By Tom Quirk
The IPCC use of computer models to predict temperatures, rain fall, sea level rises and other weather related events either global or regional has comprehensively failed to predict most of the observations made in the last twenty years and ignores any analysis that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate. Ad hoc effects are put forward in order to explain why the model predictions parted company from the observations. This is most obvious in looking at the components of radiative (temperature) forcing (Figure SPM.5) where such effects as aerosols appear as contributions with 100% uncertainty. This is not a statistically derived uncertainty but rather an “expert” opinion on an effect that is needed to “balance the books”. Yet all the uncertainties are combined as if they are all well behaved statistical errors.
The report is best summed up by the classic Polish saying from Soviet times – The future is certain only the past is unpredictable.
There are a series of points that one can take immediate objection to:
- The temperature plateau from 2000 to the present year is dismissed as of no consequence. The report has borrowed the reply of Chou En Lai who, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, replied that “It was too early to tell”. Yet in 1988 James Hansen appearing before a Congressional committee said he was 99% certain that the temperature rise from 1977 was not a natural variation.
- The oceans that have been ignored up to now have suddenly become centre stage as the lodging place for the heat that should have raised the global temperature. The extra infra-red radiation from the increasing atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the top 2 millimetres of the ocean. This is then mixed by wave motion through the top 100 to 200 metres of the oceans. But the sea surface temperature is in equilibrium with the air surface temperatures so how has the heat energy achieved this avoidance. Of course the deep ocean from 1,000 to 4,000 metres is at 40C or less and any overturning of the deep ocean would cause no end of trouble. This looks like another ad hoc explanation.
- Sea level rises are forecast to be as much as 1 metre by 2100 yet the measurements show quite different annual rises in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Indeed a good pair of gumboots should get our grandchildren through 2100 with the present measured annual increases.
- Methane is referred to as reaching unprecedented levels in the atmosphere with no suggestion that its annual increases have fallen by a factor of eight since 1995[2]. Three of the scenarios (now called trajectories) have reasonable methane concentrations out to the year 2100 but the fourth (RCP 8.5) is an echo of the early extreme scenario A1FI and a little more borrowed from another earlier scenario of the IPCC 2007 report. The main justification for the more than doubling of the present methane level of 1750 ppb to 3750 ppb in 2100 may be to keep the highest temperature and sea level rise predictions in play. This last scenario is of course used by the CSIRO to predict the end of Sydney and Brisbane airports.
- There is a reference (Figure SPM.4 (a)) to the long running time series measurements of atmospheric CO2 at the South Pole (black line) and Mauna Loa (red line). What has not been pointed out is that in 1958 to 1960, there is no difference in these measurements between the two stations but it remains unexplained. Also there is a modest bump in 1990 that had the Point Barrow measurements at latitude 710N been included would have shown a modest 2 year plateau in CO2 concentration. This, when properly analysed, shows that about 2.5 GtC of CO2 entered and left the Northern Hemisphere atmosphere in the space of 4 years when fossil fuel CO2 emissions were 6 GtC in 1990 with 90% occurring in the Northern Hemisphere.. Yet we are taught that fossil fuel emissions are absorbed with great difficulty by the land and oceans.. This is at the time of the Mount Pinatubo eruption but the CO2 output has been estimated at only 0.015GtC so volcanic activity is not the cause.
Left: IPCC SPM.4 (a) and Right: CO2 measurements at Point Barrow
- The temperature plateau from 2000 to the present has been variously explained by heat disappearing into the oceans, volcanic activity and a lessening of solar radiation (dismissed in this IPCC report). The failure to acknowledge the impact of the oceans that cover 70% of the surface of the earth not only on the temperature behaviour but also CO2 is extraordinary[3]. But the explanation may be that we do not understand what triggers the phase changes in the oceans where up-welling cold water displaces warmer water and of course the reverse. So it is not possible to model such events and this would be an admission of complete failure of the computer models.
- Regional models should not be regarded as having any useful predictive power if the global models have been unsuccessful. There is a problem with regional modelling over land as the assumption that the mean temperature is the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures can increase temperatures by up to 0.50C. This distorts the heat load over the land and thus would cause a systematic error in computer modelling results.
This report from the IPCC should be its last. Not only has the climate science research community extracted billions of dollars from politicians but tens if not hundreds of billions have been invested in schemes to reduce CO2 emissions with little to show by way of reductions.
The last word should be left to Jonathon Swift who brilliantly satirized the Royal Society in Gulliver’s Travels[4]. Gulliver is taken to the country of Balnibarbi whose enlightened rulers have adopted new methods of agriculture and building but the country appears to be in ruins as “the only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection”.
[1] Catch phrase from Little Britain BBC TV series
[2] http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1339463096_document_twentieth_century_sources_of_methane_in_the_atmosphere.pdf
[3] See http://www.ipa.org.au/library/publication/1339463007_document_break_paper_apjas_ipa.pdf
[4] http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9213
Dirk H @8.15am
The mechanism of CO2 induced downwelling LW radiation inhibiting ocean heat loss by altering the temperature gradient in the thin film layer has actually been heavily promoted by alarmists.
I unfortunately don’t have the skills to provide you with a link, but if you search on SKS for ‘HOW INCREASED CARBON DIOXIDE HEATS THE OCEAN’ by Bob Painting on 18th Oct 2011, you will see what I mean.
It is this mechanism that the alarmists imply is preventing the oceans losing 4 atomic bombs worth of heat to atmosphere every second and this is why air temperatures are not rising!
It needs rebutting by calculation if someone could step up to the plate.
False.
Ah, but many. many times in the past 16 years the CAGW dogmatists claimed that “the real science” in the main body of the reports IS very conservative in its claims and in ITS predictions and cautions about the science! See, now that the Summary For Policymakers is shown in realtime to be the driver for the IPCC’s decisions and statements – which, of course, it always was – you are claiming the reverse?
The politicians – in those openly governments and those more cleverly inside the “non-government” NGO’s and the bureaucracies and in the universities and labs and computer centers and the professional enviro’s and their press “corpse” of news releases and “pre-paper” exaggerations – ARE using both sides of the paper as they see fit.
We would get more use, less waste if both sides were toilet paper.
Atmospheric levels of CO2 used by the IPCC are determined by the instruments set up initially at Mauna Loa and Antarctica. These instruments were designed and patented by Charles Keeling. It was known some time ago that there were problems with approximately the first 13 years of the data as presented.
The Antarctic readings were stopped early because of lack of funding.
Keeling’s early work (1960) convinced him that human burning of fossil fuels was and would continue to cause an increase in atmospheric levels. I believe it introduced a bias into his work. It paralleled the IPCC bias of proving rather than disproving their hypothesis that human CO2 was causing warming.
The bizarre thing about all the readings, but especially those at Mauna Loa is that they were created to eliminate local effects from volcanic vents by taking readings above the thermal inversion layer. These are then further altered by normalization to eliminate influence from local contamination.
Anyone who has studied local weather conditions know that those inversion layers have significant effect on all weather variables. It is the same problem involved in ocean temperatures and the significant layering in the upper ocean levels. So the readings do not represent the real conditions at all. They are a deliberately created artificial construct no different than the manipulation of raw temperature data that people like Jones refused to disclose and then later lost.
Apart from the fact that CO2 and other gases leak from the ground for hundreds of kilometers round a volcano, as studies at Mt Etna showed, you are producing a measure that does not represent what the shortwave solar radiation and Earth IR has to pass through. Are they claiming that the “greenhouse effect” of CO2 doesn’t occur in the layer of air next to the ground?
Geiger identified this “boundary layer” of air in which most of the mechanisms of weather occur. Ignoring it creates the same nonsense that claims temperatures in a Stevenson Screen represent the surface temperature. They don’t. They represent the temperature between 1.25 and 2m above the surface. Even that range, approved by the WMO, results in very different temperatures. The temperature difference between even the lower level and the surface has been well documented at micro stations and is a vastly different climate regime. For example, one station in the US midwest showed a difference in frost free season of 90 days at the two levels – that is sufficient to grow some crops.
The Province of Saskatchewan, Canada learned about this difference when they tried to implement frost insurance. Each farmer was required to choose the weather station that would be the station of record in the even of a frost. The very first year they had one of the earliest frost on record. Approximately half the farmers who had “black” frost didn’t get paid because the station had a reading of 0.5°C. Another large group got paid, even though they had no frost damage because their station showed -0.5°C. I got involved when an ombudsman was appointed by the government to resolve the conflict. He couldn’t believe how meaningless the actual weather data was, especially as it related to crops most of which grow below the level of the Stevenson Screen.
All the data used by the IPCC was either produced or carefully selected and ‘adjusted’ to achieve a result. The CO2 data is no different. For example, we are told about the annual levels of human CO2 production in gigatons. The difficulty is the IPCC are the source of these numbers. In a segment titled, “Source of National Inventories” in the 2001 Report they write, “Utilizing IPCC procedures, nominated experts from around the world draft the reports that are then extensively reviewed twice before approval by the IPCC.”
http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/faq/faq.html
It is no surprise the IPCC model results don’t create accurate projections. Mother Nature couldn’t be corrupted, but I suspect they are working on her.
Karl Drobnic says: “Watching the birds in your backyard is a good way to get a perspective on climate change. Compare your records from thirty or forty years ago with the birds showing up the last few years and you will see big changes.”
I would have thought a detailed knowledge of the biology of birds would be essential before invoking ‘climate change’. Required answers which immediately spring to mind include variations in migratory patterns, changes in habitats, introduction of predators, avian infections and diseases – no doubt an ornithologist can come up with plenty of possible influencing factors.
Let’s once and for all stop attributing every natural phenomenon to ‘climate change’!
“Of what kind? I can tell you this from Germany, 30 years ago (1983) we had no snow in most winters. Now for the last 4 years we had very harsh snow-rich winters.
So, by extrapolating, can I expect a glaciation in 2050?”
Check your migratory birds. Are they showing up earlier or later (if the same ones are showing up at all), Are they staying longer or shorter? Greater numbers or lesser? You can also check the north-south migration of local plant life. If glaciation is encroaching on your backyard, you should see microbial changes. Expect tropical microbes to get pushed south and an overall healthier climate to emerge. Fungal changes should also provide you with some clues. There are all sorts of things you can observe right in your own backyard that will help you enjoy life more, and be a fact-based, informed local citizen.
Haruspex is the reading of entrails which is what the climatologist do to the GCM’s. They are modern day Haruspices.
The IPPC manuel for working the computer, Of the computer says no take a notter computer.
The existence of the temperature plateau overrides any other observations they bring up. They are wrong of course on sea level and various other things but the temperature plateau is the overriding observation. It turns out that it is not the only one or even the longest lasting plateau in recent times. Satellites clearly show another temperature standstill in the eighties and nineties lasting for 18 years. But if you try to find it in ground-based data like GISTEMP you cannot see it because they show a warming in its place. I researched this temperature region for my book “What Warming?” and decided that this was a fake warming. I said so when the book came out in 2010 but nothing happened for two years. Then, unexpectedly, GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC, all in unison, decided to stop showing it last fall and aligned their data with satellites. It was done secretly and no explanation was offered. I regard this trans-Atlantic cooperation as proof that they knew the warming was fake. If we now add this “liberated” no-warming stretch to the current pause in warming we get a total of 31 green-house-free years out of the last 34. The difference is taken up by super El Nino of 1998 and its associated step warming. It was that step warming and not the fake warming in the eigthies and nineties that raised all twenty-first century temperatures above those of the preceding twentieth century values with the exception of the super El Nino itself. Hansen crowed about it being caused by the greenhouse effect but it was the step warming, not the greenhouse effect that caused it. Satellite record of the eighties and nineties shows a series of ENSO oscillations, El Ninos alternating with La Ninas yet always returning to the global mean that stayed the same for 18 years. Hansen’s 1988 presentation to the Senate falls right smack in the middle of this period. He showed a poor quality temperature curve to the Senate and claimed that it represented global warming. I checked it out and what he showed is nothing more exotic than the temperature peak of the 1988 El Nino. More accurate data shows five El Ninos in a row there and his is the one in the middle. Six months later a La Nina moved in and dropped his “Global warming peak temperature” he spoke of to the Senate down by 0.4 degrees Celsius. Next we need to get the physics straight. According to the greenhouse theory of IPCC the earth emits OLR (outgoing long-wave radiation) in the infrared band that must go into outer space to balance the energy we receive from the sun. And on the way out it must pass through the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which absorbs some of the OLR passing by. This absorbed radiation then turns into heat, warms the atmosphere, and we have greenhouse warming. A very fine theory, going back to Arrhenius, except that it does not work. What is actually happening is that OLR goes straight through that cloud of CO2 waiting to catch it and disappears into the cosmos without any of it being absorbed. This violates the predictions of the greenhouse theory which is thereby proven false. But this conclusion is the one that IPCC wants to suppress under all circumstances. That is because if you admit lack of IR absorption by CO2 now it means that there never has been any and stories of warming that depend on it are all false. This explains why they concoct weird explanations (like those in box 9.1 of AR5) and publish really odd papers in learned journals. Some of these suggest that the missing heat has disappeared into the ocean bottom, or that the Pacific Ocean cooled and caused the hiatus etc. They fail to explain the mechanism that could accomplish these feats. All this stuff is meant to prevent us from recognizing the truth, namely that carbon dioxide does not absorb outgoing OLR. This is exactly what Ferenc Miskolczi predicted [1] in 2007 but his work was suppressed. Not one climate science article even admitted knowledge of his existence. But by 2010 Miskolczi had experimental proof and published it [2]. Using NOAA weather balloon database that goes back to 1948 he studied the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time. And discovered that absorption had been constant for 61 years while carbom dioxide at the same time went up by 21.6 percent. It follows that the addition of this substantial amount of CO2 to air had no effect whatsoever on the absorption of carbon dioxide by the atmosphere. And no absorption means no greenhouse effect, case closed. This finding is an exact parallel to the failure of the atmosphere to absorb IR today. It is worth our while to enumerate the major consequences of this. First and foremost, the absence of the greenhouse effect cuts the feet right out fro under the claim that anthropogenic greenhouse effect even exists. All doomsday warming predictions based on the use of the greenhouse effect are simply invalid. And any emission control laws and regulations passed with the help of such predictions were passed under false premises and should be voided. Furthermore, IPCC was set up to monitor human influence on the climate. Since there is none, they have nothing more to do and should be dissolved.
References:
[1] Ferenc M. Miskolczi, “Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres” Quarterly Journal of Hungarian Meteorological Service 111(1):1-40 (January-March 2007)
[2] Ferenc M. Miskolczi, “The stable stationary value of the Earth’s global average atmospheric greenhouse-gas optical thickness” E&E 21(4):243-262 (2010)
“The extra infra-red radiation from the increasing atmospheric CO2 is absorbed in the top 2 millimetres of the ocean. “
tumetuestumefaisdubien1 says: “It is impossible for mid-IR spectrum to significantly penetrate so deep into the water. The value is overestimated at least 1 order of magnitude.”
And 2 mm isn’t very far, leaving any putative absorbed heat subject to immediate loss via evaporation. Plus the air directly above the ocean is always saturated with water vapor (a powerful greenhouse gas), intercepting much of the incoming IR before it even reaches the surface.
jorgekafkazar says:
October 7, 2013 at 8:41 pm
Does this mean that the putative CO2-warmed air can’t heat up the deep ocean (where “deep” means more profound than 0.2mm to 2.0mm), so Trenberth needs to find a new hiding place for the “missing heat”? Or does the magic gas somehow miraculously transport the heat to 700m deep, skipping the intervening layers beneath the surface but above the abyssal depths?
Could Josh draw Heat Trekker Kev as Scotty, beaming the missing heat down to the depths?
Would it not follow, as a dog the scent of a herring, that the IPCC should be 95% certain humans are responsible for The Pause?
The IPCC reminds of a Mafia Don being audited by the IRS:
IRS Agent: Ummm. Excuse, me, Don Pachauri, but what’s this debit entry called, “natural variability”?
Don Pachauri: Oh, dat… Ya know. it’s like dat miscellaneous thingy. Da money comes in, da money goes out, ya know, it’s variable… All natural, like.
IRS Agent: I’m sorry, Don, but that’s highly irregular and not in accordance to GAAP rules and regulations.
Don Pachauri: What chu talkin’ ’bout this GAAP crap. My cousin Vinny did these books and he says they’re legit. That’s good enough for me.
IRS Agent: Well, Don, with all due respect, we going to have to freeze all your accounts and issue a cease and desist order of your operations.
Don Pachauri: What chu talkin’ ’bout? I done nutin’ wrong. We gots our debits, we gots our credits money comin’ in and goin’ out, I’m tellin’ ya it’s all legit….
See? Now, they could have really swamped all the skeptical blogs and scientists under deep mierde if they had only done this. It was there for the taking. All they had to do was to come up with models that matched reality – even if only nominally.
But it ended up that they had to make a choice: Either match reality or send a message. They couldn’t have both, it’s turned out, and they chose sending the message. KNOWING a full 10 years ago and more that the models were diverging, they chose to stick it out and stay on message. As CO2 climbed and their projected warming stopped cold, they did nothing to show that they understood that reality actually mattered in science. They didn’t adjust the models (not that noticeably made any difference, anyway).
So, here we are, 15 or 17 or 19 or 20 years down the line, and the message they sent has been shown to be wrong – and still they stick to their models – their disconnected-from-reality models.
Nothing since “Hide the Decline” has hurt their cause more than the hiatus.
Thanks, guys!
It’s like Slim Pickens riding the nuke down to Moscow in Dr. Strangelove. Wahooooo!
It wasn’t to Moscow. It was to a remote element in the linked network that was set to trigger the Doomsday Bomb if attacked.