Climate Insensitivity: What the IPCC Knew But Didn’t Tell Us
By Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger
In a remarkable example of scientific malfeasance, it has become apparent that the IPCC knew a lot more than it revealed in its 2013 climate compendium about how low the earth’s climate sensitivity is likely to be.
The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated. If the UN had played it straight, the “urgency” of global warming would have evaporated, but, recognizing that this might cause problems, they preferred to mislead the world’s policymakers.
Strong words? Judge for yourself.
The report “Oversensitive—how the IPCC hid the good news on global warming,” was released today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)—a U.K. think-tank which is “concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated” regarding climate change (disclosure: our Dick Lindzen is a member of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council).
The new GWPF report concluded:
We believe that, due largely to the constraints the climate model-orientated IPCC process imposed, the Fifth Assessment Report failed to provide an adequate assessment of climate sensitivity – either ECS [equilibrium climate sensitivity] or TCR [transient climate response] – arguably the most important parameters in the climate discussion. In particular, it did not draw out the divergence that has emerged between ECS and TCR estimates based on the best observational evidence and those embodied in GCMs. Policymakers have thus been inadequately informed about the state of the science.
The study was authored by Nicholas Lewis and Marcel Crok. Crok is a freelance science writer from The Netherlands and Lewis, an independent climate scientist, was an author on two recent important papers regarding the determination of the earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS)—that is, how much the earth’s average surface temperature will rise as a result of a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.
The earth’s climate sensitivity is the most important climate factor in determining how much global warming will result from our greenhouse gas emissions (primarily from burning of fossil fuels to produce, reliable, cheap energy). But, the problem is, is that we don’t know what the value of the climate sensitivity is—this makes projections of future climate change–how should we say this?–a bit speculative.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of recent scientific research aimed at gaining a better understanding of what the climate sensitivity may be. We have detailed much of this research in our ongoing series of articles highlighting new findings on the topic. Collectively, the new research indicates an ECS value a bit below 2°C. The latest in our series is here.
But in its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) finalized this past January, the IPCC gave short shrift to the major implication of this collection of new research results—that the climate sensitivity is much lower than what the IPCC assessed it to be in its collection of previous assessment reports (issued every 6-7 years) and that the rate of climate change is going to be much less.
For example, formerly, in its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), released in 2007, the IPCC had this to say regarding the equilibrium climate sensitivity:
It [the equilibrium climate sensitivity] is likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantial higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values. [emphasis in original]
In its new AR5, the IPCC wrote this:
Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)16. The lower temperature limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2°C in the AR4, but the upper limit is the same. This assessment reflects improved understanding, the extended temperature record in the atmosphere and ocean, and new estimates of radiative forcing. [emphasis in original]
And IPCC AR5 footnote 16 states:
No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.
So, facing mounting scientific for a substantially lower climate sensitivity, the best the IPCC could bring itself to do was to reduce the low end of its “likely” range by one-half degree, refuse to put a value on its best guess, and still cling to its high end number. Big deal.
The reason that the IPCC could only make these meager changes was that the collection of climate models that the IPCC employs to make the bulk of its projections of future climate change (and future climate change impacts) has an average ECS value of 3.2°C. The IPCC couldn’t very well conclude from the scientific evidence that the real value was somewhere south of 2°C—if it were to do so, it would invalidate the climate models and, for that matter the meat of its entire report (that is, its climate change projections).
We described the situation the IPCC faced last summer (prior to releasing the final copy of the AR5) this way:
The IPCC has three options:
- Round-file the entire AR5 as it now stands and start again.
- Release the current AR5 with a statement that indicates that all the climate change and impacts described within are likely overestimated by around 50 percent, or
- Do nothing and mislead policymakers and the rest of the world.
We’re betting on door number 3.
As predicted, the IPCC chose option number 3.
The new GWPF report confirms, in detail, the IPCC’s choice and how it came to make it—by confusing the reader with a collection of evidence that was outdated, already disproven, based upon flimsy assumptions, not directly applicable, or flat-out wrong.
Putting it nicely, Lewis and Crok describe the situation thus:
The AR5 authors might not have wanted to declare that some studies are better than others or to adjudicate between observational and model-based lines of evidence, but we believe that this is exactly what an assessment is all about: using expert knowledge to weigh different sources of evidence. In this section we present reasoned arguments for a different assessment to that in AR5.
Lewis and Crok go, in detail, through each climate sensitivity paper considered (and relied upon) by the IPCC and identify its shortcomings. At the end, they are left with a collection of five papers that, while still containing uncertainties, are built upon the most robust set of assumptions and measurements.
From those papers the Lewis and Crok conclude the following:
A new ‘best observational’ estimate of ECS can now be calculated by taking a simple average of the different observationally-based estimates….This gives a best estimate for ECS of 1.75°C and a likely range of about 1.3–2.4°C. However, recognizing that error and uncertainty may be greater than allowed for in the underlying studies, and will predominantly affect the upper of the range, we conservatively assess the likely range as 1.25–3.0°C.
Now compare these figures with those in AR4 and AR5….Our new ‘best observational’ ECS estimate of 1.75°C is more than 40% lower than both the best estimate in AR4 of 3°C and the 3.2°C average of GCMs used in AR5. At least as importantly, the top of the likely range for ECS of 3.0°C is a third lower than that given in AR5 (4.5°C) – even after making it much more conservative than is implied by averaging the ranges for each of the observational estimates.
And as to what this means about the IPCC global warming projections, Lewis and Crok write:
The [climate models] overestimate future warming by 1.7–2 times relative to an estimate based on the best observational evidence.
This is a powerful and important conclusion.
We recommend that you read the full report. Not only is it a comprehendible and comprehensive description of the current science as it relates to the climate sensitivity, but it is an illumination of how the IPCC process does, or rather doesn’t, work.
The Obama Administration and its EPA will ignore this reality at their peril.
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Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
Thanks, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger.
Your new report deserves careful reading, possibly links.
Gail Combs: You didn’t answer my question.
It sure looks like Lewis & Crok deliberately avoided peer reviewed journals. Why?
It’s a simple question.
Yes, we are ignoring you.
Why?
It is a simple answer.
Because your “question” is assuming that their paper and their ideas would get a fair and accurate and timely review by the prejudiced paid-by-government-grants pal-review-and-approve-system without chance of public review and exposure.
“It sure looks like Lewis & Crok deliberately avoided peer reviewed journals. Why?”
Because peer review is at best a rather superficial check, and has been thoroughly corrupted by the alarmists, as the Climatequiddick e-mails show.
RA Cook: There have been many contrary papers published in recent years, some by Nick Lewis himself:
“A lower and more constrained estimate of climate sensitivity using updated observations and detailed radiative forcing time series”
R. B. Skeie et al , Earth Syst. Dynam. Discuss., 4, 785–852, 2013
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/785/2013/
“Energy budget constraints on climate response”
Alexander Otto et al (includes Nic Lewis), Nature Geoscience 6, 415–416 (2013)
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n6/full/ngeo1836.html
“Observational estimate of climate sensitivity from changes in the rate of ocean heat uptake and comparison to CMIP5 models,” Troy Masters, Climate Dynamics (April 2013)
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-013-1770-4
“An objective Bayesian, improved approach for applying optimal fingerprint techniques to estimate climate sensitivity,” N. Lewis, J. Climate (2013)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00473.1
So why avoid peer review now?
Akatsukami says:
Because peer review is at best a rather superficial check, and has been thoroughly corrupted by the alarmists
But there have been over 1000 skeptical papers published in the literature:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
So I’m asking again — why did Lewis & Crok avoid the peer reviewed literature?
Dr. Feynman was far too optimistic about the proliferation of scientific integrity.
Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman
From a Caltech commencement address given in 1974
“We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves–of having utter scientific integrity–is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
There is a very interesting paper out by two brothers from the United Kingdom somewhere who analyzed 13 million weather balloon, temperature reading profiles.
They discovered there is a 1:1 linear fit effectively for the condition called molar density. It is the number of actual molecules in a cubic meter of a gaseous compound; and is a little separate thing from, simply, the air pressure.
They discovered that the atmosphere has the temperature profile so clearly that it was on their original passes over the data they saw how straight the line was, simply projected a linear response and found that the overwhelming majority of all the readings were right on the linear response to molar density.
The profiles show the atmosphere up to about 20 miles where the helium radiosonde balloons burst, is in what’s called energetic equilibrium: the amount of energy per cubic meter of air is the same from the ground up through 20 miles, but the temperature is different.
They are two brothers one of whom is a progammer who dissected current infrared cooling models in use and noted their algorithms and features; and was interested in climate. In the United Kingdom them founded and operated some kind of tropical fish raising operation and in their years of dealing with liquid and gaseous fluids and temperatures they got more and more interested in Climate the more they researched for themselves.
They didn’t get paid for the research and put it online with instructions how to perform what they did. It’s is up for some kind of ‘open peer review’ where instead of a few hidden people making notes and critiques, several hundred to several thousand can simply review the paper and pick out any errors, or something like that.
They said they believe that it was simply coincidental that they decided to simply check and see if the atmosphere actually was, energetically distributed as it truly is, not the way modern climate majority believers thought it was.
Mead R. says:
March 6, 2014 at 4:59 pm
Gail Combs: You didn’t answer my question.
It sure looks like Lewis & Crok deliberately avoided peer reviewed journals. Why?
It’s a simple question.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I did answer your question. If the paper is put out for peer-reviewed publication it can not be published else where first. So As I just said TIME!
This is from a peer-reviewed paper on solar influence on climate chosen at random:
Received: 12 July 2012
Accepted: 24 September 2012
Published: 28 November 2012
If they put the paper out now, and even if the first journal accepts they still may miss influencing mid term elections in the USA.
Also peer-review doesn’t mean Sh1t any more. It is completely useless in determining the quality of a paper because it has been so badly abused. It is to the point where one Journal is now demanding the statistical method be sent to the journal BEFORE the experiments are done.
I have a whole file labeled science fraud. I will [refrain] from dumping that file here unless you request I do so.
Mead R……peer review?
Well it is out there now….review away!
I’d love to hear what you, OR anyone else, has to say. Or is your idea of “peer review”…. sceptical filter?
Mead R. says: March 6, 2014 at 3:56 pm
Why didn’t Lewis & Crok submit their science for peer review? Frankly, it looks like they’re trying to avoid it. Disappointing, because more is needed.
Don’t worry Mead.
It is right now in the process of getting very thoroughly reviewed by ‘peers’.
And by everyone else.
It makes the old ‘peer review’ process seem very old school, and a bit too [cozy], does it not?
Mead R. says:
March 6, 2014 at 5:24 pm
“So I’m asking again — why did Lewis & Crok avoid the peer reviewed literature?”
——————————————————————————————————–
You can ask as many times as you like, but there is nothing to be gained by this. The petulant “but, but, it’s not peer reviewed” shrieking impresses absolutely no one.
A. The Lewis & Crok paper is not a scientific paper, just a report listing ECS values of other papers. Peer review has no relevance here.
B. For future reference, most WUWT readers will be familiar with the classic Climategate email – “we’ll keep these papers out even if we have to re-define what peer review means”. After that email, no amount of shrieking about “not peer reviewed” will ever work again. That ship has sailed, hit the iceberg of truth and sunken with all rodents.
Watching the Alinskyite David Appell moaning about a report on reduced ECS is a bit of a joke now. More and more citizens are considering evidence that radiative gases do not warm our planet at all. “Pal review” is meaningless when citizens around the world can build and run the empirical experiments proving AGW false for themselves. No amount of Alinsky “change agents” can counter empirical results that individuals can try for themselves.
Trying to control the “narrative” no longer works in the age of the Internet. Citizens aren’t waiting for some “pal reviewed” paper reported by the lame stream media to tell them what to think. They are feeding satellite temperatures directly into their own computers now. They are surveying the surface stations for themselves. Citizens now review and demolish the papers of the climate pseudo scientists (often within minutes), not their “peers”. The Internet has proven a powerful force for truth and democracy. The Fabian fantasies of the AGW fellow travellers are being crushed, along with their reputations, careers and any institution, NGO or political party they seek to hide in. Welcome to OUR brave new world 😉
I read through the papers’ summaries but not the papers. The brothers said they used pretty standard methods. They did the atmospheric pressures and temperatures research all themselves, because it’s so simple: it is ideal gas laws that creates the profile for the temperature of the atmosphere they said, and that the fact it was ideal gas law’s exact match to temperature gradient vs molar density was what made them go on to do a lot more research to see if they could possibly just be wrong.
These are the two people here
About Us | Global Warming Solved
http://globalwarmingsolved.com/about-us/
and here is their explanatory starting page:
Start Here | Global Warming Solved
http://globalwarmingsolved.com/start-here/#our_methods
It’s pretty interesting stuff and there is a description that assigns the point where the air molecules seem to clump exceptionally densely as the tropopause edge, with the realm and region above that point being the full region normally considered the tropopause itself with a very gradual and regular change toward typical stratospheric conditions.
They have both worked in many sciences and also run working scientific businesses dealing with fluids and temperatures, and really what they say sounds like it has the ring of real science.
Not, what most modern climate science people consider, real science.
They seem to be very sure that what they are saying is easily checked and verified as being what they say, or not, I didn’t go so far as to actually read their papers; however their links for their papers’ introductions have a lot of in-depth discussion of the atmosphere that makes a lot about what their message is, quite clear, and I can say that I recommend everyone read them.
It seems it has only been a couple of years since climate gate revealed the scientists knew their precepts and postulations were in trouble, and here we are with Dr. Michael Mann mired in lawsuits he can not possibly win as a public figure active in policy politics,
James Hansen forced into retirement, AGW believers everywhere in stunned disarray,
and a whole new generation of experienced, competent, professional atmospheric chemists is coming up behind them analyzing the atmosphere using honest straightforward means,
revealing very much of what the climate scientists were saying was just, wrong.
Climate gate simply underlined that they all knew it and that they had to keep control of public policy over it, or the entire charade they were involved in – basically they were mathematics modeling grants scammers whose work got seized on by an unfortunate politician for usage in an ecological crisis crusade –
would come utterly unraveled.
markx says:@ur momisugly March 6, 2014 at 6:19 pm
A paper that makes it though a WUWT review is much better than a paper that goes through pal-review.
More than one paper has been vetted by WUWT first and then updated based on comments before formal submission.
Anthony,
Three important points to remember:
1) This climate sensitivity is with respect to CO2 only. The climate is sensitive to many other radiative forcings from clouds, aerosols, ocean circulations, etc. IPCC excludes clouds and oceans in its assessment reports but their effects are probably greater than CO2. (Note the “pause” is sometimes attributed to PDO, ENSO, AMO) The uncertainty is the forcing of aerosols is about -2.5 W/m^2 (IPCC estimate). This means it could cancel the forcing of CO2 = +1.66 W/m^2. This is obvious from the IPCC AR4 radiative forcings chart but not emphasized.
Even if CO2 doubles, it is uncertain temperature will rise by X amount because that assumes all other forcings remain constant. “All things being equal” The climate is always changing. “All things are never equal”
2) The relevant sensitivity is TCR not ECS because the latter takes thousands of years to attain. It is only flawed models that exclude deep ocean mixing that assumes ECS can be attained in decades.
3) Any TCR estimate above 1 C implicitly assumes positive feedback. Lindzen and Spencer have studies based on satellite data that the climate has strong negative feedback (approx. 6 W/m^2/K) This means it’s possible TCR is less than 1 C.
Dear Gail,
I see that no one else responded to your fine question of 12:50pm, today. You have been, apparently, (so far as I’ve read of the posts since mine of 1:21pm) polite enough to say nothing when nothing good could be said about my reply to you at 1:21pm, today. I apologize again for how general it was, but, I was really out of time, then.
You deserve a better answer. When I thought over this evening how I would approach the topic of private citizens suing the EPA, in anticipation of writing you a better reply, I realized that it would take me many hours to do the research that it would take to write you a memorandum on the law involved of the quality I would want to do (of the quality I really must do, if I do it at all). YOU ARE WORTH that effort, but, if I ever get to that project, it will end up being quite awhile until I respond to you. Thus, this disappointing post by me here just to let you know that I am not ignoring you and to apologize for not answering more fully. If I get that memorandum completed, I’ll flag you down (and you KNOW I’ll persevere at that flagging, lol).
If you have other questions, please ask me — perhaps, I may know the answer without much research needed OR (even better!) someone else will answer you with competence and completeness.
Regretfully,
Janice
It is a great pity that these excellent scientists, Lewis and Crok, make the careless mistake of reporting a small temperature change as a percentage. When they do so, they imply that we all agree that absolute zero is 0C. It is of course 0K. They would get a very different percentage if they used that. Why can’t they just say there is a difference in temperature and report it in degrees? It would be scientifically correct and it wouldn’t matter whether the reader was thinking in C or K.
They are of course not the only ones making this foolish mistake. It is usually warmists. I don’t bother correcting them.
Three important points to remember:
1) This climate sensitivity is with respect to CO2 only. The climate is sensitive to many other radiative forcings from clouds, aerosols, ocean circulations, etc. IPCC excludes clouds and oceans in its assessment reports but their forcings are probably greater than CO2. (Note the “pause” is sometimes attributed to PDO, ENSO, AMO) The uncertainty in the forcing of aerosols is about -2.5 W/m^2 (IPCC estimate). This means it could cancel the forcing of CO2 = +1.66 W/m^2. This is obvious from the IPCC AR4 radiative forcings chart but not emphasized.
Even if CO2 doubles, it is uncertain temperature will rise by X amount because that assumes all other forcings remain constant. “All things being equal” The climate is always changing. “All things are never equal”
2) The relevant sensitivity is TCR not ECS because the latter takes thousands of years to attain. It is only flawed models that exclude deep ocean mixing that assumes ECS can be attained in decades.
3) Any TCR estimate above 1 C implicitly assumes positive feedback. Lindzen and Spencer have studies based on satellite data that the climate has strong negative feedback (approx. 6 W/m^2/K) This means it’s possible TCR is less than 1 C.
Mead R.
So I’m asking again — why did Lewis & Crok avoid the peer reviewed literature?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It doesn’t matter why. Either there is an error in their work, or there isn’t. If you have spotted an error, by all means, tell us what it is.
Konrad,
That was my paper that they plotted to keep out. They ultimately included it but smashed it with a totally ad-hoc criticism in the IPCC text.
Dr. Strangelove says:
March 6, 2014 at 8:33 pm
————————————–
No Dr. Strangelove, that won’t work. Try that and there will be fighting in the war room.
There is no “warming, but less warming than we thought” get out of jail free card.
Remember Dr. Spencer’s blog? Remember when you lied and claimed to have conducted an empirical experiment into LWIR heating of water? Remember just after your post when another reader took my build instructions and replicated my results? The Internet remembers. The Internet remembers forever.
There will be no “soft landing” for the global warming hoax nor any of the fellow travellers. Nothing you can say or do can engineer such an outcome. The net effect of radiative gases is planetary cooling at all concentrations above 0.0ppm. No excuses. No ameliorations. No escape.
michaelspj says:
March 6, 2014 at 9:53 pm
“That was my paper that they plotted to keep out.”
—————————————————————–
“What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”
It’s not the initial lie but the subsequent cover up that gets them…
Although I’m not sure any further “practice” could have saved the IPCC 😉
My point – the attempt to suppress your paper cost the IPCC far more than they could ever have imagined.
Ultimately this is not about science. Adding radiative gases to the atmosphere reducing the atmospheres radiative cooling ability was always pseudo science. Complete foaming inanity. Observe the petulant squealing of David Appell. “Scientists say” and “it’s peer reviewed” is core to his “narrative”. They hoped that pulling on the white coat of scientific respectability would help them further the ultimate “gotcha” against free market democracy.
But they are now caught in their own tangled web. “scientists say” no longer works. Now the public ask, are those scientists or climate “scientists”. I find it delicious that what posed the greatest threat to science, reason, freedom and democracy has now turned against its worthless creators and will destroy all of the Fabian’s sick fantasies.
We are living in interesting times 😉
IPCC should stand for International Panel for Communicating Corruption
FYI, the pressconference and presentation took place in the very heart of our democracy, presscenter Nieuwspoort in The Hague, the Netherlands.
For a report see: http://www.groenerekenkamer.nl/2365/een-gevoelige-kwestie/ including some pictures.
Translate via Google translate
where all reports are also downloadable, including the Dutch version, translated from English by Marcel Crok.
No AGW no IPCC, it really is that simply . Now given that want do you think the IPCC will do ?