By Rud Istvan
A sound bite summary*
The climate consensus now has two derogation levels for those who disagree. Climate ‘contrarians’ like Bjørn Lomborg disagree about mitigation policies. Climate ‘deniers’ like Judith Curry disagree about the underlying climatology. The consensus does not any want any disagreement, since their science is ‘settled’ and solutions ‘clear’. They decline to engage (Schmidt/Spencer), disappear comments (Real Climate, the Guardian), refuse to host comments (LATimes), and loudly allege a fossil fuel funded ‘denier’ conspiracy (Grijalva). But they cannot avoid encountering skeptics. Following are some possible skeptical ‘silver bullets’.
There are basic consensus points that most ‘deniers’ “97%” agree with.
· Yes, climate changes. Millennially, we are in the Holocene interglacial, not the preceding ice age. Centennially, we are warming out of the Little Ice Age (LIA); London’s last Thames Ice Fair was in 1814. We are not yet back to Medieval Warm Period (MWP) warmth; Greenland farmers still cannot grow barley as the Vikings did back then.
· Yes, fossil fuels increase atmospheric CO2 while also greening the planet.
· Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas (GHG), and doubling its atmospheric concentration would by itself cause temperatures to rise between 1.1C and 1.2C (Planck effect given ‘grey Earth’, the most precise estimate using IPCC data being 1.16C).
· Yes, water vapor and clouds (to note only the big two) provide natural feedbacks, which in the case of water vapor must be somewhat positive.
Much more of the ‘settled’ science consensus cannot be correct.
· Erroneous attribution. Observed decadal warming from about 1920 to 1945 cannot be attributed to increasing anthropogenic CO2 (anthropogentic global warming, AGW) since it didn’t increase very much. The IPCC even said so in AR4WG1 figure SPM.4. Nor can slight cooling from about 1945 to about 1975, since AGW warms. Yet the consensus attributes ‘all’ warming from about 1975 to 2000 to anthropogenic CO2 (and other GHGs). That cannot be right–natural variability cannot have miraculously ceased in 1975.
· Overly sensitive models. Observed climate sensitivity from about 1880 to now is about half of what climate models estimate (both TCR and ECS). The newest observational estimates are TCR ~ 1.3 and ECS ~ 1.65. CMIP5 mean TCR is 1.8C and the mean ECS is 3.4C; the median ECS is 3.2C. Hot by twice.
· Climate models are now falsified by the 18+ year UAH and RSS ‘pause’, using Santer’s 17 year consensus criterion published in 2011.
· Unsurprisingly, derivative consensus sequelae have also not come true.
· Sea level rise (SLR) is not accelerating. (Most tide gauges are unreliable owing to isostatic adjustment or plate tectonics.) Satellite SLR altimetry since 1979 is higher than differential GPS vertical and motion adjusted long running tide gauges, and does not close (SLR~ sum ice mass loss plus thermosteric rise). DiffGPS adjusted tide gauges do close.
· No historical evidence for a sudden SLR ‘tipping point’ despite previous interglacial (Eemian) temperatures 2 degrees higher for several millennia. No evidence during the Holocene ‘optimum’ caused several millennia ago by Earth’s planetary precession. Papers finding otherwise are flawed, and at least one arguably comprises clear academic misconduct.
· No identifiable potential ice sheet tipping point. Greenland is bowl shaped; nothing can tip. East Antarctica is gaining ice. West Antarctica’s Ronne is stable. ANDRILL proved Ross is anchored, and has not ‘tipped’ before. Amundsen Embayment’s Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are creeping, not tipping. Even if they did, they are not big enough to matter much. Most of their Amundsen catchment basin is not creeping, and its interior is slowly gaining ice mass.
· Barren ocean ‘acidification’ is half the rate predicted by AR4, since ocean is highly buffered. Fertile ocean pH has much larger seasonal biological swings.
§ -Corals may be in trouble from pollution and overfished reefs, but not from ‘acidification’. The main paper claiming otherwise overlooked toxic hydrogen sulfide, arguably comprising clear academic misconduct.
§ -Pacific oyster spawn at Netarts Bay was not affected by ocean acidification. The hatchery needed to be managed like the estuary it isn’t, where warm summer spawning water is naturally >1.0 higher pH from biological activity. The NOAA PMEL paper claiming otherwise evidences willful negligence (or worse) based on the ‘knew or should have known’ standard.
· Weather extremes are not increasing (cyclones, tornadoes, heat waves).
· Polar bears are thriving thanks to curtailed hunting. No matter what happens to Arctic summer ice, the majority (~80%) of polar bear seal feeding is on spring ice during the whelping season.
· No climate extinctions. CAGW predictions are based on overstated models (like species/areal range S=cAz), GCMs cannot regionally downscale an A estimate, and endemic species (small initial A) have strong selection bias.
· Consensus mitigation solutions have no answers to contrarian objections.
· Renewables are expensive; that is why they are still heavily subsidized.
· Renewables are intermittent, so must be backed up by equivalent peak gas or spinning reserves prviding grid inertia to keep it stable; that is a large hidden cost beyond direct subsidies. This is why high renewables penetration South Australia suffered a blackout in 2016.
· CCS is much more expensive than nuclear, and (except in special circumstances) geologically impractical. The Kemper Mississippi demonstration plant is a failure both technically and financially. It will burn natural gas; no coal gasification and no CCS.
· Denying inexpensive coal generation to Africa and Asia hurts the neediest, hindering development. China’s new development bank will fund coal stations in Africa and Pakistan, while per consensus mitigation the World Bank won’t. China and India are not playing the UNFCCC COP21 Paris game.
· Lower sensitivity suggests adaptation is sounder than mitigation.
*Drawn partly from ebook Blowing Smoke: Essays on Energy and Climate (example, corals and oysters), and partly from previous WUWT guest posts (example, SLR and closure).
Rud
I agree on almost all points with a few caveats that mostly come down to “The existing data is so awful that no solid conclusions can be drawn either way”.
I’d add one.additional scientific point. A great deal (most it sometimes seems) of climate “science” consists of running GCMs then drawing dire conclusions based on their output. Those models have never been validated. In fact they fail the only test I can think of that is somewhat independent of natural cooling/warming trends that we do not understand well enough to quantify. They predict low latitude stratospheric warming that simply doesn’t seem to be happening. I expect that point will draw one of Mosher’s unhelpful “wrong” comments and possibly something more thoughtful and substantive from Nick Stokes.
And an additional “engineering” point. Energy storage is getting better over time. It seems to me that it is quite possible that by 2050 or so, humanity may have “batteries” that can buffer large amounts of wind, and solar power in a cost effective fashion. The problem is that until that happens, the amount of intermittent power electric grids can tolerate is severely limited. You’d have a better idea than I do what the practical limits today are. My WAG is that the limit today might be as low as 15% total non-dispatchable penetration.
And an economic point. Leveled Cost of Energy is a perfectly OK metric. It gives the cost of a kw/hr of generation from any given technology. But it includes any subsides that shift costs to other ratepayers or taxpayers in general. And it does not include the cost of backup generation. Using LCOE is fine if your goal is to show off at cocktail parties. But in practice, depending on real costs of wind and solar generation to come in at LCOE levels is delusional. Who is going to pay the difference? Most likely the ratepayers, and disproportionally the poorest consumers who will pay a higher percentage of their income for electricity than the wealthy. Personally, I think that is rotten social policy.
If opacity to outgoing IR radiation effectively traps the energy in the atmosphere and this energy is transferred to other molecules as kinetic energy as well as the reversible excitation and emission by GHG, why does this “trapped” mainly kinetic energy not just drive more convection, taking the gases to thinner atmosphere where radiation to space is less impeded?
The scientific consensus is widely misreported and misunderstood. That bothers me, so I’ll present some key facts. The relevant question is whether AGW is large enough to justify energy restrictions. The 97% consensus is an irrelevant straw man, about whether AGW is non-zero, which virtually everyone concedes, since striking a single match indisputably warms the earth.
The NASA web page on climate consensus falsely claims “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” The papers NASA, and many others, cite are: Cook et al 2016 and 2013, Doran and Zimmerman, Oreskes, and Anderegg. On careful examination, none of them support that claim.
From Cook et al 2013 (Environ. Res. Lett. 8 (2013)):
“We examined … the scientific literature … to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current … global warming … ratings were consolidated into three groups: endorsements (including implicit and explicit; categories 1–3 in table 2), no position (category 4) and rejections” … “97.1% endorsed the scientific consensus.” From Table 2, the consensus includes: “(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification (2) Explicit endorsement without quantification (3) Implicit endorsement”.
They misleadingly mention a consensus on dominant AGW, but the 97% consensus they reported instead was completely unquantified, and therefore completely irrelevant. (Legates et al 2013 reported the true “consensus” on dominant AGW was 0.3%.)
Cook 2016 re-hashes Cook 2013. Oreskes is also completely unquantified. Doran and Zimmerman (a masters thesis) got 97% by cherry-picking a sub-group of fewer than 80 from over 3100 respondents to the question of whether human activity is “a significant contributing factor” (significant not defined).
Anderegg et al. got to about 97% by carefully selecting a group of climate researchers and assuming they all endorsed the IPCC position unless they publically dissented.
There is no meaningful consensus on dangerous, or even noticeable, AGW. Those who reported otherwise sacrificed their credibility IMO (including the publications that accepted those papers).
I thought about this comment for a few days.
Then I re-read the article
and asked a Climate change believer I know to read it too.
Too many subjects are covered too briefly.
A few lines in the “There are basic consensus points that most ‘deniers’ “97%” agree with” section tell us you are a “lukewarmer” — you believe CO2 controls the climate, but is probably not dangerous.
If you were NOT implying that in your article, then I have even bigger problems with the article — too easy to misinterpret !
The “lukewarmers” have no idea of exactly what causes climate change, or what the future climate will be, yet will often provide a guess … when they should have said “I don’t know”.
It seems hard to find people willing to say “I don’t know” about climate science, and the future climate.
On some subjects, the smartest person in the room will be the one who says “I don’t know”.
We’ve had three decades of wrong climate predictions simply because too many people think they understand climate change … but don’t.
Specific Criticisms:
(1) Your article was too concise — almost every issue needed more discussion than the brief ‘talking points’ provided. I suspect you know enough to write a lot more.
(2) You overlooked important basic questions that need brief answers before getting into science details, such as:
(a) Is there anything unusual about the current climate?
(b) What does “climate change” mean?
(c) What is the “climate change” prediction based on?
(d) How much do we know about what causes climate change?
(e) If CO2 was really the “climate controller”, then what would the warming be like, and how does the theory compare with reality?
See my brief answers at my climate blog for non-scientists at:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
You may have better answers.
(3) Readers will think the CO2 lab experiments describe real life.
Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t.
I think you are jumping to a conclusion about the value of lab experiments.
You should have included a sentence describing how harmless that would be, such as:
“If you believe lab experiments, a 2 ppm CO2 increase every year would increase the average temperature only +1 degree C. in 200 years, excluding feedbacks, which are currently unknown.”
(4) My fourth problem is that the CO2 warming feedbacks should be unknown to you, but you seem sure which are “the big two”, and confident about the effect of one of them:
“Yes, water vapor and clouds (to note only the big two) provide natural feedbacks, which in the case of water vapor must be somewhat positive”.
I disagree with your confidence about the effects of CO2 and possible feedbacks, Istcan — in my opinion, your article fails because you are too reluctant to say “we don’t know” and “I don’t know” about the long run effects of CO2.
Your article implies a level of certainty not justified by the data, so I think you contribute to the climate change hoax (CO2 controls the climate) more than you refute it.
There are many good reasons to question the “lukewarmer” implication that CO2 controls the climate.
Here’s my quick summary:
(1)
In 4.5 billion years of climate history, we have ice core evidence that CO2 levels lagged average temperature in the past 800,000 years, and for real-time measurements there is only one brief period of strong positive correlation:
From the 1993 low to the 2003 high, the average temperature anomaly rose by at least +0.5 degrees C., and so far has remained in a higher range than before 1993 (I’m using satellite data). Other people would stretch out the “1993 to 2003” period, and say “1975 to 2000”.
(2)
Are we supposed to believe “the climate controller”
has switched at least three times since 1940,
with no explanation of how that could happen,
why it happened, and no evidence in the temperature record
that anything unusual happened?
Below is what I hear from “modern climate science”,
and it seems so ridiculous that I added (h)
for even more laughs!
(a) Natural climate change for 4.5 billion years,
(b) 1940: Natural climate change “dies”,
(c) 1940: Man made aerosols take over as “the climate controller”,
(d) 1975: Man made aerosols “die”,
(e) 1975: Man made CO2 takes over as “the climate controller”,
(f) 2000: Man made CO2 “falls asleep”
(g) 2015 / 2016: ENSO takes over as “the climate controller”
(h) 2017: In late 2017 there will be an election
for “The New Climate Controller”.
The four candidates in 2017, so far:
— Al “The Blimp” Gore,
— Barack “The Seas Will Stop Rising” Obama.
— The “Rope-a-Dope” Pope
— Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann
(Mann claims experience in controlling climate history!)
(3) In the “era of manmade CO2” since 1940, we had:
(a) Negative correlation of CO2 and temperature from 1940 to 1975,
(b) Positive correlation of CO2 and temperature from 1975 to 2000, and
(c) No correlation of CO2 and temperature from 2000 to 2015.
(1), (2) and (3) do not give ME confidence that CO2 is currently, or was ever, “the climate controller” … and strongly suggest to me that man made CO2 including feedbacks is NOT as important as the CO2 lab experiments, and your article, suggest.
More fake chemistry from warmist and fake atmospheric chemist Rud Istvan.