Guest essay by Patrick J. Michaels
Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.
The story is told in a simple graph, the same one that University of Alabama’s John Christy presented to the House Committee on Natural Resources on May 15.
The picture shows the remarkable disconnect between predicted global warming and the real world.
The red line is the 5-year running average temperature change forecast, beginning in 1979, predicted by the UN’s latest family of climate models, many of which are the handiwork of our own federal science establishment. The forecasts are for the average temperature change in the lower atmosphere, away from the confounding effects of cities, forestry, and agriculture.
The blue circles are the average lower-atmospheric temperature changes from four different analyses of global weather balloon data, and the green squares are the average of the two widely accepted analyses of satellite-sensed temperature. Both of these are thought to be pretty solid because they come from calibrated instruments.
If you look at data through 1995 the forecast appears to be doing quite well. That’s because the computer models appear to have, at least in essence, captured two periods of slight cooling.
The key word is “appear.” The computer models are tuned to account for big volcanoes that are known to induce temporary cooling in the lower atmosphere. These would be the 1982 eruption of El Chichon in Mexico, and 1992’s spectacular Mt. Pinatubo, the biggest natural explosion on earth since Alaska’s Katmai in 1912.
Since Pinatubo, the earth has been pretty quiescent, so that warming from increasing carbon dioxide should proceed unimpeded. Obviously, the spread between forecast and observed temperatures grows pretty much every year, and is now a yawning chasm.
It’s impossible, as a scientist, to look at this graph and not rage at the destruction of science that is being wreaked by the inability of climatologists to look us in the eye and say perhaps the three most important words in life: we were wrong.
This article appeared in TownHall.com on May 29, 2015. Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.
Solar cycle changes is the cause of the majority of the warming in the last 30 years.
Any idiot knows, the mechanism causes that changes to the earth’s temperature is not a change to the solar total irradiation.
Only an idiot would continue to provide a link to a graph of total solar irradiance (TSI) stating that solar changes are not causing the planet to cyclically warm and cool. What is the point?
I can and will now defend the assertion that solar cycle changes are the reason for the majority of the past warming. We are now going to experience scary abrupt cooling. This is no longer a game, we have a front row seat to watch the most important solar event in recorded history and the most important climate change event in recorded history.
TSI changes are small. If TSI changes was the cause of the warming the majority of the warming would be at the equator not in high latitude regions, as the majority of the short wave solar radiation is received and the majority of the long wave radiation is emitted in the equatorial regions. The same logical argument applies for greenhouse gas warming. The majority of the greenhouse gas warming should be at the equator. There is almost no warming at the equator which supports the assertion the warming has not caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
The majority of the warming has been in high latitude regions which supports the assertion that something that cause latitude specific warming is the cause.
The solar changes cause planetary warming by modulating the amount of cloud cover and cloud properties. There are cycles of high latitude warming and cooling that correlate to solar magnetic cycle changes.
The solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted. The high latitude regions have started to cool.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
The ‘interruption of the magnetic cycle’ is what any idiot might believe, but has no grounding in fact. So your premise is wrong [or worse].
Sir, You ridicule all those with a different opinion to yourself, are you infallible like the pope or just big headed.
Take for instance your stance on the gas giants effecting the sun!! I ask does the sun have an inbuilt clock to regulate it,s cycles, or does god do it?
If that opinion is ridiculous it should be ridiculed. And many qualify.
IMO the UV component of TSI, which varies much more than TSI, is an important influence on climate, as is solar magnetic flux.
Sigh. How much energy is in UV and magnetic flux? Since you say these things have important influences on climate, you will undoubtedly need to propose amplifiers. Funny how we never get to read the details about those amplifiers from solar enthusiasts. And links to peer-reviewed high quality research are nonsupportive. So what we get are links to marginal peer-reviewed low quality research. Of course if one is not schooled in standard research critique methods, solar supporters blithely pay-it-forward, echoing this nonsense to others easily convinced of piecrust theories. Easily made, easily broken.
What would be the point of showing you the abundant support for hypotheses arguing the varied effects of UV and magnetic flux on climatic phenomena?
You must have seen them before to have concluded that they’re rubbish.
Trying to lead true believers to valid science at odds with their religious faith is generally a waste of time.
Pamela,
The amplifiers are the repeatedly demonstrated mechanisms by which variation in UV and solar magnetic field strength have been observed to affect climatic phenomena.
Why you chose to ignore so much actual data, ie direct observations of nature and experimental results, is mysterious to me. In the case of UV the observed mechanisms include but are not limited to the effect on ozone levels and absorption of the increased energy in seawater and, arguably terrestrial surfaces as well.
To ignore reality is as anti-scientific as it gets.
An even greater sin is to confuse wishful thinking with reality. The energy in the UV and in the solar magnetic field is minuscule and the heating effect on the troposphere is negligible. The upper atmosphere is severely influenced, but that is because the density there is a billion times smaller than at the surface.
Lief,
Small doesn’t mean insignificant.
Since the effect of UV variation on the upper atmosphere is indeed severe, the effect on climate of that flux on climatic phenomena is similarly important.
As you know, in physics effects often don’t scale linearly, in both directions, ie greater and lesser. Take for example the effect of increasing energy in nuclear detonations with their blast, radiation and thermal effects on the ground and air.
Mechanisms by which UV (to say nothing of magnetic flux) can and does affect climatic phenomena have not only been proposed but conclusively demonstrated in the field and the lab.
Thus, to dismiss out of hand the possibility of important effects of solar activity on climate seems to me, as I said, not only unscientific but anti-scientific, and example of hand-waving special pleading of heroic proportions. In short, the reaction of a true believer.
Since the effect of UV variation on the upper atmosphere is indeed severe, the effect on climate of that flux on climatic phenomena is similarly important.
You cannot so conclude. Just because A is big does not imply that B is similarly big. When you compare the energetics that should be blindingly obvious, but as you say, one can never convince a true believer that his view is false.
Oops. My response would benefit from editing, but you get the idea.
Leif,
It’s not the instantaneous energy that matters, but the time integral of the difference between high UV periods and low UV periods that matters, and the effects thereof on specific climatic phenomena.
I don’t have “belief” in any hypothesis. I just go where the evidence leads. IMO it’s preposterous to imagine that variation in solar activity doesn’t affect the climate of Earth and other planets. All available evidence tells me that it does. Which should come as no surprise.
Those who d*ny a major solar influence on cyclical “climate change” remind me of the geologists of my youth who claimed that the fit between South America and Africa was simply a coincidence and those in the 17th century who imagined that fossils just accidentally happened to resemble living things, before your compatriot Steno, a Catholic convert, conclusively demonstrated that assumption false, thanks to sharks’ teeth.
It’s not the instantaneous energy that matters, but the time integral of the difference between high UV periods and low UV periods that matters, and the effects thereof on specific climatic phenomena.
There is absolutely no evidence for that and no theory or model that explains how that would work. You are invited to come up with the detailed numerical calculations that support your claim.
For the rest of your comment: they are just the usual silly analogies that are totally irrelevant and are all simply fallacies ranging all over the map. Here is another one that you would appreciate: a stone cannot fly, you cannot fly, ergo you are a stone.
Recent cosmic ray study, finding a statistically significant effect on year-to-year temperature fluctuations of solar-modulated GCR flux. Naturally its authors had to d*ny any secular, longer term affect on climate in order to get published, but despite such obligatory genuflection toward the orthodoxy, how could the cumulative effect of decades of temperature differences not affect climate?
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-cosmic-fluctuations-global-temperatures-doesnt.html
Your link states: “We find no measurable evidence of a causal effect linking CR to the overall 20th-century warming trend”. Enough said.
how could the cumulative effect of decades of temperature differences not affect climate
Because the evidence for it is not there:
http://www.leif.org/research/PNAS-No-Evidence-CR-GT.png
Their conclusion:
Our results suggest weak to moderate coupling between CR and year-to-year changes of GT. They resonate with the physical and chemical evidence emerging from laboratory studies suggesting a theoretical dynamic link between galactic CR and GT. However, we find that the realized effect is modest at best, and only recoverable when the secular trend in GT is removed (by first-differencing). Thus, it is important to stress that they do not suggest that CR influences can explain global warming and should not be misinterpreted as being in conflict with the IPCC (25). Indeed, the opposite is true: we show specifically that CR cannot explain secular warming, a trend that the consensus attributes to anthropogenic forcing. Nonetheless, the results verify the presence of a nontraditional forcing in the climate system, an effect that represents another interesting piece of the puzzle in our understanding of factors influencing climate variability.
——
The sun can have and does have a small effect [even the 0.1% TSI variation translates to a 0.1K delta T]. The main issue is whether the sun is a major driver, and clearly as your link shows, it is not. Are you now convinced?
Lief,
Whose temperature “data” are those?
Any significant divergence is probably due to tampering with the record.
If you mean the plot on comment lsvalgaard May 31, 2015 at 10:46 pm the answer is that it comes from your link to the PNAS paper as you would have known if you even bothered to read that paper before claiming that it supported your belief. And, yes, if the data don’t support your belief, there must obviously be something wrong with the data…
Lief,
That doesn’t answer my question.
I looked for the source in the paper.
The correlation is good until near the end, when the “data” appear adjusted warmer.
As I said, although I haven’t contacted its authors, I suspect that the verbiage you cite and which I mentioned was inserted so that it could survive review.
Then your question was ill-posed. As for ‘surviving review’, I think it is just the opposite: they find no correlation, but in order to show the relevance of their work [and obtaining funding] it is important to claim that at least some of it seems to be climate related. I use the same trick and it works really well. Here is the last line of our press release for the upcoming IAU general assembly in August:
“This revision of the sunspot number has thus numerous implications for studies of the solar dynamo, space climate, and possibly terrestrial climate change.”
You cannot have looked carefully enough. The paper says: “. The GT record we used is the HadCRUT3 set of the United Kingdom’s Met Office”.
Leif,
You’re right that I could have been clearer.
Love your boiler plate buzzword “trick”. A lot more legitimate than “Mike’s Nature trick”.
Good morning.
Leif,
My question was rhetorical. I assumed it was HadCRU, but didn’t look closely enough.
Since it is HadCRU, ’nuff said. Worse than worthless garbage.
As I said: if the data do not support your belief they are deemed worthless.
I’m amazed they’ve managed to hold off on admitting at least some error this long. I had the audacity this week to point out some errors in a Cosmos episode on global warming hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I was accused of being a mindless minion of Fox news and was bombarded with 20 You Tube Videos ‘proving’ CAGW. You Tube Videos! It’s hard to believe that anyone can still insist that this is ‘settled science’. I’ve been arguing about CAGW for almost 18 years and I have to admit…it loses some of the sport when the theory you’re arguing about is proving itself wrong with every passing year.
Here’s the thing, a cooling planet doesn’t actually ruin CAGW. 18, 20, 35 years of cooling…or for that matter 18 to 50 years of warming. It doesn’t validate or ruin CAGW in any way. The original assertion that Co2 is now the main driver for global climate hinges on what happens to the heat. We know beyond doubt that Co2 and IR have a lovely relationship. What we don’t know, and this is what Lindzen and others have focused some of there time on, where does that heat go? What are the key and supporting interactions…water vapour, arisols, ocean heat transfer, solar cycles. We don’t know enough to be concrete in our assertions. As for CAGW, we may yet experience a warm glut of water that has been ruminating in the deep which will raise surface temps 2C within the next 35 years…WTF knows? Its not looking like that will happen, and every day its looking like Co2 does not drive today’s climate. To kill CAGW we have to deal with the theory, because as any zealot will tell you…the warming may yet come…which on its head will mean nothing. That’s where we’re at
They will tell you, as the planet cools, that it would be colder if not for AGW
Scott
Whenever they bring out Fox News it tells me the limitations of their intellectual capacity. The Left have been told what to think for so many generations, that they no longer know HOW to think. Gullible bobble heads all.
Sturgishooper….Pamela will only believe what her opinion leader says. No point in trying to convince her of anything. Science has nothing to do with it.
They do not admit being wrong because they use a different measurement of wrong.
According to the temperature data there has been a warming trend, and so they declare their models are correct since they also show a warming trend. The specifics of the warming trend are glossed over because as they say, “THERE IS A WARMING TREND, SHUT-UP ABOUT IT ALREADY.”
Yes there has been a trend, but their trend is a gross exaggeration of what actually occurred and is occurring, and they ignore the 2 decade halt in the warming trend. This is of course dishonest. Courts expect the truth the whole truth… Partial truth is considered a lie. They are using a partial truth to lie.
If the warming trend ticks up again they will claim credit for predicting it, (no matter how accurately or not) and if the trend goes towards cooling it is because they have saved the world. Taking credit for what ever happens up or down is normally the provenance of shallow politicians. That climate scientists thought this a good model, so to speak, to follow remains unfortunate.
The executive reports by the wordsmiths have gone in the exact opposite of the indicated prediction errors. That alone should tell any reasonable person that this is not science. Back to the chart, it’s going to look a lot worse when the AMO pulls the hiatus into an outright decline while the sky hook projections are going off the charts. Slope differences at the margin will be glaring and will require even more ignoring of the facts and name calling by the green cultural revolution zealots.
Yes am also expecting the cooling to start over the northern Atlantic area of the NH. The clues are there be had from the last ice age. Get the right weather patterns turning up often enough and for long enough and it can set up the right conditions for taking the Atlantic side of the NH into climate cooling.
Patrick J. Michaels,
Excellent applied reasoning on observed nature.
John
The UN IPCC AR5 WGI report clearly showed and established the failure of its climate models in Chapter 11 Figure 11.25a of the report as noted at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/07/un-wgii-report-relies-on-exaggerated-climate-model-results/
Amazingly they just ignored their own evidence of model failure and proceeded to use these flawed models to frame all their doom and gloom projections in tens of thousands of pages of purely speculative baloney contained in the WG!! and !!! reports. This action is simply beyond incompetence and demonstrates that political ideology drives the climate alarmist movement.
With The pope and obama in their pockets, they dont need to admit they are wrong.
global warming is for damis ?
Pavel,
?damis? Perhaps as in the idea that the climatologists of global warming are aretalogi and not scientists?
John
?”Dummies”? lol
Janice, I found Jimbo – he was over at notrickszone the other day
spreading the kinks?
well, ‘links’ (must be Friday)
Bubba Cow! Thank you, so much, for telling me!! I’ve really been concerned about Jimbo. He was so consistently present… . Getting the kinks out with the links :).
I wonder why he and Gail Combs who also posted many great links are now frequenting other blogs… . Just wondering.
Have a great weekend enjoying those lovely sea port bell wind chimes,
Janice
Read the details and the drafting errors from the Paris agreement after the fact.
some thinks going wrong is here : http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/geo/index.php?satellite=fy2e&channel=ir2&coverage=fd&file=jpg&imgoranim=8&anim_method=flash
“The End Of The World”
Why does the sun go on shining
Why does the sea rush to shore
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world
‘Cause I know I’m not right any more
Why do the birds go on singing
Why do the stars twinkle along
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world
It ended when I had to admit, I’m wrong
I wake up in the morning and I wonder
Why everything’s the same as it was
I can’t understand, no, I can’t understand
How the climate goes on the way it does
Why does my heart go on beating
Why do these eyes of mine cry
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world
It ended when the funding said goodbye
Why does my heart go on beating
Why do these eyes of mine cry
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world
It ended when the funding said goodbye
Tom J on May 29, 2015 at 2:26 pm
– – – – –
Tom J,
That is a nice oldies makeover and perfectly on topic.
John
Of course, the problem is that they and their backers have nothing to lose by being wrong as long as they are believed. (Except their personal integrity for those who see but will not say what they see.)
No its new begining
please more Comments I,m not aderstend ,its real or samting stiupid
some
Hang up and dial “911.”
Models are not tuned to volcanos
“Some people believe the climate models perform well
in general because they can show the dips and rebounds
associated with volcanic eruptions. Those people are
mistaken. It is only because climate models are
forced to simulate those volcano induced dips
that they show up at all. Climate scientists created a dataset
called stratospheric aerosol optical thickness or aerosol optical depth
to make their models respond accordingly. (See the GISS webpage
Forcings in GISS Climate Model – Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness —
— the papers linked at the bottom of that GISS webpage {http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/ }
describe how the modelers estimated that data;
that is, for most of the time period of the dataset,
the data are not based on direct measurements.) ***”
Source: Climate Models Fail, Bob Tisdale, pp. 94-95 (2013)
Steven Mosher,
Looking at what Patrick J. Michaels said,
The models do attempt to account historically for volcanic effects.
So, both of your statements can be true.
John
The models were wrong going forward, and they couldn’t get them to go back either. The LIA and MWP weren’t that long ago. To cover those events, they said it didn’t happen, it was local and not world wide. ( both events have been shown to be world wide). CAGW main evidence is the correlation between co2 and temp. If you look at the chat they drew up, do you see a change in temps during any of those times? If the temps changed, then the co2 levels would have had to change. Then they would have been left with having to explain where the co2 came from or went.
So
haha
#(:)) Well, good for you, Pavel, to be such a good sport. Try asking your question again. If you are seeking arguments and evidence for why AGW (human CO2 caused global warming) is not “science,” but mere speculation only, use the Search box in the right hand margin of this page. WUWT has TONS of great articles for you to read to learn the facts about CO2.
Best Wishes,
Janice
By the time the Theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is proven wrong we’ll all be dead and buried.
The politicians and “marketeers of doom” will have made and spent all of their money.
By then, the next set of politicians and “marketeers of doom” will have selected another crisis that will also play out over two lifetimes, guaranteeing new money for the complicit and punishment for the dissenters.
Sadly, this is the way the real world works.
“The politicians and “marketeers of doom” will have made and spent all of their money.”
Their money?
Not until you pry their climate models from their cold dead fingers……
Careful now, they will claim that is a death threat!
And the fourth (and most important) word: “Sorry”
A lot of AGW bellwethers will have to die.
Then a new generation of bellwethers will realise the whole AGW scam was an expensive madness.
They will ridicule the previous generation of AGW believers while putting the climate record straight.
AGW money will dry up and the carbon dioxide religion will melt away.
AGW will be consigned to the dustbin of history and become the vilified standard by which all junk science is measured.
If the science is settled why is more than one GCM required? If it isn’t settled, and the models use different science, then an average of models is meaningless. That, in a nutshell, is why climate science and the claims about global warming are a crock.
I imagine the alarmists are hoping the warming will recommence, in which case the global warming propaganda will redouble. If the temperature levels-out or falls, then they won’t admit they were wrong, instead they will just walk away whistling to look for another scam to promote.
That’s the way cowboys operate. Only accept responsibility where you stand to gain from doing so,
they will go to there graves still believing in global warming
In reply to:
Why do you continue to make the same silly comments concerning TSI? Changes in TSI did not cause the planet to warm and is not the reason why there is sudden cooling of both poles of the planet.
What you are doing is creating a straw dog, to distract the reader from the real cause.
You have no idea what is happening to the sun and you have no idea how changes to the solar cycle affects planetary temperature.
You have ignored the fact that sunspots are shrinking and now disappearing.
You have provided no physical explanation as to why sunspots were shrinking and now disappearing. The sunspots have observationally changed. The is a physical reason for the observational change in sunspots.
You ignore observations that disprove your beliefs. Cult science is what Feynman calls people who continue to support a hypothesis that has been disproved by observations.
Do you have anything beyond name calling and repeating your old tired beliefs?
The sun modulates planetary cloud cover.
The solar cycle has been interrupted which will and has caused an increase in high latitude cloud cover which explains the sudden cooling of both poles.
What is currently happening to the sun has happened again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again … which explains how the late Gerald Bond has able to find 22 cycles all of which correlate to solar cycle changes which is the limit of the paleo proxy.
The interruption to the solar cycle is also the reason for the sudden increase in rainfall, see Little Ice Age for what to expect next in terms of the regions and type of effects, however the actual cooling be more sever, similar to the 8200 BP abrupt cooling event.
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_4096_4500.jpg
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_4096_HMII.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
That is exactly correct. You said it well.
Well put William, It is indeed the sun and nothing to do with TSI, the sun’s behaviour and it’s cycles are controlled by the positions of the large giant planets. It is not gravitation but the feed back of charge that enters the poles of the sun and exits approx. 30 degrees north and south in that band. This planetary positioning gives us both the length and strength of the solar cycles. It is this charge [ the missing 95% of the universe} that gives our Earth the warm periods and the ice ages. The solar system tilt to the galaxy and our positioning in or near galactic arms also play a part. CO2 does diddly squat.
as France’s top Climate Diplomat, Laurence Tubiana said at the Carbon Expo 2015 in Barcelona this week, it (CAGW) is not an ideological question, it’s an economic question. science doesn’t come into it.
Tubiana also admits to RTCC’s Ed King that French climate teams are bypassing National Govts to depoliticise the issue by working with sub-national entities – think California, Canadian provinces or the so-called “seven Australian governments” Christiana Figueres (UNFCCC) met with in Australia, as reported by the Guardian, (UN climate chief says the science is clear: there is no space for new coal – 4 May):
29 May: RTCC: France ready to step in if climate talks stall, says Tubiana
by Ed King in Barcelona
***VIDEO: 12 mins: Laurence Tubiana, French Climate Ambassador
http://www.rtcc.org/2015/05/28/france-ready-to-step-in-if-climate-talks-stall-says-tubiana/
26 May: RTCC: Can carbon pricing be a climate saviour?
By Alex Pashley in Barcelona
The Carbon Expo is filled with carbon pricing advocates, but the concept does have its detractors.
Socialist-leaning countries like Venezuela in the ALBA negotiating bloc reject market-based mechanisms. You cannot put a price on nature, they argue, nor should businesses or nations be allowed to trade away their obligations…
Giving clearer signals to business so they can prepare is critical, adds Kyte (World Bank), and the “foundation for unlocking investment… for a innovative, dynamic low carbon economy”…
http://www.rtcc.org/2015/05/26/can-carbon-pricing-be-a-climate-saviour/
btw do a search “Carbon Expo 2015” Barcelona, and you will find the MSM is as silent about the financial shenanigans that went on there as they are about trade deals such as TPP and TTIP. even Bloomberg, a media partner along with Reuters, has said nothing. as for Reuters, they’ve written plenty but can’t bring themselves to include the words “Carbon Expo”; instead they write about a business event in Barcelona!