Pierre Gosselin over at “No Tricks Zone” is reporting that within a day of its publication, the paper from the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has now been debunked and denounced by German climate scholars, some of whom side with the warmer view of climate. He writes:
Spiegel and the FAZ pour cold water on paper
Fortunately other media sources have been somewhat more critical and report that there’s skepticism on the paper – coming from warmist circles, no less.
Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) here for example writes that Rahmstorf is puzzled that a part of the north Atlantic has cooled over the last 100 years: “The cooling was stronger than what most computer models calculated it would be,” the FAZ reports. Models wrong again!
The FAZ then writes that, “An independent expert assesses the estimation skeptically”, adding:
Climate scientist Martin Visbeck of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel sees Rahmstorf’s interpretation of the results critically: ‘The study’s focus on the sub-polar part of the Atlantic and the spectral analysis are interesting,’ he says. But there are other AMOC assessments that point to a completely other development. The paper does not offer any strong indication of the development of the AMOC during the past fifty years.”
When a warmist dismisses another warmists’s science, then you know it’s likely pretty slipshod.
– See more at: Dead At Birth! German Warmist Scientists Slap Down Rahmstorf/Mann AMOC Paper: “Offers No Strong Indication”
Typical Mann, when challenged, he runs away.
Here’s a guy who thinks he’s the worlds #1 climate scientist, but his experience is in dendrochronology. Really, there shouldn’t be a link between these two as the tree rings give an approximation of the “sum of conditions” not necessarily climate, but he already knew that.
Quite so, Abram. Mann thinks he is #1. Tree rings show not just temperature but also rain amounts and incidentally, insect attacks. Yes, we have regular years every 20 or so in the Northeast where we have all the trees stripped of their leaves simultaneously by caterpillars who come out of the ground where they hibernate.
So on these years, the tree rings are smaller than other, normal years.
Tree rings most certainly do not show us cooling or heating alone.
Is he gonna sue them?
Good one. Imagine what Mann would do if he had any power or authority.
He’d be the Pol Pot of Climate Science.
IIRC this is literally the truth. In one of the directories released with the original tree ring data, there was a record of email conversations where some of the goals of the work were clearly discussed with colleagues, and dealing with the MWP and LIA were on the list, as they were clearly visible on (IIRC) Jones and Briffa’s reconstructions that were also published in AR3/TAR. But the JB result wasn’t a hockey stick, and hence didn’t tell the right story. IIRC there were climategate emails that said almost exactly the same thing. The simple fact of the matter is that there was a body of climate scientists — a substantial body — in direct communication with one another and at the very least displaying their utter lack of scientific objectivity as they were “gunning” for the MWP and LIA in order to support their assertions of catastrophic warming (and the funding cornucopia gold rush that followed, where they were regularly interviewed on radio and TV and became “famous” — and who can resist the seduction of all that?).
But my favorite thing is this:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/CO2plants.htm
Note well — for the trees used by Mann as proxies, we expect to see roughly 12% increased growth rates of tree rings from 1850 to the present due to the increase in atmospheric CO_2 itself, not due to increased temperatures at all! Indeed, the growth rate due to temperature increases is also documented in this short review as being expected to be around 10% over the same interval.
The problem with this is that it means that the tree ring proxies were almost certainly incorrectly selected and normalized across the overlap using Mann’s procedure of only using trees that were in good correspondence with the temperature data and then extrapolating the ring widths observed into the past. In the past there would have (possibly, even probably) much less variation in CO_2 level, so that they underestimate warming by roughly a factor of two by attributing growth due to two factors in the recent present to only one of the two, but not correcting for the absence of variation in the other in the remote past.
Tree rings based climate estimates probably underestimate past warming by a factor of roughly two, outside of the additional confounding of heat with or without adequate water under the conditions of lower CO_2. That is, hot dry low-CO2 conditions actually decrease plant growth rates as they are water-limited in growth and (as the article points out) have large stoma through which water loss occurs, experiencing a very severe increase in plant stress. As CO_2 increases, plant stoma sizes needed to maintain CO_2 perfusion decrease, water loss decreases, and in addition to growing faster in response to the otherwise rate limiting CO_2, the plant grows faster still in warmer conditions even when less water is present, as they lose less water to respiration through the smaller stoma.
This additional confounding factor could make tree rings underestimate past temperatures by an additional factor of 2, or it could cause tree rings to infer cool conditions where in reality the conditions were hot, but CO_2 stressed and dry.
I first realized this when I saw a paper (probably linked through this site) that was trying to make inferences about tropical storms and temperatures using growth rates of certain tropical trees (in the Phillipines, maybe? Can’t remember.). The trees have showed a systematically increased growth rate that the article (naturally) attributed to global warming even though the data they presented did not show any sort of good correlation with global average temperature in detail. It did, however, follow a curve I had recently worked out for probable well-mixed CO_2 content in the atmosphere over the last 1850 years, and the numbers — 15% overall, IIRC — worked out almost perfectly for the increase in growth expected from the increase in CO_2 alone.
This may be the next big shoe to come crashing down on the global warming dendroclimatologists. AFAIK, they have all to a Mann completely, utterly, totally neglected the effect of CO_2 itself on growth rates of the very plants they are using as proxies. In many cases — notably this case in the Phillipines or Malaysia or wherever it was — consideration of CO_2 completely eliminates any correlation with temperature at all in the residuals (that is, after taking CO_2 increase into account, there is nothing left to explain via temperature variation). In any event, correcting for it will, without question, substantially lower the anomaly these methods report when it is taken into account.
This is the one thing that the catastrophists don’t want to draw attention to, but even my friends in Environmental Sciences are perfectly aware of — the increased CO_2 alone is responsible for over 10% of the crops harvested worldwide every year. If one takes the increased drought resistance and increased growth rates due to warming (whatever the cause) into account, the number goes up closer to 20%. We feed, clothe, and shelter somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion people a year with this food mass, with the plant fiber mass, and with the trees mass that we know, quite reliably and on the basis of literally hundreds if not thousands of greenhouse experiments, is available only because of the increased CO_2 in the atmosphere.
This is why even some otherwise rabid ecologists are starting to change their stance on CO_2. Yeah, maybe it will cause a global catastrophe in 100 years, maybe not, but up to now its effects have been so overwhelmingly positive that the world would almost certainly have voted to burn enough carbon to take the atmosphere to 400 ppm regardless if they were actually informed of its benefits.
1 to 1.5 billion people.
That’s how many people would potentially starve if we waved a magic wand and dropped CO_2 right back to 280 ppm tomorrow. At the very least, to prevent the worst catastrophe humanity has ever even dreamed about we’d all have to tighten our belts and equitably distribute the food we have to the world’s poorest 2 or 3 billion people, as naturally the hardest hit would be the poorest and most populous nations, nations that can only feed their own populations because of the CO_2 benefit.
Here’s the really, really sad thing. The climate news this week has been fabulous. Seriously! A paper is being published that through careful work reduces aerosol cooling uncertainty by over a factor of two and reduces the probable cooling itself to a mere 0.5 C! This in turn invalidates 80% of all of the climate models — 100% of the ones predicting catastrophe. This in turn requires one to re-tune the surviving ones so that they work at all with the much smaller aerosol cooling, which eliminates almost all of the positive water vapor feedback which is the only thing that could cause a real catastrophe. The probable implication of this paper is that the “crisis” is decisively over! ECS from 1 to 2 C is simply not likely to be catastrophic even in RCP8.5, and most probable ECS is on the low side of this range, with basically no net feedback on top of CO_2-only forcing!
Throw in the observation that the hockey stick neglected direct CO_2-driven growth and hence is incorrectly normalized. Throw in on top of that the simple observation that the CO_2 increase in the industrial era is feeding one person in five who is alive today (and not just humans — this effect pervades the entire biosphere!). If we had anything like objective reporting on this issue, anything like non-politicized science addressing it, anything like simply human selfishness in analyzing it, this would be headline news.
And in 1 to 2 years, if the aerosol result holds up, it will be. It is simply inevitable. If the strict upper bound of aerosol cooling is only 1 C, it will simply no longer be possible to maintain the illusion that the GCMs are useful in some way. The modelers will be forced to recalibrate the models, and the recalibrated models will, without any doubt at all, show far, far less warming than the old ones.
There will be two important social results from this. It will become common knowledge that the claims for precision and accuracy in these models and their suitability for purposes of “projecting” future climate have been from the beginning sheer bullshit. Numerous papers will appear proving what is and really always has been perfectly obvious, that there is no statistical basis for any claim for predictivity for the entire procedure that has been used to “project” a future climate, that every single assertion of “confidence” in documents presented to policy makers has been a deliberately deceptive misuse of a statistical term in a political context. Pitchforks and torches may appear as it becomes clear just how much public money has been wasted and stolen and misdirected as a result of this deliberate, self-interested deception. Second, it is barely possible that we will stop demonizing coal burning power plants and gasoline burning cars long enough for science and technology to do its job and actually invent better alternatives without the panic and without the incredible misdirection of resources into climate research on the hypothetical effects of a hypothetical catastrophe that will no longer be hypothetically likely at any level worth the money.
All good, from my point of view.
Thanks RGB.
Long ago, before I discovered WUWT, I brought up the issue of CO2 fertilization disrupting tree rings in terms of both temperature and precipitation response in what I soon came to understand was a “science” forum in name only. I was patted on the head and told not to worry about the issue, and to leave the science to the “scientists”. Kinda forgot about it until your comment just now.
David, I though of it affecting the recent period (1950 and on) I did not make what should have been the obvious connection of the historical flat line of CO2 causing them to under estimate the past warmth.(CO2 past is somewhat controversial with “Beck”, but, hey maybe they will revive Beck to save the tree studies, oh the tangled web)
rgbatduke
March 25, 2015 at 8:58 am
Hello rgb
You say;
“This in turn invalidates 80% of all of the climate models — 100% of the ones predicting catastrophe.
This in turn requires one to re-tune the surviving ones so that they work at all with the much smaller aerosol cooling, which eliminates almost all of the positive water vapor feedback which is the only thing that could cause a real catastrophe. The probable implication of this paper is that the “crisis” is decisively over! ECS from 1 to 2 C is simply not likely to be catastrophic even in RCP8.5, and most probable ECS is on the low side of this range, ….”
———————-
If the CS of an average of ~3C (1.5C to 4,5C range) is lowered as you imply then you lose to the error 100% of climate models predictions, with 0 survivors left for any meaningful tuning as you suggest.
Is THE INTERPRETATION AND THE EXPLANATION OF THE PROJECTIONS THAT SUPPORT AND UPHOLD THE ~3C CS, not the other way around, as far as I can tell, if I am not wrong.
If CS happens to be in reality any much different than that, then the projections of all of the GCMs are wrong, 100%, none will be of any good for any such re-tuning unless corrected.
The projections up-hold and support the AGW (either catastrophic or not), not the other way around…….
cheers
Whiten,
I have seen numerous papers in the past 2 years (many of which were reviewed right here on this site) in which ECS has been estimated to be < 2C. I think that your 3C estimate of ECS is hopelessly out of date given the recent literature on the subject.
RGB says, “This is the one thing that the catastrophists don’t want to draw attention to, but even my friends in Environmental Sciences are perfectly aware of — the increased CO_2 alone is responsible for over 10% of the crops harvested worldwide every year. If one takes the increased drought resistance and increased growth rates due to warming (whatever the cause) into account, the number goes up closer to 20%. We feed, clothe, and shelter somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion people a year with this food mass, with the plant fiber mass, and with the trees mass that we know, quite reliably and on the basis of literally hundreds if not thousands of greenhouse experiments, is available only because of the increased CO_2 in the atmosphere.”
============================================
Thank you. For years I have said the predicted harms of CO2 are failing to manifest, the benefits of CO2 are know, manifesting, and continue to increase in a fairly linear fashion, unlike the exponentially decreasing atmospheric warming affect of additional CO2. For those interested, the NIPCC and CO2 science document the benefits of CO2 well. The also well document the predicted harms of CO2 are unlikely to manifest in the real world.
So, attention to all CAGW enthusiast, the peer reviewed science based on observations is solidly skeptical and consist of thousands of papers based on ten of thousands of real world studies, laboratory and in field experiments, and fundamental science.
The proponents case for CAGW consist of failed models, failed what if, maybe, it night in the future happen projections, based on the FAILED model mean of the WRONG IN ONE DIRECTION climate models.
BTW RGB, it has been awhile since I read Climate Audit on the many problems with tree rings. I do not recall the brilliant but “why din[t I think of that” implications of the perennial flat CO2 levels being used as a proper baseline for determining the relative warmth of the past. Has Steve McIntyre explored this?
@RGB,
To paraphrase Keynes (The General Theory 1936, p.192): Mann and his models offer us the supreme
intellectual achievement … of adopting a hypothetical world remote from observation as though it were the world of observation and then lived in it consistently.
Too bad our policy makers don’t understand the difference between an ergodic and nonergodic world.
Sorry, I meant that that Malaysian trees didn’t follow the known local temperature but were in good agreement — really excellent agreement — with the CO_2 curve itself, a thing that eluded the authors of the study as it has eluded the entire discipline AFAICT. My bad.
rgbatduke says:
“Pitchforks and torches may appear as it becomes clear just how much public money has been wasted and stolen and misdirected as a result of this deliberate, self-interested deception.”
Well said rg. If anyone wants to know why roughly half of this country’s eligible voters don’t bother going to the polls on election day, this could be one example of the reason why. While I don’t expect the American people to literally hit the streets with pitchforks and torches when this fraud becomes fully exposed someday, there will no doubt be a lot of red faces and explaining to do when it does. I just hope I’m still around to see it when it does happen.
“While I don’t expect the American people to literally hit the streets with pitchforks”
=========================
Really, we can’t? aw shucks. Is tar and feathers ok?
The truth is I hope our system can find some appropriate justice.
The AMOC is the far north / European end of the Gulf Stream (North Atlantic Drift) AND the return current below the surface. Now Mann was all “unprecidented” all over this slow down, and absolutely certain that it is an unusual and human caused thing.
Unfortunately, it is highly precidented and happens to even greater degree with very significant tendency to ‘regularity’. (I note in passing that we just had a ‘super tide’ event with folks coming out to see it as there will not be another one for decades… yet there will be another one as tides are driven by lunar / solar orbital mechanics.) My speculation is that much of the cyclical change is related to water flow changes directly driven by tide cycles in both water and air and that’s why we have what looks like 1500 ish year cycles along with sub cycles at 750 and about 300 years, along with a 5000 ish year cycle on the long end.
But far from speculation. This paper looks at Florida weather and how it relates to changes in the Gulf Stream and through it AMOC (by implication).
http://www.geology.um.maine.edu/publications/Jacobson%20et%20al.%202012%20Hg%20in%20L.%20Tulane%20ES%26T%2046%20%2011210-11717%5b1%5d.pdf
While it mostly looks at Hg concentration and transport with sea level and temperature changes, there’s an interesting chart of changes in the ratio of oak to pine pollen (which shifts with temperature and rainfall).
And:
So we have periodic peaks of warmth and rain (Florida “summer pattern” today) happening when there are increases in Hg accumulation (leaching into the lake) in sync with the Younger Dryas and Heinrich Events. Heinrich Events being a rise in ice rafted debris on ocean floors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_event
So they are during cold events, preceding the rapid warming spikes of D-O events.
What’s the point? While there is a lot of speculation that Heinrich Events are caused by some kind of fresh water flow or ice dam collapse leading to a slow down or halt of the AMOC, that isn’t known. IMHO it could just as easily be a natural shift of the current under extreme tidal forces (and would explain the quasi-periodic nature of D-O events that happen on the same schedule as Bond Events during the Holocene and their Heinrich Event fellow travelers). But what is clear:
When the AMOC slows and shifts, and Europe goes cold, the solar heat backs up in the Gulf of Mexico and Florida gets warmer and wetter. This is not at all unusual, and has been happening for tens of thousands (and perhaps hundreds of thousands) of years. The pine and the oak trees are clear testimony to that. The Mercury is a bit more complicated, but also suggests the same.
So all you folks in the frozen north and tundra Europe, Florida is the place to head when the ice doesn’t leave “on time”… but you already knew that 😉
This is also indirectly testimony for the W. Thunderstorm Thermostat Thesis. Florida gets warm, and wet, and fires up a whole lot more thunderstorms to hold total heat flow constant (less from the Arctic, more via thunderstorms and convection / precipitation). Even now during full on interglacials, it is very clear that the heat can only build up so far before the thunderstorms kick in and take it to the stratosphere for direct radiation to space. Hard to get much over about 88 F in Florida for very long before a thunderstorm cools things off again. Even when the Gulf Stream backs up and the AMOC shuts down; it just goes to “Summer Mode” and rains out the heat…
So, IMHO, this is pretty direct evidence that Mann has no clue about what real science has been done showing natural variability far more extreme than any proposed human caused changes. And just how much the AMOC is an oscillator and not a steady state.
Apparently deleting a rational thoughtful conversation in your own blogs comments section with another poster is not too low for Mann. How low can one go? With Mann we may never know, could be limitless.
Einstein’s infinite
@Someone else,
You sing the praises of John Cook’s “Skeptical Science” which is neither sceptical or scientific. Cook Nuccatelli et al. are a bunch of Mimophants:
Arthur Koestler coined the portmanteau word “Mimophant” in “Suicide of a Nation”:
“Throughout the ages, painters and writers of fantastic tales have been fond of creating chimeras (a monster with a lion’s head, goat’s torso and a serpent’s tail). My own favorite brain-child is the mimophant. He is a phenomenon most of us have met in life: a hybrid who combines the delicate frailness of the Mimosa, crumbling at a touch when his own feelings are hurt, with the thick-skinned robustness of the elephant trampling over the feelings of others.”
Proponents of world government need problems that require “Global” solutions. CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) is a problem that only globalists can solve. Around the world, governments, supported by lick spittle academics and hordes of useful idiots are focusing on our wallets. The money they extract will be used to save us from ourselves.
For sure, it is a noble cause but is it real or just another “Holy Grail” that will inspire the best of our citizens to do amazing and heroic things that in hind sight will be seen as meaningless? The great pyramid at Giza was a heroic achievement based on ideas that seem quaint today. The role of government and academia promoting windmills and solar panels is an example of wasted heroism. None of this could have come about but for the “Greenie” movement that has somehow achieved real political power. One of the magnificent achievements of the Greenies is the mobilization of folks like John Cook and his SKS team.
If the “Science” that John Cook promotes, backed by untold billions of government dollars was valid it would vanquish the counter arguments with ease. Instead the proponents of CAGW have been humbled by unpaid bloggers who have noticed that the “Emperor has no clothes”. In a better world John Cook’s “Skeptical Science” would be an open forum for exchanging ideas, rather than a sounding board for a new Lysenkoism much more dangerous than the one that created famines in the USSR.
gallopingcamel,
Kudos for an excellent post. I suspect that ‘someone else’ will hide out and ignore it, rather than trying to respond. There’s too much common sense for him to respond to it.
@Someone else,
You don’t seem to have any substantive arguments yet you say the people who blog here are not qualified to have an opinion on climate, basically “argumentum ad hominem”.
So you won’t make a bigger fool of yourself don’t try that on rgbatduke. He is a physics professor.
And
and
Would that you applied the same standards to Skeptical Science. Cook’s a shrink, still earning his degree in that, btw. One of them is an ex-cop. Lotsa’ authority there. Not.
Obviously, you haven’t bothered to inform yourself about rgbatduke, Dr. Robert Brown from Duke University, who not only teaches theoretical physics, but is a statistics expert.
The first PhD in climate science did not come off the boards until 1979 at the University of Wisconsin, hardly an ancient science, 36 years old. PhD degrees in Geology, Atmospheric Physics, Chemistry, Meteorology, Physics, Mathematics, and other hard sciences sufficed before then…and since. There are climate science advocates who claim they are scientists when they are lowly social scientists with the science background of a gnat.
And I say lowly not to denigrate social scientists, but when they presume to be hard scientists, they’re not.
And let’s not forget the excellent engineers on this blog who use the hard science they studied in applied science as engineers.
@Someone else, you are out of your league casting aspersions on this group here.
policycritic,
Since ‘Someone else’ asked, I spent my 30+ year career designing, testing, calibrating and repairing mostly weather-related instruments of all kinds. I worked for one of the country’s largest private sector employers, in a large Metrology lab with more than 140 engineers. We received all the latest literature, gratis, from vendors, and I clearly recall the 1970’s cooling scare, and watched it morph into the current warming scare. But during that whole time, nothing really changed. The view out the window remained the same.
My turn: what’s ‘Someone else’s’ CV?
Upthread I recommended the Denizen’s thread over on Climate Etc. link: http://judithcurry.com/2015/02/15/denizens-ii/
It puts a lot of CVs together in one place.
“There are climate science advocates who claim they are scientists when they are lowly social scientists with the science background of a gnat”
=========================================================
Well, well, but, but they can tell you that the oh so prophetic and predictive climate models tell us that there will be massive and unprecedented future droughts and hurricanes and SL rise, and then write a paper on the psychological affect this will have on our destroyed society.
Well, that’s what they need John Cook for. /sarc
They’re eating their own.
Would that be Mannibalism?