scarcity.
I disagree with KNMI. We don’t need IPCC to pay attention to any other things. Science will learn about natural variability in the usual way, without the need of any Intergovernmental Panel made by politicians to tell what politicians have to do in a suposedly scientifically justified way. What IPPC has to do is disappear and never ever return.
KNMI thinks the IPCC does not examine natural climate variability, like solar, volcanos, clouds, GCRs, ocean/atmosphere oscillating and quasi-periodic systems, the ice ages caused by orbital variation with concurrent ice-sheet albedo changes? Their whole paleoclimate section is about natural climate change. They compared natural forcings with anthroopgenic in order to estimate the anthropogenic impact. Which IPCC document did KNMI read?
“What IPPC has to do is disappear and never ever return.” [Nylo]
YES!
Speaking of return, I was just thinking about you the other day, Nylo, and wondering where you’ve been. Yes, I remember you (smile)! I was hoping all was well in your world. Glad to “hear” your robust, forthright, enthusiastic, voice again. You CARE and it shows.
lsvalgaard says:
Geez Leif … this is splitting hairs, grasping at straws, building straw men, assuming, and trolling … all at once! Most uncharacteristic.
You have decided Crock “…implies that, he agrees with, the IPCC assessment that,.. CO2 induced warming is not controversial”.
Firstly – at the most basic level, – no-one can argue that CO2 absorbs certain wavelengths and that more CO2 molecules being present in the atmosphere will result in more energy being retained by those extra molecules.
But, that is when the controversy just begins … convection effect?, conduction effects? distribution in the atmosphere? increased radiation to space?
Then we go further into controversy: water vapor feed back effects? out gassing from warmer oceans? cloud effects? etc etc and on it goes, right through to the issues about wheter we are really warming and if so how much of that warming is really anthropogenic …. No doubt there are some controversies related to all that or it would all be tied up and finished and we’d not be having this discussion.
However – back to your interpretation of the implication: the Crock statement could be taken in many ways:
….IPCC should concentrate on more controversial issues …
Crock could have meant any or several of the following:
….IPCC should concentrate on (the) more controversial issues …
….IPCC should concentrate on more (of the) controversial issues …
….IPCC should concentrate on more controversial issues (than the simple fact that CO2 can cause some warming and we can model it as it proves nothing really…)
….IPCC should concentrate on more controversial issues … (“..because I’m not silly enough to take the whole CO2 issue shemozzle on head on so I’ll just skirt around that and give it token acceptance because my bigger picture message is the IPCC is doing an appalling job of assessing and communicating the science so bringing about change is the issue I will concentrate on..”)
Me? I’m going with the last one, it is pretty clear to me that is exactly what he meant, and although I have to assume his implied meaning, I’m really doing no more or less than Leif is, so my assumption is equally valid.
Leif, I have seen a lot of people wrongly labeled trolls for simply having a different opinion, but to me, this sort of argument based on hair splitting and assumption, complete with your one line ‘smart’ replies, is a classic example of trolling.
Many people think trolling is something to do with short ugly guys living under bridges, but no, it is a method of fishing where you bait a hook and trail it behind a moving boat, waiting for a fish who is dumb enough to bite … then you hook him and quickly throw some more lines in just in case he has company.
markx says:
July 5, 2013 at 11:07 pm
I’m really doing no more or less than Leif is, so my assumption is equally valid.
Implying that my assumption is valid too. Where does that leave the troll label?
I would have preferred [for the sake of integrity] that Crock did not try – as you say – to ‘skirt around that and give it token acceptance’, but some have a lower bar than I, it seems.
markx says:
July 5, 2013 at 11:07 pm
I’m really doing no more or less than Leif is, so my assumption is equally valid.
To follow up, I fault Crock for not trying to demand IPCC to address head-on the one thing that they think is not controversial [namely CO2 dominating global warming]. As long at that paradigm is allowed to stand, what does it matter that a few bones are thrown to people peddling minor controversial issues? Apparently, you disagree, as is your right, of course. But you overstep your rights when you label me as a troll.
Jimbo says:
July 5, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Holocene climate extremes
Thanks for a great deal of information and great links there Jimbo.
One only has to see that lot to realize how little evidence there is to justify talk of the “unprecedented events” of recent times.
What IPCC should pay more attention to is the water cycle.
1 water vapor is the predominant GHG in the atmosphere
2 its distribution is not uniform, but highly variable
2.1 on multiple spatio-temporal scales, with fractal-like features
2.2 therefore, its average IR optical depth is not determined by its average concentration
3 it has an unlimited supply from a large enough reservoir (oceans)
4 water plays a dual role, beyond being the most important GHG
4.1 short wave albedo is also regulated by the water cycle
4.2 clouds, ice & snow are white in SW, black in IR
5 in reproducible non equilibrium stationary systems the MEP principle holds
5.1 in a reproducible system macrostate A either always evolves to B or never
5.2 in case of radiative coupling the highest entropy production rate is given by a black body
5.3 earth is not black (on the other hand, the sun comes pretty close to a black body)
5.4 therefore the climate system is not reproducible (chaotic on all scales)
6 we do not have any theory of a non-reproducible non-equilibrium quasi-stationary system
6.1 therefore the science is not settled
7 the colder it is, the more variable is the climate
7.1 temperature fluctuations are highest in the polar winter
7.2 climate swings were more pronounced & abrupt during ice ages
7.3 average atmospheric concentration of water is low in cold states
7.4 therefore a more intense water cycle regulates more efficiently
8 fitting complex computational models to a single run of a unique physical instance is not science
8.1 “climate experiment” is an oxymoron
8.2 therefore, GCMs are crap
8.3 one should pursue a general theory of non-reproducible non-equilibrium quasi-stationary systems
8.4 which is experimentally verifiable on some members of that wide class
8.5 as soon as we have such a theory, it is applicable to climate (but not sooner)
9 the climate system seems to be regulated
9.1 therefore a variational principle, more general than MEP, is lurking in the background
9.2 its applicability may require a vast number of coupled internal degrees of freedom
9.3 which the climate system does have
10 this hypothetical variational principle is (as yet) utterly unknown
10.1 why don’t we start doing science, really?
10.2 why do we let the IPCC submerge into the worst kind of pseudoscience?
10.3 are we lame?
Doug Allen says:
July 5, 2013 at 6:21 pm
The so called “greenhouse effect” based on the work John Tyndall in 1859, Svante Arrhenius in 1869(sic), and others before and since and is well regarded theory, meaning it is not controversial. Modeled positive and negative feed backs are controversial. The computer models are hypotheses, and the past 15 years of data appear to be falsifying the high “climate sensitivity” models. Stay tuned.
Have you read the 1896 paper of Arrhenius? I have.
He claims that he based his ideas on Fourier (1824), but if you read that paper, you find that Fourier says the exact opposite of what Arrhenius claims that he said (there is a good translation of F1824 made for the Royal Society in 1837). The are many errors in the 1896 paper, so Arrhenius published a revised paper in 1906, which argues his case from the Aether hypothesis, nearly 2 decades after Michelson-Morley.
His next project was the electrical stimulation of the brains of school children to improve their academic performance. His write up claims great success.
And this is well respected? And what has respect to do with science anyway?
Nullius in verba!
Sorry, but I can’t attach pdf’s.
Relevant to Natural Variability:
CET daily maximum is catching up with the long term average:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-Dmax.htm
currently only -1.1C (May -2.3C) from earlier in the year when it was averaging about -3C on the 20 year (1990-2010) average.
This follows the existing 350 year long behaviour in the CET’s movements:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MidSummer-MidWinter.htm
Ergo: nothing new, all seen before.
.
lsvalgaard says:
July 5, 2013 at 4:17 pm
[In answer to William Astley, July 5, 2013 at 3:38 pm – The current solar change is causing the observed change in planetary climate]
there is no evidence for that, just your supposition. The solar energy output is now the highest it has ever been since the start of reliable [and well-calibrated] measurements in 2003.
Leif, I am genuinely struggling to understand the relevance of this. In another remark you (quite rightly in my view) dismissed changes to “climate” over a 3 years period as being weather, presumably because a 3 year perturbation means nothing in climatic terms. Here however, you seem to be implying that something that has happened in the last 10 years can tell us anything of interest concerning a body which is approximately 4.5 billion years old.
Of course, you include the phrase ‘reliable [and well-calibratged]’ in your response which could imply that there are less reliable records going back for much longer, although I would have thought that even records going back as far as the invention of the telescope mean little in the context of the 4.5 billion year age of the sun.
If I have misunderstood either your response or the science, please accept my aplogies. I would very much appreciate an elucidation on this point.
… or even well-calibrated … 🙂
Interglacial periods end abruptly, not gradually. There is currently no explanation for cyclic abrupt climate change. It is a fact that abrupt climate change correlates with super cycle changes to the sun and geomagnetic excursions. Science is the name for the logical process of identifying and solving scientific puzzles not pushing green party agendas.
The mantra is global warming as global warming is being used to push a green party’s irrational political agenda. Western countries have spent trillions of dollars on engineering and economic failures and there has been no significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the countries where the green project funds has been spent and CO2 emissions on a world basis have increased.
http://www.cato.org/blog/long-awaited-snowfall-increase-antarctica-now-underway
A paper to soon appear in Geophysical Research Letters gives us another enticing look at recent snowfall changes in Antarctica. In “Snowfall driven mass change on the East Antarctic ice sheet,” Carmen Boening and colleagues from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that extreme precipitation (snowfall) events in recent years (beginning in 2009) have led to a dramatic gain in the ice mass in the coastal portions of East Antarctica amounting to about 350 Gt in total (Figure 1)
http://news.yahoo.com/energy-storage-rare-metals-next-ice-age-173700272.html
Next ice age.
The Laureates exchanged a few glances. Michel spoke first. He pointed out that some research has hinted that the next ice age on Earth may occur in the not-so-distant future. “So Berlin may be covered with ice and we won’t even be able to think about this because we’ll be under ice,” he said, with a half-smile. “How long will it last?” Schrock asked his colleague. “About 80 to 90,000 years, maybe,” Michel answered. “Oh, good, problem solved,” said Schrock.
In reply to:
lsvalgaard says:
July 5, 2013 at 7:43 pm
William Astley says:
July 5, 2013 at 5:17 pm
William: Do you deny there has been a sudden and abrupt change to the solar magnetic cycle? The following is a comparison of solar magnetic cycle 21, 22, and 23. There appears to be a reduction in the solar magnetic cycle of a factor of 3.
Leif: Happens all the time [although the factor of 3 is wrong,, should be more like just reduction of 33%], From cycle 19 to 20: almost a factor of 2; from cycle 4 to cycle 5: almost a factor of 3, etc.
William:
The solar super cycle change occurs periodically with a periodicity of 1350 years. It does not happen all the time. There is cooling when Maunder minimums occur. We are heading towards a Maunder minimum. Do Maunder minimums happen all the time? Your comments are irrational.
Solar cycle 21 was the 21st solar cycle since 1755, when recording of solar sunspot activity began.[1][2] The solar cycle lasted 10.3 years, beginning in June 1976 and ending in September 1986. The maximum smoothed sunspot number (monthly number of sunspots averaged over a twelve-month period) observed during the solar cycle was 164.5
Solar cycle 24 smoothed sun spot number 66.9
164.5/66.9 = 2.5
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
ABRUPT CHANGE IN EARTH’S CLIMATE SYSTEM
Abrupt shifts between warm and cold states punctuate the interval between 20 to 75 ka) in the Greenland
isotope record, with shifts of 5–15C occurring in decades or less (Figure 1). These alternations were identified in some of the earliest ice core isotopic studies [e.g., (22)] and were replicated and more precisely dated by subsequent work (23). Further analysis of diverse records has distinguished two types of millennial events (13). Dansgaard/Oeschger (D/O) events are alternations between warm (interstadial) and cold (stadial) states that recur approximately every 1500 years, although this rhythm is variable. Heinrich events are intervals of extreme cold contemporaneous with intervals of ice-rafted detritus in the northern North Atlantic (24–26); these recur irregularly on the order of ca. 10,000 years apart and are typically followed by the warmest D/O interstadials. …. …Both Heinrich and D/O events exhibit clear global impacts. These patterns have been summarized in several studies [e.g., (26, 34)]. Although the pattern of influence appears to differ between these types of anomaly, a clear interpretation of these differences, particularly in terms of distinguishing physical mechanisms, has not been developed. As Hemming (26) notes, different global patterns of impact may simply reflect proxy-specific or site-specific limitations such as sensitivity and response time. In general, however, a cold North Atlantic corresponds with a colder, drier Europe, weaker Asian summer monsoon, saltier northwestern tropical Pacific, drier northern South America, colder/wetter western North America, cooler eastern subtropical Pacific, and warmer South Atlantic and Antarctic. Table 1 summarizes the main impacts of a cold North Atlantic (stadial) on key regions and systems.
Mr Green Genes says:
July 6, 2013 at 1:36 am
Here however, you seem to be implying that something that has happened in the last 10 years can tell us anything of interest concerning a body which is approximately 4.5 billion years old.
Observations of the sun today tells us a lot about the Sun regardless of how old it is: its mass, its size, its temperature, composition, rotation, etc, etc.
although I would have thought that even records going back as far as the invention of the telescope mean little in the context of the 4.5 billion year age of the sun.
Cosmic ray activity as recorded in ice caps and tree rings tells of what the Sun have been doing the past ~10,000 years. And those are very relevant for finding out what is happening today. Some records from 4.5 billion years ago would probably not be very useful now.
William Astley says:
July 6, 2013 at 1:56 am
William: Do you deny there has been a sudden and abrupt change to the solar magnetic cycle? The following is a comparison of solar magnetic cycle 21, 22, and 23. There appears to be a reduction in the solar magnetic cycle of a factor of 3.
Leif: Happens all the time [although the factor of 3 is wrong,, should be more like just reduction of 33%], From cycle 19 to 20: almost a factor of 2; from cycle 4 to cycle 5: almost a factor of 3, etc.
You were talking about cycle 23 as being the last one.
The solar super cycle change occurs periodically with a periodicity of 1350 years.
No it doesn’t, as I have shown you many times.
Solar cycle 24 smoothed sun spot number 66.9
164.5/66.9 = 2.5
You were talking about cycle 23 above.
It would help the discussion if you did not pollute the blog by regurgitating the same old papers every time. By now, we all know your collection of cherry-picked supporting ‘evidence’
lsvalgaard says:
July 6, 2013 at 2:21 am
Thanks for your answers. May I press you a little further on your first point concerning current observations telling us a lot about the sun?
I understand the point in your reply to me concerning mass, size, temperature etc. The specific point in the original post was, if I understood it correctly, about solar energy output. Are you saying that it’s possible to deduce historic solar energy output (or if not the actual level, trends in the level) from current observations?
Thank you for your patience: as a humble former railway engineer, I know a fair amount about running railways; about solar physics, not so much (if anything). I am here to learn.
Mr Green Genes says:
July 6, 2013 at 2:34 am
I understand the point in your reply to me concerning mass, size, temperature etc. The specific point in the original post was, if I understood it correctly, about solar energy output. Are you saying that it’s possible to deduce historic solar energy output (or if not the actual level, trends in the level) from current observations?
It is indeed possible, naturally with increasing error bars as we go back in time. The process works like this: modern measurements show that the energy output is very constant. We understand enough about the Sun that we can calculate the energy input billions of years ago and follow how it has changed over the eons [it has increased about 30%]. On top of that very slowly varying base output the magnetic field at the surface generates tiny changes in the energy input of the order of a small fraction of a percent. From the radioactive nuclides generated by cosmic rays when hitting the atmosphere [and stored in ice cores and tree rings] we can deduce the magnetic field of the Sun going back ~10,000 years. From the sunspots we can also get the magnetic field going back 400 years. And finally, the solar magnetic field causes ‘wiggles’ in the Earth’s magnetic field from which we can deduce the solar field going back about 180 years back. The various reconstructions [at least the most recent incarnations] agree rather well giving us some level of confidence that they are largely correct. Just today a recent paper by me was published that describe some of this http://www.leif.org/research/swsc130003p.pdf there you can learn more.
HenryP says:
July 5, 2013 at 11:40 am
Know that the CO2 is causing cooling from the top (12 hours per day) as proven to from numerous papers, and warming from the bottom (24/7).
____________________
Additional warming at the bottom and/or cooling at the top (by CO2 IR radiation) accelerates the speed of convection. Assuming that the average altitude of H2O molecules in the atmosphere remains unchanged, faster convection requires through conservation of mass that H2O is removed from the atmosphere. This would provide a physical mechanism for increased CO2 driving H2O out of the atmosphere as following from Miskolczi’s findings and as observed. The average altitude of H2O molecules will largely be determined by condensation altitude/temperature of water vapor. The question is how does the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere change by increased CO2 and with that, how does the condensation altitude change.
Comment incomplete. Evaporation from surface is also assumed to remain constant as in Miskolczi’s theory.
lsvalgaard says:
July 6, 2013 at 2:50 am
Thank you very much for that paper. I’m somewhat amazed that I understood its general thrust. I put that down mainly to the clarity with which it was written, rather than some hitherto undiscovered intelligence on my part!