Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
It is not surprising that Roe and Baker explained in a 2007 Science paper that, “The envelope of uncertainty in climate projections has not narrowed appreciably over the past 30 years, despite tremendous increases in computing power, in observations, and in the number of scientists studying the problem.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wasn’t designed to improve the uncertainty. Rather, it was mandated, designed and operated to isolate human effects.
The IPCC let the public believe they are examining the entire climate system. From a climate mechanism perspective, they only look at one or two very minor components. It is like describing a car and how it operates by ignoring the engine, transmission, and wheels while focusing on one nut on the right rear wheel. They are only looking at one thread on the nut, human CO2.
Figure 1, from IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5), shows the few forcing variables they examine.
Figure 1
Their mandate is limited to determining only “human causes of climate change”. Why are “Changes in solar irradiance” included? How do humans influence it? Why not include all changes in solar activity? The top panel labeled “Well-mixed greenhouse gases” is apparently done to eliminate water vapor, which is not well mixed? It can’t be anything else, because CO2 is not “well-mixed” either as the recent satellite images show.
There are other deceptions in the chart, including the claim that the “Level of Confidence” for CO2 is very high. This claim is false because CO2 levels have risen for 18+ years while temperature hasn’t increased, in contradiction to their major assumption that a CO2 increase causes a temperature increase. It is not surprising because it doesn’t occur in any record. The “High” rating for “Total Anthropogenic RF relative to 1750” is a self-serving IPCC assessment. It must be high because we created it.
Why Sins of Commission and Omission Work
Another deception was creating the illusion that CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas. The IPCC acknowledges H2O is the most important, but that is not what the public understands. Figure 2 shows a diagram taken from the ABC news website a few years ago.
Figure 2
The IPCC was designed and managed to perpetuate this deception and cynically do it openly. Deception is possible because most know very little about climate, as the Yale Education study showed (Figure 3).
Figure 3
Graded like a school exam, they found over half failed (52%) and 77 percent received D or F.
Too many scientists don’t know because they accept without checking. They assume, or don’t want to believe, that funding or a political agenda can corrupt other scientists. Klaus-Eckert Puls’ comment explains.
“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements.”
I described this as “daylight robbery” three years ago because they don’t hide what they are doing. Explaining how it is done is central to persuading the public of the falsity of IPCC proclamations, without requiring people to understand the science. Sins of omission are as damaging as those of commission.
The whole wheel comprises the so-called greenhouse gasses, of which water vapor is 95 percent by volume. The nut on the rear wheel is total CO2, but the IPCC narrow their focus to a portion of one thread, the human fraction. The IPCC ignore water vapor by assuming humans don’t change it measurably. In the 2007 Report they wrote,
“Water vapour is the most abundant and important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. However, human activities have only a small direct influence on the amount of atmospheric water vapour.”
It is essentially impossible to determine the impact of 4 percent if you have very limited knowledge about 95 percent.
The IPCC tried to downplay the role of water vapor in affecting global temperatures by amplifying the role of CO2 and CH4. The range of numbers used to determine greenhouse effectiveness or Global Warming Potential (GWP) suggested people were just creating numbers – it was not scientific. The IPCC note,
The Global Warming Potential (GWP) is defined as the time-integrated RF due to a pulse emission of a given component, relative to a pulse emission of an equal mass of CO2 (Figure 8.28a and formula). The GWP was presented in the First IPCC Assessment (Houghton et al., 1990), stating ‘It must be stressed that there is no universally accepted methodology for combining all the relevant factors into a single global warming potential for greenhouse gas emissions.
Appropriately, questions about the GWP assessments persist. It prompted Gavin Schmidt, graduate of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), part creator of the website Real Climate, and now director of NASA GISS to offer clarification.
The relative contributions of atmospheric long‐wave absorbers to the present‐day global greenhouse effect are among the most misquoted statistics in public discussions of climate change.
The source of his clarification appears to disabuse his claim.
Motivated by the need for a clear reference for this issue, we review the existing literature and use the Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE radiation module to provide an overview of the role of each absorber at the present‐day and under doubled CO2.
This form of affirmation is the standard circular argument of the IPCC. What I say is correct because my models say so. Schmidt further confuses the issue by saying,
With a straightforward scheme for allocating overlaps, we find that water vapor is the dominant contributor (∼50% of the effect), followed by clouds (∼25%) and then CO2 with ∼20%.
Clouds are made up of water droplets so the total effect of water, according to Schmidt, is ~75 percent. The role of water in all its phases is critical to understanding weather and climate. For example, the upper portions of most clouds are predominantly ice crystals that change the albedo factor considerably. Roger Harrabin reported Roy Spencer’s view;
“He thinks clouds are impossible to model at present.”
IPCC claim greenhouse gasses raise global temperature by 33°C. Water vapor varies between slightly more than 0 and 4 percent of the atmosphere. According to Schmidt, this means water vapor accounts for approximately 25°C of the warming. Using an average of 2 percent, this means approximately 12.5°C per 1 percent. But, we don’t know how much water vapor there is or how much it varies. Does a minor fluctuation in water vapor at least equal or exceed the warming effect claimed for the human portion of CO2?
The IPCC is also unsure about the GWP as they explain in AR5. However, it is still not enough to recognize that it alone likely puts their entire computer model output in question.
The simulation of clouds in climate models remains challenging. There is very high confidence that uncertainties in cloud processes explain much of the spread in modelled climate sensitivity. However, the simulation of clouds in climate models has shown modest improvement relative to models available at the time of the AR4, and this has been aided by new evaluation techniques and new observations for clouds. Nevertheless, biases in cloud simulation lead to regional errors on cloud radiative effect of several tens of watts per square meter.
They conclude;
Many cloud processes are unrealistic in current GCMs, and as such their cloud response to climate change remains uncertain.
Importance of Water Vapor
Water, whether gaseous or liquid, serves to modify the temperature range. It increases minimums and decreases maximums and carries out other important processes.
As one website notes,
Over 99% of the atmospheric moisture is in the form of water vapor, and this vapor is the principal source of the atmospheric energy that drives the development of weather systems on short time scales and influences the climate on longer time scales.
Movement of water vapor, and its associated latent heat of vaporization, is also responsible for about 50% of the transport of heat from the tropics to the poles. The movement of water vapor is also important for determining the amount of precipitation a region receives.
The effect of the increased volume of atmospheric water vapor is not knowable because until recently there were only very crude estimates of atmospheric water vapor levels. Here is a 1996 quote,
“It is very hard to quantify water vapor in the atmosphere. Its concentration changes continually with time, location and altitude.” “A vertical profile is obtained with a weather balloon. To get a global overview, only satellite measurements are suitable. From a satellite, the absorption of the reflecting sunlight due to water vapor molecules is measured. The results are pictures of global water vapor distributions and their changes. The measurement error, however, is still about 30 to 40%.”
Four different measurements reflect the difficulties in determining the role of water in the atmosphere; Relative Humidity, Absolute Humidity, Specific Humidity, and Mixing Ratio. Relative Humidity is the only one the public knows, but it is also the most meaningless.
Recently satellite systems claim more accurate measures.
Total column water vapor is a measure of the total gaseous water contained in a vertical column of atmosphere. It is quite different from the more familiar relative humidity, which is the amount of water vapor in air relative to the amount of water vapor the air is capable of holding. Atmospheric water vapor is the absolute amount of water dissolved in air.
The IPCC lack of confidence about precipitation indicates they are not dealing with water vapor properly. Quotes from AR5 illustrate the problem.
Confidence in precipitation change averaged over global land areas since 1901 is low prior to 1951 and medium afterwards. Averaged over the mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere, precipitation has increased since 1901 (medium confidence before and high confidence after 1951). For other latitudes area-averaged long-term positive or negative trends have low confidence (Figure 4).
Figure 4 (Source IPCC)
The problem with this map is it assumes the number and accuracy of precipitation measures are the same in 1901 as in 2010. But the IPCC indicate that is not the case.
At regional scales, precipitation is not simulated as well, and the assessment remains difficult owing to observational uncertainties.
The simulation of precipitation is a more stringent test for models as it depends heavily on processes that must be parameterized. Challenges are compounded by the link to surface fields (topography, coastline, vegetation) that lead to much greater spatial heterogeneity at regional scales.
These comments apply to horizontal measures of precipitation, which are assumed to be a reflection of accuracy of knowledge about water vapor in the vertical column. Here is what the IPCC say about that.
Modelling the vertical structure of water vapour is subject to greater uncertainty since the humidity profile is governed by a variety of processes. The CMIP3 models exhibited a significant dry bias of up to 25% in the boundary layer and a significant moist bias in the free troposphere of up to 100% (John and Soden, 2007). Upper tropospheric water vapour varied by a factor of three across the multi-model ensemble (Su et al., 2006). Many models have large biases in lower stratospheric water vapour (Gettelman et al., 2010), which could have implications for surface temperature change (Solomon et al., 2010).
Most climate model simulations show a larger warming in the tropical troposphere than is found in observational data sets (e.g., McKitrick et al., 2010; Santer et al., 2013).
Because of large variability and relatively short data records, confidence in stratospheric H2O vapour trends is low.
Benjamin Franklin included the nursery rhyme, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost” in his Poor Richards Almanack. It is appears the IPCC car is lost for the want of a water wheel.
“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity”, the fat lady sang.
Barry
Apparently the IPCC know the answer to your question. Confronted with problem of CO2 saturation that set an upper limit on temperature increase, even with doubling and tripling of CO2, they invoked a positive feedback mechanism? This claimed that the small temperature increase caused by increased CO2 due to humans, resulted in increased evaporation. The higher water vapor level in turn caused a further temperature increase as a positive feedback mechanism.
So, they only include water vapor when it suits their claim of a positive feedback. This implies they do know how much water vapor varies and how much it increased due to human activity. Can anybody show me their calculations and real world proof of the claim?
I’ll believe the predictions of climate models when they can do all of the following:
1. Derive from first principles the average amount of cloud cover
2. Derive from first principles the average amount of snowfall
3. Derive from first principles the transparency of the oceans (a more transparent ocean is a cooler ocean)
4. derive from first principles the average amount of vegetation
5. Derive from first principles the average amount of sea ice
“3. Derive from first principles the transparency of the oceans (a more transparent ocean is a cooler ocean)”
Mike,
you may want to review the physics of that statement. The more transparent the oceans, the deeper solar radiation penetrates, the longer it takes the energy to return to the surface, the hotter the oceans get.
This was the greatest mistake of the climastrologists. By using standard S-B equations on the ocean surface they effectively treated them as opaque. That resulted in the utterly false claim that the oceans could only be heated to 255K (-18C) by solar radiation alone. The reality? The oceans could be driven to a surface Tmax of around 80C if not for cooling by our radiatively cooled atmosphere.
This is the sort of VERY basic physics , undoubted well understood by the end of the 19th century to which one should be able to immediately provide a link to the experimentally verified , quantitative relationships . They certainly must be required in any undergraduate curriculum in “climate science” . These basic relationships apply to any semi-transparent medium , atmosphere , ocean , or glass .
I’m an APL programmer for whom “more” and “less” don’t cut it . If it’s not quantitative , it’s word waving , never-converging BS .
Basically , the ocean is blue because it is most transparent in blue . That transparency provides a greater chance for a photon to be scattered or reflected back out . My best cut at the temperature of an ocean blue ball is here : http://cosy.com/Science/WaterEquilibriumTemp.jpg . Were we a naked ocean blue ball , our temperature would be about 0.98 of the 278.7 ( I express that to 4 decimal places because the entire phenomenon this battle for a rational future is over is on the order of the 4th. decimal place ) gray body temperature in our obit .
I’m far more interested in implementing my own abstraction of APL in Forth than this stuff which has diverted me only because of the politically consequential nonscience being foisted . I welcome feedback from and collaboration with physicists whose core interest is understanding these issues ( in the form of classical , well defined and understood experimentally unambiguous , quantitative relationships ) to build an open , executable vocabulary building to a quantitative model of the planet in my nascent 4th.CoSy . Anybody who does not know what APL is , I recommend the first few slides of my Heartland presentation : http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandBasicBasics.html . Suffice it to say that a spectral map of the planet can be applied to a sphere with just a single line or so expression and run on any scale computer .
Good start. Now due that calculation for the round sphere of “blue water” we actually are on, and the actual albedo of water at various solar elevation angles found between 80 south and 80 north. See, the radiation is falling between 45 north and south, but the heat is radiating out from each latitude band differently into space since each band is at a different degree K w/r to space.
You offering to help ? I’m “working like a grad student” to get my 4th.CoSy ready for a Google Hangout to uber-nerds by the end of this month or next . Only those interested in bleeding edge programming language implementation are likely to be interested .
The handful of definitions in http://Kx.com's K to compute the temperature of radiantly heated uniformly colored balls are on my Heartland slides . Definitely implementing a Lambertian cosine function on a ball is one of the obvious next steps I’d like to do when I reach that sort of thing in 4th.CoSy . ( Roy Spencer described this approach as “ray-tracing” . I’d never thought of it that way since it’s so much simpler than what’s generally thought of ( here’s some I did some years ago with the http://www.povray.org language : http://glasstables.cosy.com/TableMain.jpg ) but essentially he’s right . ) I really am curious what the isotherms are like on a simple ball . How much does the 0c “tipping point” boundary move with a 0.1c change in mean temperature .
I really am interested in the classical minimalist analytical understanding of experimentally verifiable simple arrangements first . As I point out in my Heartland presentation Griffiths’ “Electrodynamics” which I inherited from my niece spends the first 280 pages on “statics” . I’ve only implemented the first half a chapter of such a treatment of planetary temperature physics but that’s sufficient to show the quantitatively howling absurdity of Hansen’s claim that Venus is an example of a “runaway” .
Bob Armstrong & RACookPE1978,
Standard S-B equations cannot give the correct answer for SW translucent / IR opaque materials being illuminated by solar SW. For that you need CFD (computational fluid dynamics) or empirical experiment. I ran the experiments.
Climastrologists claimed 255K (surface without radiative atmosphere) being raised 33K by our radiatively cooled atmosphere. Wrong. It’s surface at 312K being cooled to 288K by our radiatively cooled atmosphere.
AGW is not “less than we thought”. AGW from CO2 is a physical impossibility.
I don’t know what you mean by “Standard S-B equations” . It requires Planck and dot products between spectra for even the simplest computations of radiative balance between anything other than gray ( flat spectrum ) objects .
And as I pointed out before , the 255K meme is more an indication of how pathetically amateurish and consequently stagnate this uniquely retarded branch of applied physics is . It’s an irrelevant computationally useless dead end .
This is great and adds even more nails to the CAGW coffin with simple logic… however, my pet peeve. Water vapor is NOT a gas anywhere in our atmosphere except briefly at volcanic vents before cooling to equilibrium temps and “normal” atmospheric pressures. At the highest point on Earth the boiling point of water is ~72°C (161°F) and I don’t think it gets that hot at the top of Everest. (Hottest recorded natural temp is 134°F in Death Valley, below sea level.) Look at any phase diagram for water and our atmospheric conditions don’t fall in the gas area. The reason I bring this up is, as Dr. Ball points out, the AGW types not only omit allowing for water vapor’s sensible heat in calculations and models, they omit the massive amounts of energy in latent heat transferred in and out of the atmosphere as water vapor evaporates and condenses out of solution. Gases do NOT do this above their boiling points.</rant>
Are you suggesting that if you have a clear blue sky without a cloud that the amount of water vapour in the air has to be zero? There just may not be enough vapour molecules to coalesce to the liquid form.
No. he is suggesting its not a gas, that’s all, Its vapour.
However its a pretty fine line to tread to say that a vapour is not a gas..
Werner, I suggested no such thing. Water vapor’s the #3 component of our atmosphere and just because something is “invisible” in some conditions does not make it a gas.
By (partial) definition the state of matter that we call a “gas” is a molecular substance that’s always above its boiling point at ambient pressure. It can dissolve in another liquid or solid but it won’t change states and condense into liquid without a pressure increase and temperature decrease. Gases and vapors have very different characteristics. Only vapors can move back and forth between liquid and vapor and a significant amount of energy is required for them to move in and out of solution (latent heat.) Since the Global Climate [insert current term here] is all about atmospheric energy and where it goes, that’s not a “fine line” it’s a large mover of energy. No gas in our atmosphere can do that at naturally found temp’s and pressures. Only water vapor has that ability in measurable amounts. (There are other trace compounds that can as well but they don’t make significant contributions to the energy flow.)
Next, in gas form most elements are also insignificant emitters of radiation at pressures found in most of our atmosphere, but vapors, acting like dispersed liquids can and do emit since (oversimplified) they are closer to their liquid phase energy wise. This is also important as the ridiculous “back radiation” fallacy attempts to equate CO2 as a gas with water as a vapor. CO2, as a gas, has an emissivity (at normal atmospheric pressures) that is essentially zero but water vapor does emit radiation at normal atmospheric pressures. So that’s not such a fine line either.
Leo Smith
February 9, 2015 at 2:41 am
No. he is suggesting its not a gas, that’s all, Its vapour.
However its a pretty fine line to tread to say that a vapour is not a gas..
//////////////////////////////
Not necessarily, since the optical absorption of LWIR in water is such that it only penetrates and is fully absorbed within a few microns. Accordingly, when water is water ‘vapour’ and not a ‘gas’ the size of the ‘droplets’ could become material as to how effective an LWIR block it becomes, and at what altitude it is operating.
For example, when you have a sea mist (or fog over the ocean), how much DWLWIR actually reaches the ocean below, and how much of the DWLWIR is fully absorbed in the mist lying above the ocean?
My understanding is that if you had a single tungsten atom in the air, that atom would be in the gas phase, regardless how slow it may be moving. It does not depend on what the melting point of a chunk of solid tungsten might be.
Werner Brozek
True, as stated. A single uncharged atom of “chemical” anything loose in the atmosphere is the definition of a “gas”. A single charged ion would be a plasma, by that logic. Spectroscopically, the light waves emitted by a hot body are from the individual ions and atoms, not the “gas” as a whole. true – but almost irrelevant at the same time.
But, in the real world, the “properties” of a chemical depend on how it is “packed” into a crystal arrangement, or as smoothly “flowing” separate atoms and compounds (a stable liquid), or freely moving (as a gas.) The metal’s properties (tungsten in your example) are STRICTLY controlled by the crystal lattice and its very strong non-random directional bonds. Thus, a melting point is a property of the crystal (diamond, coal, peat, etc are all the same atom, right?). Equally, a single liquid has very, very different strength and corrosion and stress-strain curves as it deforms under pressure: See the different types of steel I can make by very slightly changing the crystal properties and cooling rate of the same original carbon-iron-oxygen-manganese-silicon-nickel-copper mix originally stirred up. Or add more or less of the same atoms to get very different properties of the final crystal. Or beat the crystal mechanically (forging it) and get yet a fourth or fifth or sixth different kind of steel properties.
Thus, a gas will behave differently thermodynamically depending on its concentration, its composition, and its local “weather” (pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed, wet bulb temperature) conditions. The “weather” in turn means that the film coefficients for heat transfer change as well when the temmperature of either – or both! – surfaces confing the gas change!
RACook, thanks for making the point I was trying to get at with phase properties of water. You said that much better than I.
I have a degree in metallurgical engineering so I am well aware of that. I basically agree with what you are saying. But this does not affect the basic definitions of gas, liquid and solid.
However I am not sure about:
If you have fog or clouds, you have fine droplets of liquid water and liquid water has very different properties from water vapour in which no two water molecules are attached. Water vapour in the air is transparent, but clouds are not. So in terms of how hot the sun warms the earth has a lot to do with the phase of the H2O.
Water vapour is a gas.
Not in our atmosphere. Look at any phase diagram for water and even though (by convention) they label gaseous water as “vapor” note the temperatures and pressures associated with it. They do not naturally occur on our planet. All of the water in our atmosphere falls inside the liquid and solid phases.
NielsZoo,
water vapour is a gas, otherwise air would contain 0% humidity. I suspect you are misreading the phase diagram for water.
You need to look carefully at the phase diagram for water and tell me where in our atmosphere water vapor is a gas. As to your comment about 0% humidity??? I can’t help you if you don’t understand how one substance dissolves in and saturates another. That’s basic chemistry and far beyond the scope of a comment. Take a look at See RACook’s excellent comment above as a better explanation as to why I always bring this up.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_%28phase_transition%29
“Note, however, that the pressure referred to here is the partial pressure of the substance, not the total (e.g. atmospheric) pressure of the entire system.”
If this were not the case, sublimation would not be possible, but as we know, it happens.
Of COURSE it’s a gas. At any temperature, even below freezing, there’s a fraction of gaseous H20 in the atmosphere. That ratio is much lower than the liquid water/vapor ratio at 15 C or 30 C, but it’s still greater than zero. If it WASN’T a gas, you wouldn’t get any benefit from perspiring. As it is, your body is cooled by the latent heat of evaporation.
Another Tim Ball conspiracy theory piece. Quelle surprise!
Explain.
No one like it when someone makes a hit ‘n’ run comment like that. What, exactly, is your objection?
State it here chapter and verse, or we will rightly assume you are just trolling.
dbstealey, once again we have commented at the same time.
We move in different ways from completely different political perspectives. But we move in parallel.
I think we are exact opposites.
Of course we are exact opposites! You are British, and I am American.☺
No. His Stormfrontesque posts are not like this. I disagree and disagreed with those.
But…
Water vapour is the most significant greenhouse gas. That is a physical reality.
Observable facts about physical reality are not the same as subjective ideas about social constructs.
“There are other deceptions in the chart…”
“The “High” rating for “Total Anthropogenic RF relative to 1750” is a self-serving IPCC assessment. It must be high because we created it.”
“The IPCC was designed and managed to perpetuate this deception and cynically do it openly. ”
“Too many scientists don’t know because they accept without checking. They assume, or don’t want to believe, that funding or a political agenda can corrupt other scientists.”
I gave up at this point; I’m sure you can see why, to wit, Ball is accusing the IPCC and scientists of widespread corruption to spread a lie (or something-or-other) about CO2.
[But. Are any of those statements inaccurate? .mod]
The ipcc have an agenda, and it’s purely a political one. Their pretense of doing science is blatant, and yes, they are spreading lies (manmade global warming propaganda). They are corrupt to the core.
Kit Carruthers;
gave up at this point; I’m sure you can see why, to wit, Ball is accusing the IPCC and scientists of widespread corruption to spread a lie
And when actually CAUGHT in a lie (the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 debacle) the HEAD of the IPCC admitted that they knew the info was wrong but put it in anyway in the hopes of spurring governments to action. Read the climategate emails, read all the grey literature incorrect references that turned AR4 into a mockery, read carefully the tortured wording of ALL the AR reports to give the impression of certain things without actually saying them….. There’s an awful lot of fuel for that fire.
Kit Carruthers
You list a series of true statements by Tim Ball then you conclude
NO! Ball is explaining how the IPCC operates the Role of the IPCC as stated by the IPCC itself.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only exists to produce documents intended to provide information selected, adapted and presented to justify political actions. The facts are as follows.
It is the custom and practice of the IPCC for all of its Reports to be amended to agree with its political summaries. And this is proper because all IPCC Reports are political documents although some are presented as so-called ‘Scientific Reports’.
Each IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) is agreed “line by line” by politicians and/or representatives of politicians, and it is then published. After that the so-called ‘scientific’ Reports are amended to agree with the SPM. This became IPCC custom and practice when prior to the IPCC‘s Second Report the then IPCC Chairman, John Houghton, decreed,
This was done and has been the normal IPCC procedure since then.
This custom and practice enabled the infamous ‘Chapter 8′ scandal so perhaps it should – at long last – be changed. However, it has been adopted as official IPCC procedure for all subsequent IPCC Reports.
Appendix A of the most recent IPCC Report (the AR5) states this where it says.
This is completely in accord with the official purpose of the IPCC.
The IPCC does NOT exist to summarise climate science and it does not.
The IPCC is only permitted to say CO2-induced AGW is a significant problem because they are tasked to accept that there is a “risk of human-induced climate change” which requires “options for adaptation and mitigation” that can be selected as political polices and the IPCC is tasked to provide those “options”.
This is clearly stated in the “Principles” which govern the work of the IPCC.
These are stated at
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf
Near its beginning that document says
This says the IPCC exists to provide
(a) “information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change”
and
(b) “options for adaptation and mitigation” which pertain to “the application of particular policies”.
Hence, its “Role” demands that the IPCC accepts as a given that there is a “risk of human-induced climate change” which requires “options for adaptation and mitigation” which pertain to “the application of particular policies”. Any ‘science’ which fails to support that political purpose is ‘amended’ in furtherance of the IPCC’s Role.
The IPCC achieves its “Role” by
1
amendment of its so-called ‘scientific’ Reports to fulfil the IPCC’s political purpose
2
by politicians approving the SPM
3
then the IPCC lead Authors amending the so-called ‘scientific’ Reports to agree with the SPM.
All IPCC Reports are pure pseudoscience intended to provide information to justify political actions; i.e.Lysenkoism. And the IPCC explicitly states this in it ‘Principles’.
Richard
Since corruption and deception are proven facts from emails leaked to the public record, how does pointing it out qualify as “accusing?”
@Kit Carruthers,
Over the last four years I separately verified everything that richardscourtney writes at February 8, 2015 at 10:59 pm. richardscourtney is reporting accurately and without hyperbole. I’ve made it plain here I’m not a scientist, but I *will* research a topic relentlessly. I don’t mind being ignorant, or being perceived as ignorant. But ‘stupid’ is refusing, on my part, to correct that ignorance. Determining the IPCC’s mandate is job #1 if you want to take its documents seriously, imo, so I looked into it. Further, there are feeder documents, papers (published as books) written by people like Dr. Irving M. Mintzer (formerly of the World Resources Institute) and Rajendra Pachauri (before he headed the IPCC)–too lengthy to go into here–that presuppose a warming world way ahead of the science (1994) and advocates global policies imposed with the weight of government money that they, of course, will ultimately manage. Mintzer has a B.A. and MBA from Berkeley, and a PhD in Energy Resources (I called and verified). Pachauri is a railway engineer.
There is a lot to be suspicious of: if you read the literature.
I actually plowed through 2/3 of the IPCC AR5 (I’m being honest, I didn’t finish it). Your statement that Dr. Ball wrote another “conspiracy theory piece” is laughable. (The discussion of the scientific differences of opinion here is another matter.) Even I, the token scientific ignoramus on this blog, asked when I saw Figure 1 above in the original AR5, “Where is the water vapor?” You need to direct your Monsieur Poirot skills to the people who are actually bamboozling you.
“the HEAD of the IPCC admitted that they knew the info was wrong but put it in anyway in the hopes of spurring governments to action.”
No, that was Lal, the head of the Asia group, speaking to David Rose of the Daily Mail. Unfortunately, he wasn’t taped, so he denied he’d said it a couple of days later. Rose then said he had indeed said it.
I dispute the claim of certain gasses having a “greenhouse effect” at all, but even if I play along with the hypothesis, the CO2 to water ratio and IR absorbtion properties makes the alarmists fear of CO2 increases laughable!
According to all the literature water vapour is 6 times as “greenhousy” as CO2. At 1% concentration in the atmosphere (I take a low average) that’s 20 times the current CO2 level and (according to basic arithmetic (assuming basic arithmetic is allowed in these days where 10 page equations are needed to secure funding)) that’s 120 times the greenhousyness of CO2.
If the total greenhouse effect is 33C (another dubious claim as that assumes the huge difference in Albedo between the Earth and the Moon is irrelevant) then CO2’s total role is no more than 0.28C (rounded up!) and man’s role in the last 160 years of temperature change to be <0.1C
In addition to the issues raised by Tim in his article, there is also the issue of transfer of latent heat through evapotranspiration. As an example, consider heating of the land where soils are very dry, and there is no latent energy absorbed during evaporation, leading to run way local warming. Compare this to the simple conclusion of the IPCC that CO2 = warming = more evaporation = positive feedback. In the case of heating of dry soils, increased water and evaporation retard temperature increase. And that’s just pne of many such examples where water vapour effects are counter intuitive. It just ain’t simple, and yet so many believe that it is simple.
Water vapour dominates climate in numerous ways, and yet current climate science only considers greenhouse feedback important, and this goes mostly unquantified. Feedback is estimated from paleoclimate records, even though in the past we have never had the situation where CO2 increases precede temperature increase (so the paleoclimate records are not analogous to the present, obviously). In climate modelling, many of water vapours impacts are simply ignored, or cast aside as a work in progress.
Yet the warmies declare the science is settled: “science sez CO2 means warming, and yous say it’s not, so yous are anti-science deniers”. Really, that is the argument the warmies have resorted to, go check HotWhopper. [sigh].
Whilst water vapour effects remain a mostly unanswered question, we simply do not know how increasing CO2 will impact on global warming. How much and how fast? Climate science has a long way to go to quantify all of the phenomena associated, and the debate on greenhouse policy must take this uncertainty into account.
The water vapour argument is that it responds to the other forcing and has no independent impact (as water vapour is always available in excess).
This is actually correct.
The failing of the alarmists is not the idea that water vapour adjusts in response to other forcings.
The failing of the alarmists is the idea that nothing else adjusts in response to other forcings
Quite succinct! (+1000)
The decision making paradigm between the skeptics and the believers of AGW is very different and it would difficult to come up with a sound discussion and resolve the issue. The skeptics have moved towards more rigorous analysis of raw data and soundness of the assumptions of the models used. On the other hand, to the believers the smoothing of raw data and dropping of major causes such as water vapor does not matter. To the believers, the most important fact is to get the politicians, decision makers and the public to move in the direction of what they believe is the salvation of the world and they think they are succeeding it. In fact any sound decision maker from the simple home owner to big business takes insurance in case their decision is faulty or there are unforeseen events that will prove their decision wrong and result to disaster for their home or businesses. A sound decision maker if goes for the believer side he should finance the skeptical studies so he will be ready to take corrective actions if his current actions is proven to be a failure. However, this is not happening because the believers have complete faith on the correctness of their actions and in fact they are concentrating the studies and researches to further support their position. they do not feel or appreciate the need for an insurance as they have more than 100 per cent confident they are correct and what is needed is more propaganda to convert the skeptics to their side. It does not matter if IPPC will ignore water vapor and even other non-man made factors affecting climate change. On the extreme side to some “believers” climate change is not even important but the real mission is to alter human society back to the concept of the noble savage that has always been popular in the human dreams making fictions such as robinson Crusoe or current TV shows on being marooned in islands to philosophical works.
“…they believe is the salvation of the world…” no, it is purely money, greed, and control.
speaking of water…and BBC…
beginning late January & going into February, BBC has endlessly promo-ed and then aired and repeated 50 minutes of BBC’s Claudia Hammond with Marine Biologist Mary Hagerdorn at the Wellcome (Trust) Collection, with opening claim by Hagerdorn that ALL CORAL in the world could be gone within FIFTY years.
Now, BBC World Service’s “Science Hour” last night includes Hammond/Hagerdorn/Wellcome excerpts with BBC presenter’s intro stating “some experts” claim ALL CORAL in the world could be gone within FORTY years from triple whammy from humanity, pollution, global warming and ocean acidification. that was a quick LOST DECADE.
the original 50-min show:
Download Audio: BBC: Exchanges at the Frontier: Saving Coral 31Jan15
Sat, 31 Jan 2015
Duration: 50 mins
Marine Biologist Mary Hagedorn has an innovative plan to save the coral reefs
Download
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ideas
Latest Science Show: Coral segment begins half-way through the 49-minute program, approx 24 mins in:
8 Feb: BBC World Service: The Science Show: Cosmic Renaissance; Three Person Babies; Chimpanzee language
Note in Summary…Boosting coral populations…
Download
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/science
It’s just … wait for it …
“Worse than they thought!”
run away global humidity is a fail………….
if it were possible, we would not be here right now
Only slightly O/T: Anthony Watts has made both Climate Depot, and today’s DRUDGE REPORT. Excellent!
They say no publicity is bad publicity, but this is very good on more than one level. Kudos!
Just heard the DSCOVR launch is scrubbed for today… Bummer!
Thanks, Dr. Ball.
“It is essentially impossible to determine the impact of 4 percent if you have very limited knowledge about 95 percent.”
Yes, and water should be considered twice, as it would be the means for the amplification of the warming effect of CO2.
thanx to the MSM, the public don’t know this either:
30 Jan: Foreign Policy Mag: McKenzie Funk: The Hack That Warmed the World
Europe’s carbon-trading market was supposed to be capitalism’s solution to global warming. Instead, it became a playground for gangsters, international crime syndicates, and even two-bit crooks — who stole hundreds of millions of dollars in pollution credits.
Although stockbrokers have to be licensed, just about anybody can become a carbon trader. (In 2007, the New York Times had called carbon traders the “rising stars” of London’s financial district.)…
As for carbon trading as a strategy to save the world, Beddoes remains skeptical. “Biggest scam on the planet!”…
These crimes point to an inherent flaw in cap-and-trade systems: the difficulty of substantiating transactions that involve nothing palpable. “The noteworthy potential for the carbon market to be exploited,” Interpol says in its report, “rests on a single significant vulnerability that distinguishes it from other markets—the intangible nature of carbon itself.” Put another way, if a man who buys a horse never receives it, he’ll pick up on the scam. But if he buys the right, represented by a numerical code, to emit an invisible gas or the promise that someone else will emit less of that gas in the future, he might easily be fooled…
In 2015, because of problems like excess credits, the main barrier to carbon crime may be that credits have become so cheap. But there’s still strong faith in the potential of cap and trade, and a mounting concern about fraud.
So while officials wait for prices—***and global temperatures—to rise***, they’re finally tightening security…
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/30/climate-change-hack-carbon-credit-black-dragon/
***Funk seems rather more CAGW sceptical since writing his recent, well-researched book, “Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming”, which didn’t take sides on CAGW, but examined those cashing in, mostly in a positive light, & looked at potential benefits to countries, industries, individuals, etc., if the world did warm, according to the predictions.
btw Christopher Booker’s latest – The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever – posted by highflight56433 above, had 9,226 comments when i last checked. add your voices…for the sake of your children and grand-children!
Pat, it’s now an incredible 21,251 comments. Go, go, go, Christopher Booker . . . .
I wish someone would model the effect of water vapor on climate. I read somewhere (maybe WUWT) that the weather in the mid-west is influenced by the massive irrigation in California. Is that true? Does the loss of the Mississippi delta affect the strength of Hurricanes that hit New Orleans? Inquiring minds want to know.
The weather in the Midwest is influenced by the warm, southerly flow of moisture off the Gulf of Mexico.
Thanks to the IPCC “Global warming did serve a couple of useful purposes. The issue has been a litmus test for our political class. Any politician who has stated a belief in global warming is either a cynical opportunist or an easily deluded fool. In neither case should that politician ever be taken seriously again. No excuses can be accepted.” More at http://tinyurl.com/naexuho
This must be the Brian Williams presentation of greenhouse gasses.
It’l on Drudge now. That means everyone will probably know soon. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html
How will the media spin this one?
Anthony and WUWT and many others should get a lot of credit for exposing the truth.
@Hoser
“How will the media spin this one?”
They basically just won’t mention it. – Hope I’m wrong…
It’s –
Now that reminds me of a man in a shredded suit, long hair, a beard, and the Liberty Bell March.
I keep asking this question. If the human contribution to the CO2 flux into the atmosphere is around 3% of the total flux into the atmosphere from natural sources (very close to a rounding error), how can this lead to any major climate change? The biosphere recycles the CO2. And, it is healthier because of it.
The Yale education study was to measure how many people had not been indoctrinated to climate dogma. From the executive summary these are examples of what people are “failing” to know.
1. 57% know that the greenhouse effect refers to gases in the atmosphere that trap heat;
2. 50% of Americans understand that global warming is caused mostly by human activities;
3. 45% understand that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Earth’s surface;
4. 25% have ever heard of coral bleaching or ocean acidification.
Item 1 and 3 are basic facts, but without context are meaningless in terms of climate concerns. Items 2 and 4 however is BS, politely put as propaganda. It is only speculation that global warming is caused mostly by human activities. Coral bleaching are isolated incidents and tied to AGW only because anything perceiveed as bad has to be due to AGW. In medieval times we had Satan screwing everything up, in modern times we have CO2.
Tim Balls point is true that people are easily deceived because they have limited science knowledge. The reality is it would be difficult to find someone in a Mall who even heard of the first law of thermodynamics never mind climate dynamics. Most peoples climate knowledge stops at. “don’t want it to snow, rain or get cold.”
The Yale quiz was half basic climate concepts and half on how well the propaganda is taking hold. A sad day for Yale and higher education.
Tim Ball’s excellent post (and the fact that lower Troposphere temperatures are rising less than the Surface) has caused me to think that we can actually re-write the Global Warming theory now.
–> First, the theory is based on what happens in the Troposphere. An increase of 3.7 W/m2 from CO2 doubling impacts the troposphere by increasing its temperature by about 1.0C (according to the Stefan-Boltzmann equations which is actually used in the theory) (and then there is some adjustment in the Stratosphere and the temperature increase rises to about 1.2C).
–> There are also various assumptions about how the Surface (where we live) reacts to that temperature increase in the Troposphere. The lapse rate decreases and the surface warms just as fast as the troposphere.
–> But that is not what is happening. The Surface is warming faster than the Troposphere. The lapse rate is actually increasing and the link to surface temperature assumptions is therefore broken. There is not a tropical troposphere hotspot and therefore we can move away from the troposphere-focus and just go back to the Surface.
–> For CO2 doubling at the Surface, the temperature increase is actually much smaller according to the Stefan-Boltzmann equations. While 3.7 W/m2 additional forcing in the troposphere produces 1.0C of warming (and 1.2C when some type of Stratosphere adjustment takes place), the Surface only increases by 0.68C for an extra 3.7 W/m2 of forcing.
–> If we move the theory back to the Surface, we can do away with the lapse rate feedback and the Stratosphere some type of adjustment and just focus on Water Vapor, Cloud and Albedo feedbacks as they impact the Surface.
–> The empirical evidence to date says that water vapor feedback is only 4.5% per 1.0C (not 7.0% per 1.0C as assumed in the theory and is directly built into the climate models) and cloud feedback is straight up ZERO (not the +0.7 W/m2/C assumed in the theory). The CERES and ERBE satellites show absolutely ZERO change in the net cloud radiative forcing since 1984 and it appears to be the same -22.0 W/m2 it has always been.
–> So let’s plug all the new numbers into a revised global warming theory calculation and actually see if this new method actually works and compare it to what has happened.
–> Since 1850, Forcing has increased by 1.9 W/m2 which should have produced a surface temperature increase of 0.352C by itself.
–> Water vapor feedback kicks in at 4.5% per 1.0C and we get an initial round of another 0.102C temperature increase and then another 0.029C and then another 0.009C and so on.
–> The feedbacks on feedbacks eventually diminish (in about 9 to 45 days that is with a tiny further adjustment in the long-run from Albedo feedback) and the temperature increase at the Surface stabilizes at +0.5C.
–> Is that not what has actually happened to Surface temperatures since 1850 when one pulls out the fake temperature adjustments.
http://s3.postimg.org/gp7blh6wz/Global_Warming_to_Date_Rewritten.png
–> When CO2 doubles and we do get to 3.7 W/m2 of forcing, the temperature increase will only be 0.96C. Welcome to the new Global Warming Equations.
I searched here and J. Curry’s site, and see no reference to this. Alternate explaination and not on topic of water vapor but indicates O3 is the most important GHG. Apologies to Dr. Ball (and all if inappropriate but I just found it yesterday). Published 30 May 2013 out of Univ. of Waterloo, Canada.
Quoting: “Furthermore, a new theoretical calculation on the greenhouse effect of halogenated gases shows that they (mainly CFCs) could alone result in the global surface temperature rise of ~0.6°C in 1970–2002. These results provide solid evidence that recent global warming was indeed caused by the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic halogenated gases. Thus, a slow reversal of global temperature to the 1950 value is predicted for coming 5 ~ 7 decades. It is also expected that the global sea level will continue to rise in coming 1 ~ 2 decades until the effect of the global temperature recovery dominates over that of the polar O3 hole recovery; after that, both will drop concurrently.”
Read More: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979213500732%20
Just got off the tractor putting out top dressing 18-46-0 fertilizer on the wheat.
Opened up the lap top to see if Brian Williams was still checking the temp’s from the back of a Chinook Helo and sure as the sun comes up Drudge Report has the truth up for more to see.
Drudge will not be called before King Obama and be forced to admit he hates Climate Change because he hates other race members and [is] not a mullah’s student of fake science.
Win!
Surely you know Brian Williams has far more important things to do?
Suddenly the indicator flashed orange. I thought Oh shit! “Fuel light is on”, I said to Neil crisply. “60 seconds”.
#brianwilliamsmisremembers