Commonsense Climate Science and Forecasting after AR5

Politicians were willing to forgo the trouble of thinking for themselves and  forming their own commonsense views on climate so long as their paid scientists gave them scary forecasts to use to regulate economic activity [via carbon taxes EPA mandates, etc].  This symbiotic relationship enabled politicians to reward themselves, their political  friends and corporate sponsors while at the same time feeling righteous about “saving the world”.

Thus, with the enthusiastic assistance of the anti-capitalist movement and a supine or agenda driven  MSM, the CAGW delusion took over much of the Western world as a quasi religion which will not easily fade away even though, as the AR5 science section shows, it has no connection to reality.

b) What’s wrong with the science?

The CAGW meme is built on the outputs of climate models. Many of the modelers and IPCC  and Met Office scientific  chiefs had a background in weather forecasting In spite of  the inability of the weather models to forecast more than about 10 days ahead, in an act of almost unbelievable hubris and stupidity, the modelers allowed  themselves to believe, or at least proclaim,  that they knew enough about the physical processes and climate driving factors  involved to forecast global temperatures for decades and centuries ahead.Indeed, many establishment  scientists appear to think that humanity  can dial up a desired global temperature by keeping CO2 within some appropriate limit. What arrant nonsense!

In practice the modelers have known for some time that their models have no skill in forecasting and have indeed said so in the WG1 reports. The IPCC AR4 WG1  science section actually acknowledges this fact. Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections. It concludes:

“Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”

What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- i.e. we don’t know what future temperatures will be and we can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what erroneous  assumptions (e.g. that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the “plausible” models to be tested anyway. This means that the successive SPM  uncertainty estimates take no account of the structural uncertainties  in  the models and that almost the entire the range of model outputs may well lay outside the range of the real world future climate variability. By the time of the AR5 report this is obviously the case. Here are two examples

Fig1, (IPCC Fig 1.4 2nd Draft)

Fig 2

The key factor in making CO2 emission  control policy is the climate sensitivity to CO2 . By AR5  – WG1 the IPCC is saying: (Section 9.7.3.3)

“The assessed literature suggests that the range of climate sensitivities and transient responses covered by CMIP3/5 cannot be narrowed significantly by constraining the models with observations of the mean climate and variability, consistent with the difficulty of constraining the cloud feedbacks from observations “

In plain English this means that they have no idea what the climate sensitivity is and that therefore that the politicians have no empirical scientific basis for their economically destructive  climate and energy policies.

In summary the projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them are based on specifically structurally flawed and inherently useless models. They deserve no place in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a basis for public policy their forecasts are grossly in error  and therefore worse than useless.

2.  A Simple Rational Approach to Climate Forecasting based on Common Sense and Quasi Repetitive-  Quasi Cyclic Patterns.How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate? A new forecasting paradigm is required .

It is important to note that it in order to make transparent and likely skillful forecasts it  is not necessary to understand or quantify  the interactions of the large number of interacting and quasi independent physical processes and variables which produce the state of the climate system as a whole as represented by the temperature metric.

 When, about ten years ago ,I began to look into the CAGW – CO2 based scare, some simple observations immediately presented themselves.

a) Night is colder than day.

b) Winter is colder than summer.

c) It is cooler in the shade and  under clouds than in the sun

d) Temperatures vary more widely in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days – humidity (enthalpy) might be an important factor. We use Sun Screen against UV rays – can this be a clue?

e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovitch cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages.

f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some modest knowledge of history brought to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.

g) I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.

I concluded ,as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence given these simple observations that solar activity and our orbital relations to the sun were  the main climate drivers. More specific temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine, the amount of cloud cover, the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday and at Midsummer . It seemed that the present day was likely not much or very little outside the range of climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to postulated anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.These conclusions based on about 15 minutes of anyone’s considered thought are, at once , much nearer the truth and certainly would be much more useful as a Guide to Policymakers than the output of the millions of man hours of time and effort that have been spent on IPCC – Met Office models and the Global Warming impact studies  and the emission control policies based on them. However it is necessary ,of course, to go beyond this level of understanding.

Over the last 25 years an immense amount of valuable instrumental and proxy temperature and possible climate driver data has been acquired and it turns out that climate forecasting on the basis of recognizing quasi cyclic – quasi-repetitive patterns in that data is fairly simple and straight forward.  Interested parties should take the time necessary to become familiar with the general trends in both the instrumental and proxy time series of temperature, forcings and feedbacks.

Central  to any forecast of future cooling is some knowledge of the most important reconstructions of past temperatures after all the infamous hockey stick was instrumental in selling the CAGW meme.

Here are links to some of the most relevant papers-starting with the hockey stick.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MannBradleyHughes1998.pdf

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann_99.html

note Espers comments on the above at

http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Esper_et_al_Science02.pdf

and see how Mann’s hockey stick has changed in later publications

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.full

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf

an important paper by Berggren et al relating solar activity to climate is

http://www.eawag.ch/forschung/surf/publikationen/2009/2009_berggren.pdf

and another showing clearly the correlation of the various climate minima over the last 1000 years to cosmic ray intensities -( note especially Fig 8 C ,D below  ) is: Steinhilber et al – 9400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf

for Holocene climate variability in general there is much valuable data  in Mayewski et al :

http://yly-mac.gps.caltech.edu/AGU/AGU_2008/Zz_Others/Li_agu08/Mayewski2004.pdf

Of particular interest with regard to the cause of the late 20th century temperature increase is Wang et al:

http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/9581/2012/acp-12-9581-2012.pdf

A review of candidate proxy data reconstructions and the historical record of climate during the last 2000 years suggests that at this time the most useful  reconstruction for identifying temperature trends in the latest  important millennial cycle is that of Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 (Fig 5)

http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf

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The recurring millennial cycle is also seen in the ice core data.