IPCC silently slashes its global warming predictions in the AR5 final draft

The last graphic says it all. What if we get a decade of more cooling (without volcanic forcing), what then? How will the graphic look like? 🙂 Only then will they admit that the science is really not settled? Or maybe not.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/clip_image022.jpg

2 Jan: ABC: Helicopter rescues passengers onboard stranded Antarctic ship Akademik Shokalskiy
All of the scientists and tourists who have been stranded on a research ship in Antarctica since Christmas Eve have been rescued…
A total of 52 people were flown to the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis in an operation that took more than four hours…
Sydney-based expedition spokesman, Alvin Stone, says the group is relieved.
“Aside from the packing madness, I think there’s quite a bit of joy through the ship at the fact that it’s finally coming,” he said.
“I think it was at that point where people were getting frustrated with what was going on.
“Now at last feel they can move on and the expedition can continue what it was supposed to do, or actually just get home to be perfectly honest.”…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-02/rescue-helicopter-arrives-at-stranded-antarctic-ship/5182632
wondering if everyone realises the “4 degree”/Cloud story was announced to the world by the same AAE (Australasian Antarctic Expedition) spokesman:
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 31-Dec-2013
Contact: Alvin Stone
University of New South Wales
Cloud mystery solved: Global temperatures to rise at least 4°C by 2100
“Our research has shown climate models indicating a low temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide from preindustrial times are not reproducing the correct processes that lead to cloud formation,” said lead author from the University of New South Wales’ Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science Prof Steven Sherwood…
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-12/uons-ncs121913.php

Boris Gimbarzevsky says:
January 2, 2014 at 5:21 am
I wouldn’t put it past the IPCC to suddenly announce that it had been wrong all along and that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations causes global cooling. …
While such a reversal of the IPCC’s position might seem far fetched, it is more plausible than Trenbeth’s “missing heat” and it appears that no theory is too implausible for this group of kleptocrats if it furthers the watermelon agenda of a deindustrialized world.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Given what William McClenney says @ur momisugly January 1, 2014 at 11:51 pm and in his threads here at WUWT, information that is obviously known to the politicians as shown in this CIA Report – link, one wonders WHY a movement to “deindustrialized” the first world, was promoted at the same time by John Holdren, Anne Ehrlich, and Paul Ehrlich in the book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. link
The problem is although the 1970’s “Cooling Scare’ died the Anti-Growth Malthusianism typified by that book did not. The perspective is still very much alive and well in Obama’s Science Czar, John Holdren, who now wants to use “free-markets” (WTO??) to achieve his original goal. Heck he even has a really weird definition of ‘Human’ and I doubt many here at WUWT meet it.

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being” ~ “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. link

So a baby or even a toddler with bad ‘Socializing’ is not human and therefore killing it is not murder. (Ain’t Spin-Doctors great)
This can also be seen in this statement by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a bioethicist and architect of President Obama’s health care law.

…”This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity – those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberation – are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. link

So only those people who are ‘useful’ are ‘Human’ and the elderly are no longer ‘useful’ This attitude towards the general public can also be seen in the Liverpool Care Pathway scandal in the UK. link and link and link
Where am I going with this?
These bits and pieces that indicate that world leaders view us as less than ‘human’ and may therefore have plans for wiping out large numbers of people if the feel it necessary.
A return to very cold weather would make that necessary and despite the public face I very much doubt they ever forgot Shackelton and the Milankovitch theory from the 1960s and 70s. The 88 year Geissberg cycle would have told them a warming trend was due. This is substantiated by Maurice Strong’s flogging the Global Warming Horse back at the 1972 Earth Summit BEFORE warming actually became obvious. This was especially ironic because in the same year:

…the improving knowledge of glacial history, and especially the apparent brevity of warm interglacials, prompted anxiety about a full-blown ice age. George Kukla, together with Robert Matthews of Brown University, convened a conference in 1972 entitled “The Present Interglacial: How and When will it End?”, and reported it in Science magazine.
Kukla and Matthews alerted President Richard Nixon, and as a result the US Administration set up a Panel on the Present Interglacial involving the State Department and other agencies. None of us knew then that the mid-century cooling was about to be punctuated by a warming spell from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s…
link

Am I distrustful and cynical when it comes to the motives of politicians? You Betcha!

Previous post should have said 2020-2029, not 2011-2030.

If Dr. Brown (Duke Univ.) is correct and the climate is chaotic with two strange attractors, Warm and Cold, then the Holocene is sitting on the edge of the transition between them and it may not even matter if we do not go into glaciation. The wild ride as the climate becomes unstable will be bad enough.
That is the big question of course. What is the threshold conditions needed to push us into the next glaciation or climate instability? Catastrophic Global Warming is completely off the table for the next 4,000 years even in the best case scenario, “..Insolation will remain at this level slightly above the inception for the next 4,000 years before it then increases again.” except as spikes caused by the chaotic climate’s instability.
At least two attractors — two are readily apparent in the Pliestocene, with the warm phase attractor nearly stable at pre-Pliestocene levels and the cold-phase glacial attractor steadily decreasing in mean temperature. The other pronounced feature of the data is a steady shift of the length of the glacial periods from 22 ky to 26 ky to 100 ky over the last 600 ky or thereabouts. As was already noted above, we are in one of the two longest interglacials evident in at least the recent record at a point that could reasonably be expected to be the end of it — or not. The LIA was, or should have been, rather terrifying as global temperatures reached the lowest levels they have been across the entire Holocene post Younger Dryas, level that could easily have been critically unstable to the cold phase transition.
Near critical points in open bistable/multistable dynamical systems, fluctuations often grow. The system has two (or more) states that are both consistent with the given energy flow, and random factors constantly nucleate small domains with the structure appropriate to the opposite phase. Far from criticality, those fluctuations are quickly damped. Near criticality, the feedbacks start to favor their growth rather than their decay and the behavior of the system becomes much broader, with larger oscillatory trajectories around an increasingly unstable attractor. This is what “tipping point” arguments are all about — sometimes there are gross feedbacks (such as ice albedo and latent heat) that one can imagine having a point of no return — if enough ice melts, if glaciers and permafrost retreat enough during the summer, then the lowered albedo ensures that it won’t get cold enough to refreeze into glaciers/permafrost anew come winter (at least on the boundaries) and glaciers shrink irreversibly. Or the other way — we have a very cold winter with excessive snow and ice, and all of that snow both takes time to melt and reflects away a lot of spring heat, prolonging the winter and lowering the net heat uptake for the year. The next winter is even colder, snowier, and longer, and spring/summer cooling even less effective, and we tip towards glaciation.
The problem with such arguments is that they are vastly oversimplified — they attempt to predict the behavior of a complex system on the basis of an heuristic applied to one or two projective dimensions. They fail to explain why any given year is unusually cold and snowy (or not) in the first place, and besides, the system is manifestly approximately stable almost all of the time because we do not tip over into glaciation any time there is a particularly cold winter, or tip over into melted ice caps and eternal springtime any time we have years, or even decades, of excessive warmth. The shortest relevant timescales of secular variation appear to be decades, and the relevant timescale for true movement of the climate appears to be at least a century.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Until we have models that can quantitatively — not qualitatively in some reduced dimensionality, but quantitatively — explain the full Pliestocene, and (further refined) quantitatively explain the climate variation over the Holocene, we will not have a clear idea of the baseline for climate variation — what the climate would be in the absence of anthropogenic CO_2. This is a serious question. If the barbarians had overrun Europe at the end of the 17th century (also the end of the coldest stretch of the LIA), so that the Enlightenment never occurred, so that human generated CO_2 never became an issue, what would the global climate be like right now? Is it conceivable that it would have rebounded almost identically to what we have observed even without human “forcing”? Bear in mind that even the models that predict CO_2-based warming indicate that this warming is essentially negligible up until perhaps the 1950’s when the post-WWII industrial boom caused the current relatively rapid rise. The warming from 1950 to 2000 is almost identical to the warming observed from 1900 to 1950 (so much so that one has to be pretty knowledgeable in order to be able to even identify which is which without a legend or caption to help if they are presented on the same scale side by side).
In the meantime, something caused the Little Ice Age. It was a real, global phenomenon. It was not aerosols, not carbon dioxide or its lack. It was in some ways a continuation of the general cooling that has been slowly occurring since the Holocene Optimum, but it suggests that that cooling may have proceeded to the point where cold-phase fluctuations are not so strongly suppressed — that one certainly grew, and it has taken centuries for it to shrink back to near “normal” for this point in the Holocene (which is still somewhat cooler than it has been for most of the last 11,000 years). These are not small effects — what is being moved is the climate of the entire planet, over a few decades, from mostly warm to substantially colder, all occurring entirely naturally.
The current cooling-to-neutral phase is being accomplished without the help of volcanic aerosols and in the teeth of increasing CO_2. What might we expect if we have a series of 2-3 Pinatubo-scale volcanic events in a decade, or even if one, large, particularly emissive volcano re-awakens and begins a decade-long eruption? We don’t really have much evidence for a still warmer-phase tipping point in the climate record with the current configuration of oceans and continents — the last time the climate was substantially warmer than the Holocene even back before the beginning of the Pliestocene was when the continents and oceans had an entire different topology and connectivity, in particular a channel between North and South America. It is hypothesized on the basis of a perceived stability to a warm phase planet with Antarctica and Greenland fully melted, so that negative albedo feedback is maximally achieved.
But is that truly stable? In the historical past, it hasn’t been. Even when Antarctica was indeed fully melted in the summers and supported a rich array of life, it wasn’t horribly stable and eventually it froze never to thaw again. We do not, really, have a clear idea of what the stable attractors are even out there in this extreme regime, and we have no idea what the barriers are between the current climate state and any domain where those attractors become dominant. Many egregious statements are made that are based on e.g. the melting of the Greenland icepack, kilometers thick, in only a few decades, or the melting of the land based Antarctic glaciers at a time when Antarctic ice appears to be growing.
I truly do think that climate science is a worthy endeavor for the human race. We have benefited tremendously from our ability to predict the weather in the short run and the climate (within reason) on a slightly longer run. However, predicting the climate on a century scale without the complication of CO_2 is currently beyond us. We cannot even explain the climate of the last few centuries (without CO_2) and have no particularly good reason to think that we could accurately predict what the climate would have been without anthropogenic CO_2. The historical record is rife with century-scale degree-scale changes in global temperature. If one computes the root-mean slope of global temperature in most of the proxies — essentially the average slope positive OR negative of the temperature — I suspect that it would be order of 0.5-1.0 C — decades where the average temperature changes by at least 0.05 C almost certainly outnumber decades where it does not, and the climate usually appears to have a longer term trend up or down over still longer time scales. This is a lower bound for the natural variability of the climate, and is clearly of the same order as all of the warming correctly or falsely attributed to human activity.
There is a serious problem with signal to noise here. It will be decades before the AGW hypothesis is quantitatively settled, simply because it will take decades for any “warming signal” to emerge from the natural noise, and it will even then require a lot of sophisticated analysis to separate the two in a fully coupled chaotic system with a substantial innate trend that might well swamp both signal and noise in movements so grand that the entire human race is helpless before them (such as a return to glacial conditions).
Human civilization has risen from “nothing” but scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers over the Holocene interglacial. We may — I say may — have learned enough to survive the next glaciation, although probably with a vastly reduced global population, decimated by wars and famine and the return of energy poverty. Hansen’s 5 meter SLR and the end of the Pliestocene is equally scary, actually, although I have to say that I’d rather live in a warm, wet world than in a glacial interval when times are hardest everywhere and ice a kilometer thick stretches down to Pennsylvania in North America and covers most of Europe and northern Asia where currently some billion or two people live (given a choice of catastrophes). However, we do not have such a choice. We do not understand the climate well enough to predict it with anything like real confidence, and it will almost certainly require decades of work on the part of a scientific community not infected with uncharacteristic hubris to get to where we can.
In the meantime, technology will continue its advance. The energy sources of today will eventually be abandoned simply because they aren’t sustainable on a millennial scale (some of them not even on a century scale). Carbon based energy was never more than a bootstrap resource, a readily available resource sufficient to permit the rapid advance of civilization and human knowledge to where we can do better, with fuel resources that can last indefinitely. It would be lovely to get through that transition with lots of unexploited carbon left in the ground, so that if humans are wiped out by a pandemic or if civilization collapses in a global nuclear war upon the advent of the next glacial era, there is something easy to mine and burn to bootstrap a second attempt. I applaud the desire to develop solar energy, fission based energy, fusion based energy, satellite based energy into viable sustainable resources even as I deplore any effort to force the issue and adopt them before the technologies are mature and cost-efficient.
It’s funny. For most of the course of human history, religions of all sorts predict apocalyptic events that will end “the age” of the day, the current Yuga. Even without science, religions recognize the essential impermanence of things, the changing nature of Nature. The apocalypses they predict — nay, “prophecy” — are absurd, of course. There is no secret knowledge of divine inspiration that can lead us to accurately predict the future, and plain old mundane observationally founded knowledge of things such as physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy have a pretty hard time extrapolating the global ecology a single decade into the future let alone a century. As noted above, it is easy to find or hypothesize “apocalyptic” catastrophes in nature with or without human help — glaciation, desertification, collapse of the global ecosystem, pollution of the oceans, nuclear war, asteroid collisions, gamma ray bursts. Some of these we can clearly influence. Some them, if they occur, are just plain bad luck for the human race. So long, human Charlie. Better luck next Yuga.
As was the case with the religious “catastrophes”, the unscrupulous are quick to seize on any possibility of disaster and exploit it to their own profit, or use it to advance a privately help political position by basically lying to people, playing on their fears. That’s what the quotes up above reveal — a substantial amount of the CAGW noise is just the deliberate attempt to exaggerat the the quality and certainty of the science in order to achieve a political end through deception. The end, it is presumed, justifies the means. Thus always does the priesthood justify its actions — without this myth, without believing this lie, people won’t do what they “should” do or would choose to do if, like me (they believe), they were in full possession of the facts.
Time to replay the Feynman Cargo Cult lecture. There is absolutely no substitute for honesty in science, and there is something ethically reprehensible about any scientist who would deliberately overstate the scientific case for some belief in order to attain their own desired political ends.
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