Guest essay by Dr. Norman Page
1. The AR5 Reports and Responses.
Following the publication in early August of the final drafts of the AR5 WG1 and Summary for Policymakers I posted an initial response at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
The opening sentences of the post summarized the main failure of the AR5 report and indeed the whole IPCC process.
“In the AR5 Summary for Policymakers the IPCC glossed over the developing cooling trend in global temperatures and so lost the last vestige of its scientific credibility and any claim to be a source of useful guidance on future climate trends for policymakers.”
The key factor in making CO2 emission control policy and the basis for the WG2 and 3 sections of AR5 is the climate sensitivity to CO2 .
By AR5 – WG1 the IPCC itself 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 the IPCC contributors have no idea what the climate sensitivity is and that therefore that there is no credible basis for the WG 2 and 3 reports and that the Government policy makers have no empirical scientific basis for the UNFCCC process and their economically destructive climate and energy policies.
In spite of this the while forecasting about the same amount of future warming as the 2007 AR4 report the AR5 SPM report irresponsibly raised the certainty of the IPCC forecasts and attributions from 90 – 95% in order to give the impression of more certainty after another 6 years of new data and work.
The response to AR5 WG1 by the establishment scientists in the USA and the UK who have invested their scientific reputations and careers in promoting CAGW has been entirely predictable.
On the science side several different ad hoc explanations for the pause have been put forward. Check
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/26/warming-interrruptus-causes-for-the-pause/
Of these the Trenberth’s attempt to bury the missing heat in the Oceans is probably the most popular. However this hidey hole was effectively plugged by the latest analysis of the Argo data which shows a 90% reduction in the OHC anomalies in 0- 100m water depths from 1983- 2011 compared with 2004-2011. see Table 1 in
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/OHCA_1950_2011_final.pdf
This table also shows significant, although smaller reductions, in the 0 – 300 and 0 -700m depths. In short the oceans are cooling from the top down as one might expect on a cooling planet.
There has been a concerted effort by the political propaganda arms of the establishment Societies to mislead the MSM and the public and the Politicians about the findings and implications of the AR5 WG1 report. See for example
http://whatweknow.aaas.org/get-the-facts/
This document is a scientific shambles and degrades the standing of science in general.see
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/27/climate-alarm/
The recent NAS /Royal Society report is another propaganda piece along the same lines
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/03/03/new-global-warming-report-a-disgrace-posted-by-tom-harris/
Meanwhile the Obama administration guided by Holdren and Podesta is trying to support its power grab over the US economy via the EPA with its new Climate Data Initiative discussed at
The IPCC lead editors had already recognized in their 2011 SREX – Summary for policy makers that in order to support the UNFCC process they had to avoid discussing or dismiss the temperature trends (pause) as much as possible and try to provide for their Political paymasters scare headlines based on extreme events. They say
“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.
SREX stands for Special Report on Extreme Events and this report drew attention to the probabilities of such events.
The AR5 WG2 impacts report SPM continues the sorry disconnect between the SPMs and the WG1 and 2 reports themselves.as the political alarmist agenda strives to provide frightening headlines for the MSM and Politicians to justify their climate and energy policies. For specific documentation see
2. The problem with IPCC science and Forecasting in General.
The IPCC forecasters are still trying to scare the public into continuing to fund their failed and futile modeling approach to forecasting and disappointingly most contrarians (empirical realists ) still continue to argue using the same basic approach as the IPCC but just come up with lower numbers for the future warming and reduced climate sensitivity. The realist scientists themselves need take on board the fact that the Modeling technique is inherently useless for climate forecasting because models with such a large number of variables simply cannot be computed or indeed even initialized with sufficient precision and accuracy.
see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4
The IPCC itself has been quite open about this and 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 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.
The entire IPCC output falls into the not even wrong category and provides no basis for serious discussion yet again most anti alarmist bloggers and almost all the MSM pundits continue to refer to the IPCC forecasts as though they had some connection to the real world.
3. The Solution
A different non modeling approach must be used for forecasting . Forecasts of the timing and amount of a possible coming cooling based on the 60 and 1000 year natural quasi-periodicities in the temperature and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the best proxy for solar activity are presented in several posts at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
During the last eighteen months I have laid out an analysis of the basic climate data and of methods used in climate prediction and from these have developed a simple, rational and transparent forecast of the likely coming cooling. For details see the pertinent posts listed below.
10/30/12. Hurricane Sandy-Extreme Events and Global Cooling
11/18/12 Global Cooling Climate and Weather Forecasting
1/22/13 Global Cooling Timing and Amount
2/18/13 Its the Sun Stupid – the Minor Significance of CO2
4/2/13 Global Cooling Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions.
5/14/13 Climate Forecasting for Britain’s Seven Alarmist Scientists and for UK Politicians.
7/30/13 Skillful (so far) Thirty year Climate Forecast- 3 year update and Latest Cooling Estimate. 10/9/13 Commonsense Climate Science and Forecasting after AR5 and the Coming Cooling.
The capacity of the establishment IPCC contributing modelers and the academic science community in general to avoid the blindingly obvious natural periodicities in the temperature record is truly mind blowing.
It is very obvious- simply by eye balling the last 150 years of temperature data that there is a 60 year natural quasi periodicity at work. Sophisticated statistical analysis actually doesn’t add much to eyeballing the time series. The underlying trend can easily be attributed to the 1000 year quasi periodicity. See Figs 3 and 4 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/commonsense-climate-science-and.html
The 1000 year period looks pretty good at 10000,9000,8000,7000, 2000.1000. and 0
This would look interesting I’m sure on a wavelet analysis with the peak fading out from 7000- 3000.
The same link also provides an estimate of the timing and extent of possible future cooling using the recent peak as a synchronous peak in both the 60 and 1000 year cycles and the neutron count as supporting evidence of a coming cooling trend as it appears the best proxy for solar “activity” while remaining agnostic as to the processes involved.
I suppose the problem for the academic establishment is that this method really only requires a handful of people with some insight ,understanding and the necessary background of knowledge and experience as opposed to the army of computer supported modelers who have dominated the forecasting process until now.
There has been no net warming for 16 years and the earth entered a cooling trend in about 2003 which will last for another 20 years and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that. see
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
The current weather patterns in the UK and USA are typical of those developed by the more meridional path of the jet stream on a cooling earth. The Fagan book “The Little Ice Age ” is a useful guide from the past to the future. The frequency of these weather patterns, e.g. for the USA the PDO related drought in California and the Polar Vortex excursions to the South will increase as cooling continues.
The views of the establishment scientists in the USA and of the UK’s CSA and Met office’s leaders in this matter post AR5 reveals their continued refusal to recognize and admit the total failure of the climate models in the face of the empirical data of the last 16 years. It is past time for the climate community to move to another approach based on pattern recognition in the temperature and driver data and also on the recognition of the different frequencies of different regional weather patterns on a cooling ( more meridional jet stream ) and warming (more latitudinal jet stream ) world.
All of the warming since the LIA can easily be accommodated within the 1000 year natural cycle without any significant contribution from anthropogenic CO2.
The whole UNFCCC travelling circus has no empirical basis for its operations and indeed for its existence depending as it does on the predictions of the inherently useless climate models.. The climate is much too complex to model but can be predicted by simply knowing where we are in the natural quasi -cycles.
In order to counter the IPCC and MSM’s Pravda like catastrophic warming propaganda independent empirical scientists need to publicize the possibility of a coming cooling and other methods of forecasting in the social media, the blogosphere ,letters to editors and especially in e mails and letters to politicians.
Because successive British CSAs and the US EPA are too lazy or not willing for political reasons to do their own assessments but merely regurgitate the IPCC party line the logical next step would be to urge legislators at all levels to call for non IPCC sourced independent assessments of future climate trends based on multiple working hypotheses so that impact studies would be broadened to include a degree or two of cooling as an alternative scenario.
The CAGW emperor has no clothes and winter may be on its way. We should take a clear eyed look at what may be in store.
impact studies would be broadened to include a degree or two of cooling as an alternative scenario…
…and then stand back and throw a dart
I believe Salby (among others, I’m sure) teased out and presented a very solid argument that Increase temperature begets increase CO2. The WHOLE IPCC report is built on sand and the tide is coming in, not a high tide you understand, just the regular one.
Shrinkage?
The income gap is widening and it is caused in part by the actions of the EPA, the AGW political. cronies who support wind, solar power and biofuels. Several years ago I talked to a friend who is still farming and he stated that the biofuel initiatives had finally made farming profitable.
“A different non modeling approach must be used for forecasting“.
Spot on. Mathematically, the current modelling approach cannot work, because inaccuracies necessarily grow exponentially, and render any attempt at forecasting useless within a few days (as per weather models which use similar logic). Climate is not weather, it needs an altogether different method for forecasting.
re this NINE EPISODE SERIES: i posted transcript of CBS’s Face The Nation with NYT’s Tom Friedman & Heidi Cullen on the NASA thread, but how’s this?
7 April: NYT Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin: Showtime Series Aims to Engage Sleepy Public on Global Warming With Celebrity Guides
Early in 2011, two longtime 60 Minutes producers, David Gelber and Joel Bach, met with me to describe their ambitious plan to create a television series on global warming that, they hoped, would break through the enduring public apathy and haze of disinformation surrounding the subject. I wished them luck, while warning that the scale and complexity of the problem would make it hard to be both engaging and accurate.
The first of nine episodes of the resulting series, “Years of Living Dangerously,” will run on Showtime Sunday night but can be seen on YouTube now (noted via Joe Romm, who is one of two chief science advisers on the production, the other being Heidi Cullen):..
It remains to be seen whether the series draws a substantial and sustained audience, but the Showtime team, at least in episode one, deserves plaudits …
Footnote | * Another Times columnist, Mark Bittman, is among those appearing in later episodes.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/showtime-series-aims-to-engage-sleepy-public-on-climate-change-with-celebrity-guides/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
7 April: Guardian: Nafeez Ahmed: Leaked IPCC climate plan to worsen global warming – ecologists
Critics say bioenergy, carbon capture, among draft report’s ‘false solutions’ to sustain business as usual economics
A British environmental organisation that has reviewed the draft of a forthcoming UN IPCC report on mitigating climate change has questioned many of the document’s recommendations as deeply flawed.
Dr Rachel Smolker, co-director of Biofuelwatch, said that the report’s embrace of “largely untested” and “very risky” technologies like bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), will “exacerbate” climate change, agricultural problems, water scarcity, soil erosion and energy challenges, “rather than improving them.”…
Dr Smolker, a behavioural ecologist and biofuels expert, said that the alarming impacts of climate change identified by the IPCC’s Working Groups 1 and 2 would “worsen” as a consequence of such “false solutions” which have been increasingly criticised in the scientific literature…
Currently, just under 40% of US corn production is dedicated to ethanol although it provides just “a pittance of transport energy.” The large areas of land required for meaningful bioenergy production means it would simultaneously undermine food production while contributing to “escalating food prices.” Although the IPCC proposes bioenergy as the solution to renewable energy, “it can never provide more than a tiny fraction towards the current and projected growth in demand for energy.” …
Dr Smolker of Biofuelwatch, in contrast, said that the IPCC’s central emphasis on biofuels with carbon capture is a “dangerous distraction” from the task of “deeply altering our entire relationship to energy consumption.” She highlighted an unwillingness to recognise the “fundamental link between ‘endless growth economics’ and ecological destruction.” …ETC ETC ETC
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/apr/07/ipcc-un-climate-change-mitigation-wg3-worsen-geoengineering
***”Limiting reports to 1,000 pages or fewer”? fewer by 1,000 would be nice:
7 April: Scientific American: Climatewire: Do U.N. Climate Change Reports Need to Change?
After the latest round of IPCC climate reports, some scientists are calling for a more streamlined process.
On Friday, David Griggs, a professor and director of the Monash Sustainability Institute at Australia’s Monash University, who has been involved in the last three IPCC reports, was the latest to weigh in with a proposal for reconfiguring the IPCC.
The comment, published in the journal Nature, addresses the burden the IPCC places on scientists, who volunteer their time, and the frequency of the reports.
Griggs argues for publishing shorter, less frequent reports, every 10 years, pointing out that the past three science reports from Working Group I have lengthened from 410 pages to 881 pages to 1,535 pages with the report released late last year.
***”Limiting reports to 1,000 pages or fewer would save time, reduce workloads and make the reports more readable and focused,” he writes.
In between, the panel could release brief, targeted reports addressing “fast-moving areas of science,” Griggs writes.
On that idea, Griggs appears to have widespread support from others in the community…
Would compensation help?
Like Griggs, Trenberth sees scientist burnout as a problem.
But while Griggs suggests paying scientists as a way to compensate them for the effort, UCS’s Frumhoff does not see that as a solution.
“I don’t think compensation will matter. There won’t be enough compensation to truly compensate for the time. There just won’t. People won’t do this for the money, nor should they,” Frumhoff said…
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-un-climate-change-reports-need-to-change/
6 April: UK Telegraph: The game is up for climate change believers
Charles Moore reviews The Age of Global Warming by Rupert Darwall (Quartet)
The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science” …
***(SEE NEXT LINK)Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific…
Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet…
The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard…
Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see those lessons set out with painful clarity.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/10748667/The-game-is-up-for-climate-change-believers.html
(Charles Moore has been editor of The Spectator (1984-90), the Sunday Telegraph (1992-5) and The Daily Telegraph (1995-2003). He is the authorised biographer of Margaret Thatcher and continues to write for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph.)
Rebecca gets specific:
7 April: UK Guardian: Rebecca Solnit: Call climate change what it is: violence
Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth
So if we want to talk about violence and climate change – and we are talking about it, after last week’s horrifying report from the world’s top climate scientists – then let’s talk about climate change as violence. Rather than worrying about whether ordinary human beings will react turbulently to the destruction of the very means of their survival, let’s worry about that destruction – and their survival. Of course water failure, crop failure, flooding and more will lead to mass migration and climate refugees – they already have – and this will lead to conflict. Those conflicts are being set in motion now…
In every arena, we need to look at industrial-scale and systemic violence, not just the hands-on violence of the less powerful. When it comes to climate change, this is particularly true. Exxon has decided to bet that we can’t make the corporation keep its reserves in the ground, and the company is reassuring its investors that it will continue to profit off the rapid, violent and intentional destruction of the Earth…
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/07/climate-change-violence-occupy-earth
(Rebecca Solnit is a writer and cultural historian whose work has appeared in Harper’s, TomDispatch, The Nation and other publications. She is the author of numerous books about art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie and memory.)
***CAGW in a nutshell:
8 April: Guardian: Kari Mathieson: Defining moments in climate change: hope and crisis in Copenhagen
From ‘Hopenhagen’ to ‘suicide pact’ for developing nations, Cop 15 has gone down as a failure in international cooperation
Michele de Nevers, was attached to the World Bank delegation. She says the lack of an overarching agreement made setting a carbon price impossible. “Whether it was a high price or a low price didn’t matter as much as the fact that there would be an agreement on what the reduction of emissions was going to be … which would make all of these carbon markets for climate finance kick in functionally.”
***De Nevers says the $100bn per year pledged for developing countries would have been “very easy to reach” had the world had a functioning carbon market…
Editors note: What are the conferences, speeches, reports, partnerships or rifts that have defined the climate change movement? Email Holly Young to contribute to our new series on defining movements – holly.young@theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/apr/07/copenhagen-climate-change-paris-talks
“It is very obvious- simply by eye balling the last 150 years of temperature data that there is a 60 year natural quasi periodicity at work. Sophisticated statistical analysis actually doesn’t add much to eyeballing the time series.”
Too right, and eye-balling the weather outside the window over 70 years gives one a pretty good idea of what is and is not going on.
the CAGW jokes keep rolling off the press today:
7 April: Washington Post Blog: Erik Wemple: Study: Fox News botches climate-change coverage
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has put together an awful pie chart for Fox News:…
Even more pointedly, it cited “The Five” co-host Greg Gutfeld for alleging that there’d been a “pause in global warming over 15 years now.” Indeed there’s been a slowdown in the rate of warming dating back to 1998, but the UCS report faults Gutfeld and others on Fox News’s air for having “omitted references to long-term trends in rising temperatures and [failing to] discuss other markers of climate change, such as rising seas or melting glaciers (NASA 2013; Nuccitelli 2013).”…
“Although Fox discussed climate change most often, the tone of its coverage was disproportionately dismissive,” says the study by four professors, two from George Mason University, the others from Yale and American University. They wrote, “Fox broadcasts were more likely to include statements that challenged the scientific agreement on climate change, undermined the reality of climate change, and questioned its human causes.”…
Writes Gutfeld about that assessment of Fox News’s coverage: “Yikes! Fox challenged, undermined and questioned! To the gallows! That quote, right there, shows you that tolerance is not deemed necessary if you reformat the game board so anyone who questions the basic assumptions is disqualified from playing.”
Expect the results of the UCS thing to get some rotation today on “The Five,” particularly since it more or less applauds the other networks (CNN, 70 percent accurate; MSNBC, 92 percent accurate) in their coverage of the topic area…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/04/07/study-fox-news-botches-climate-change-coverage/
7 April: WSJ: Paul H. Tice: How Climate Change Conquered the American Campus
The top-paying job for grads last year: petroleum engineer, at $97,000. Yet most colleges seem oddly uninterested.
Here is a college quiz. While many parts of the U.S. economy struggle to recover from the Great Recession of 2008-09, one domestic industry is experiencing a technology-driven expansion in which American innovations have led to countless new company startups, a surge in hiring and some of the highest-paying entry-level jobs for graduating college seniors.
How are the nation’s universities responding so students might prepare for a promising career in this growing and intellectually challenging field? By largely ignoring it. Why? Because the industry is oil and gas.
This fact may surprise the casual campus observer, since almost every U.S. college these days seems to have an energy research institute. Most of these energy think-tanks, however, are run by academic advocates of theories about global warming and man-made climate change, most of whom view energy through green-colored lenses…
For some of these programs, the agenda is obvious and stated in bold print over the door. Names such as the Yale Climate & Energy Institute and the Princeton Center for Energy and the Environment make clear that the study of energy needs to be chaperoned and monitored. The labeling is less obvious for others, but the result is the same. Visit the websites of the neutrally named Cornell Energy Institute, MIT Energy Initiative and Penn Center for Energy Innovation, and you would think you were looking at algore.com…
My alma mater, Columbia University, recently launched its own Center on Global Energy Policy, with the mission to “improve the quality of energy policy and energy dialogue through objective, balanced and understandable analysis.” The center is headed by Jason Bordoff, former senior director for energy and climate change on the staff of the National Security Council in the Obama administration, who is on record calling for carbon caps and immediate government action to drive down greenhouse-gas emissions. So much for balance…
More troubling is how this ideological bias filters into the college curriculum, both through the content of introductory natural science courses required of all students and the choice of majors and specialty electives offered by technical undergraduate schools…
(Mr. Tice works in investment management and is a former Wall Street energy-research analyst.)
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304441304579481200046204022?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304441304579481200046204022.html
This is all really quite simple (my bold)
According to (the revised) article 2 of the IPCC Principles “The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
If there is no risk the then IPCC goes away. Note that this version is different from the original version that used the term “global warming” so they have already made sure that they stay in business by changing this term and other changes. How often have you heard of a UN associated committee self-terminating?
Pat quotes Gutfeld:
“Yikes! Fox challenged, undermined and questioned! To the gallows! That quote, right there, shows you that tolerance is not deemed necessary if you reformat the game board so anyone who questions the basic assumptions is disqualified from playing.”
Observation: not too long ago, Westerners, including Americans, were proud to say that while they might disagree with what someone says, they would defend to the death their right to say it.
But now, like many other pillars of Western civilization, that has been flipped 180º, to:
“Silence! I keel you!“
A number of Leftists are now actually calling for imprisonment and death sentences for anyone who challenges their runaway global warming/climate catastrophe fantasy.
We live in dangerous times, folks. That is no exaggeration. History is repeating what the West went through less than a century ago — chapter and verse.
rogerknights says:
April 7, 2014 at 5:50 pm
Shrinkage?
He was in the pool!
Pat – Nice try.
Given that climate is a chaotic system and our measurement tools are sufficiently crude that we can’t get the initial conditions to sufficient accuracy, this is sufficient to throw out the models. We should not be surprised the models don’t work.
Pat – I recommend that you read one or more of Bob Tisdale’s books.
The truth is, humans create pollution. Large cities create their own micro-climates, with all the concrete, glass and motor vehicles, etc. On ABC’s Q & A, Chinese and Japanese were questioned on pollution in their countries, and political tensions between them. The Chinese were quite honest, coal fired industries are creating pollution. They hope to expand energy sources with wind and solar. (They make solar panels). If you remember back 40 years, hardly any motor vehicles were spotted in Peijing, they all wore black trouser suits and rode bicycles. Now it is expanding their industry and commerce, fashions and there are a very rich class. Unfortunately cities create their own UHI and pollution. ” And where there’s dirt there’s brass!”
A Northern English expression, about the industrial revolution, and brass being $$$’s. Ironically the Chinese were using coke back in the 14th century.
pat – an interesting series of comments. I object to Rebecca Solnit’s use of the word “violence” to describe non-violent expressions of non-violent opinions, just because they are at variance with the speaker’s own (invariably left) view of things. (Or was she in fact saying that Occupy Earth (presumably a spin-off from Occupy Wall Street) is violent? That I could believe.).
re: “Of course water failure, crop failure, flooding and more will lead to mass migration and climate refugees – they already have – and this will lead to conflict.” –
– Water failure and flooding? Globally, neither has gone outside the normal range. It is a ridiculous each-way bet.
– Crop failure? Hardly. There has been an impressive increase in world food production over the last decade or two.
– Climate refugees? There have been none.
– Conflict? Without any of the foregoing, why should there be conflict?
The Dead Don’t Suffer.
Just get ready for the ‘International Polar Year’ Post “Results [!! & ???]”.
Oh boy ! This will be a “Pole to Pole” knee slapper of Gigantic Political Portions. !
Te he he. 😉
bushbunny says:
April 7, 2014 at 8:09 pm
China also makes windmills. Despite making solar panels & windmills, China fuels its economy on cheap fossil fuel energy. And their fossil fuels are a lot more polluting than the cleaner coal, scrubbed plants, oil & gas used in the US. Yet the Obama Administration won’t let us export our cleaner, high energy content coal to China or build a pipeline to bring more low polluting Canadian gas into our country.
I love this site and lurk on it continually. But….can someone tell me what “anomaly” means in the context of climate science. I always thought it meant “something out of the ordinary”. Apparently not. From what I can see it just means “plots on a graph”. Or something.
Help!
bushbunny says:
April 7, 2014 at 8:09 pm
The truth is, humans create pollution.
Ja? Und?
So does Nature. cf Krakatoa, Tambura, Pompeii, huge prairie and forest fires set off by lighting, devastating floods destroying homes and crops, earthquakes causing killer landslides, etc.
Unless the point is that humans **uniquely**create pollution….what’s the point?
Pollution in the sense I meant to communicate, is we if we collect in large populated cities, garbage, sanitation, car and truck exhausts, do produce pollution, ‘if’ we don’t curb their effects or have a decent method of disposal and containment. And you are correct in your suggestion that nature when it turns nasty kills us. But they are not triggered by human activities. And I would not term them as pollution. Of course bush fires do create their own pollution. Volcanoes spew out a lot of nasty things in their gases and ash. I wouldn’t say that humans uniquely create pollution, it is a fact of life. Look at Bangkok? London and the 1950s SMOGS. I was there then and they were selling smog masks. They made London and Greater London ‘smoke free zones’ and the air cleared considerably after that. And so did the Thames river. Black coal is 30% less polluting than brown coal, but dearer to buy. Yet what I was trying to communicate, is humans do and can pollute, but it won’t change the climate. A volcano eruption can for a short time though like the 79 AD Mt.Vesuvius explosion. The Chenobyl accident is an example of contamination and pollution that spread to other parts of Europe. That was caused by human activities.
Yes and bush fires can not only be started from lightening strikes but also they can be caused by human mismanagement, and arson.
Anna Keppa says:
April 7, 2014 at 9:54 pm
I love this site and lurk on it continually. But….can someone tell me what “anomaly” means in the context of climate science.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It just means the difference from the average, with the average usually calculated from a reference period. Just to keep you confused, the various temperature records like GISS and HadCrut don’t use the same reference periods. But as an example, suppose the reference period was 1981 to 2000, and the average temperature of the earth over that period of time was 15 degrees C. But this year, it is 16 degrees, which would mean that the “anomaly” for this year is 1 degrees. This lets you compare the anomalies of very cold places to very warm places and see if both are warming (or not) and at the same rate (or not).
It has a fatal flaw in the method, but we’d have to get into physics and Stefan-Boltzmann Law to explain why a simple averaging of anomalies from disparate temperature regimes is actually not very good physics.
Anomalies are also mentioned in accounting audits. When the sums don’t add up properly. Or something has been left out that can drastically change the books accounts. Like in ‘tickling the Peta.’ Embezzlement.
“The entire IPCC output falls into the not even wrong category”
That one short sentence fragment summarises the complete history of the IPCC with 100% accuracy.
What concerns me hugely is the apparent success of the warmists’ enormous propaganda drive, and at the moment I don’t see realists countering it effectively, not least because access to the mainstream media is being blocked far more than previously. “They musn’t have a platform,” seems now to be in full spate. How can that be countered?
It may be the warmists’ last gasp; I hope so, but their snouts are far too deep in the trough to give up without a huge fight no matter how strong the case against them, and they do superficially sound convincing. The more threatened they are, the more they are likely to clamour that ‘the science is settled’ and ‘97% agree with them’, and many will believe them. Somehow, warmists have to get their case over outside the blogosphere and I don’t think that is happening nearly as well as it needs to.
‘Dame Julia’ was on R4 this morning pontificating about 4 degrees warming with no challenge whatsoever, just a rather weak request for her to imagine a world in which we didn’t reduce CO2 emissions. I suppose that’s progress of a sort, but the sheer volume of nonsense propaganda in the past few days has been extraordinary, and a l lot of it is sadly sticking.
There’s no point everybody on here patting ourselves on the back and agreeing how right we are if we don’t carry the public with us. How?
Amsterdam –
The Dutch Professor Richard Tol left on high legs the climate panel of the United Nations. Tol doesn’t agree with the negative conclusions of the latest UN climate report. The effects of climate change, according to him are systematically overestimated. , The panel is managed from the environment, not from science. ”
De organisatie wordt geleid en gecontroleerd door mensen die een belang hebben bij het klimaatbeleid.
The organization is directed and controlled by people who have an interest in climate.
Richard Tol
http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/22483313/__Heibel_binnen_VN-klimaatpanel__.html
If there has been no warming for 15 years and the oceans are cooling why have they continued to rise, faster than before, for the last fifteen years. Only expansion and ice melt can cause that, both imply warming ?
It has risen about thirty mm in just the last decade.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu
Now Dame Julia’s on again on R4 saying how important she is and how accurate the models are! It’s relentless.
old farmers almanac that predicted last winter right is saying usa will be hotter and wetter than normal in summer from june onwards and autumn will be be warmer
http://www.almanac.com/weather/longrange
good year for the warmists to say ‘its back on track’ 🙂
I would like to see the proof of the Climate Sensitivty log CO2/Temp relationship in the REAL atmosphere.
Where did this graph come from? Who drew it up? The UN IPCC “team”?
Was it drawn up from a simulated atmosphere in a closed system in a lab?
How can the earth’s temperature of its open chaotic atmosphere possibly be determined by the CS formula?
“However this hidey hole was effectively plugged by the latest analysis of the Argo data which shows a 90% reduction in the OHC anomalies in 0- 100m water depths from 1983- 2011 compared with 2004-2011. see Table 1 in
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/OHCA_1950_2011_final.pdf
This table also shows significant, although smaller reductions, in the 0 – 300 and 0 -700m depths. In short the oceans are cooling from the top down as one might expect on a cooling planet.”
Can anyone help me with that table? I don’t have a PhD, so I read the table as indicating a reduction in net heat flux, which I interpreted as a reduction in the rate of warming: to me it looks like continued warming instead of cooling.
What am I missing?
Joe Born – good point. How can anyone call a net positive heat flux ‘cooling’. So I second the call for an explanation.
Great post Dr. Page, was unaware of your blog (sorry, I’m a newbie), hope you find time to add to it, or to here at WUWT.
To most old-timers (like me) the climate seems remarkably stable, so a perturbation approach to understanding it seems likely to succeed. If each forcing effect or long-term variation is calculated or modelled as if all other variables are fixed then, when everything significant has been found, the temperature variation over history should be well fitted. Only then could one have confidence in projections into the future.
“The CAGW emperor has no clothes and winter may be on its way. We should take a clear eyed look at what may be in store.”
Very true.
I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan, and I’ll be watching the first episode of the new series tonight.
Of course, it often contains this Stark warning: “Winter is coming”.
I hope it’s not true, as history repeatedly tells us that mankind prospers during the warm periods, and civilisations fall during the cold periods. But I have a horrible feeling that winter may indeed be coming, a winter that could last for as long as the Little Ice Age.
Chris
Unfortunately reality is an uphill battle. Showtime is coming out with a series titled “YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY” dedicated to “change how you view climate change”.
The first one can be viewed online- http://www.edf.org/blog/2014/04/08/years-living-dangerously-two-producers-coffee-and-vision-climate-action?autologin=true&utm_source=EDF%20action%20network&utm_medium=email-35541&utm_campaign=culitvation&link=body_text1
The logical fallacies will be glaring to readers here but swallowed whole by the faithful.
On the plus side they did a segment with Harrison Ford on deforestation which is something we could actually take action on to reduce the destruction of local environments.
@izen
If there has been no warming for 15 years and the oceans are cooling why have they continued to rise, faster than before, …
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It’s slowing.
“Abstract
Projection of future sea level change relies on the understanding of present sea-level trend and how it has varied in the past. Here we investigate the global-mean sea level (GMSL) change during 1993–2012 using Empirical Mode Decomposition, in an attempt to distinguish the trend over this period from the interannual variability. It is found that the GMSL rises with the rate of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr during 1993–2003 and started decelerating since 2004 to a rate of 1.8 ± 0.9 mm/yr in 2012. This deceleration is mainly due to the slowdown of ocean thermal expansion in the Pacific during the last decade, as a part of the Pacific decadal-scale variability, while the land-ice melting is accelerating the rise of the global ocean mass-equivalent sea level. Recent rapid recovery of the rising GMSL from its dramatic drop during the 2011 La Niña introduced a large uncertainty in the estimation of the sea level trend, but the decelerated rise of the GMSL appears to be intact.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818113002397