Guest context by David Middleton
The headlines…
What’s actually in the report
Volume I of NCA4 (Climate Science Special Report) features this nifty image of projected global temperatures (°F) for several Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios. RCP2.6 is a drastic mitigation scenario, RCP4.5 is a strong mitigation scenario, RCP8.5 is bad science fiction and often described as “business as usual.” All the really bad stuff happens in an RCP8.5 world.
Figure 1.4 shows the projected changes in globally averaged temperature for a range of future pathways that vary from assuming strong continued dependence on fossil fuels in energy and transportation systems over the 21st century (the high scenario is Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5) to assuming major emissions reduction (the even lower scenario, RCP2.6). Chapter 4: Projections describes the future scenarios and the models of Earth’s climate system being used to quantify the impact of human choices and natural variability on future climate. These analyses also suggest that global surface temperature increases for the end of the 21st century are very likely to exceed 1.5°C (2.7°F) relative to the 1850–1900 average for all projections, with the exception of the lowest part of the uncertainty range for RCP2…
I downloaded HadCRUT4 and UAH 6.0 from our friends at Wood For Trees. After converting to Fahrenheit and applying static shifts to match NCA4’s baseline, I overlaid the real data on the NCA4 image and projected UAH 6.0 to the end of this century.
Looks like the forecast for 2100 is slightly warmer than RCP2.6. RCP2.6 is a world in which atmospheric CO2 tops out at just over 400 ppmv and the world runs out of oil…
Most of us look at temperatures on thermometers. A thermometer at the same scale as a typical temperature anomaly plot would be about 64′ tall. So, I took the liberty of reducing the temperature anomaly plot to the same scale as a thermometer, a genuine Texaco thermometer…
Volume II, Chapter 2 features this summary of what the climate would have done without Texaco…
This what they say about the image above…
Figure 2.1: Both human and natural factors influence Earth’s climate, but the long-term global warming trend observed over the past century can only be explained by the effect that human activities have had on the climate.
Sophisticated computer models of Earth’s climate system allow scientists to explore the effects of both natural and human factors. In all three panels of this figure, the black line shows the observed annual average global surface temperature for 1880–2017 as a difference from the average value for 1880–1910.
The top panel (a) shows the temperature changes simulated by a climate model when only natural factors (yellow line) are considered. The other lines show the individual contributions to the overall effect from observed changes in Earth’s orbit (brown line), the amount of incoming energy from the sun (purple line), and changes in emissions from volcanic eruptions (green line). Note that no long-term trend in globally averaged surface temperature over this time period would be expected from natural factors alone.10
The middle panel (b) shows the simulated changes in global temperature when considering only human influences (dark red line), including the contributions from emissions of greenhouse gases (purple line) and small particles (referred to as aerosols, brown line) as well as changes in ozone levels (orange line) and changes in land cover, including deforestation (green line). Changes in aerosols and land cover have had a net cooling effect in recent decades, while changes in near-surface ozone levels have had a small warming effect.18 These smaller effects are dominated by the large warming influence of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Note that the net effect of human factors (dark red line) explains most of the long-term warming trend.
The bottom panel (c) shows the temperature change (orange line) simulated by a climate model when both human and natural influences are included. The result matches the observed temperature record closely, particularly since 1950, making the dominant role of human drivers plainly visible.
Researchers do not expect climate models to exactly reproduce the specific timing of actual weather events or short-term climate variations, but they do expect the models to capture how the whole climate system behaves over long periods of time. The simulated temperature lines represent the average values from a large number of simulation runs. The orange hatching represents uncertainty bands based on those simulations. For any given year, 95% of the simulations will lie inside the orange bands. Source: NASA GISS.
This is what I think of panel (a), “All Natural Influences”…
Most of the serious banter has been about how Gorebal Warming will wreck our economy…
Climate Change Is Bad News for the Economy, U.S. Government Says
By BLOOMBERG November 24, 2018
The Trump administration just published a major report documenting the advance of climate change, weeks earlier than expected and on a day many Americans are occupied with family and holiday shopping. The news is predictably bad, but this time the tally comes with a pricetag—one significantly larger than you’ll find at the mall.The report catalogs the observed damage and accelerating financial losses projected from a climate now unmoored from a 12,000-year period of relative stability. The result is that much of what humans have built, and many of the things they are building now, are unsuited to the world as it exists. And as time goes on, the added cost of living in that world could total hundreds of billions of dollars—annually.
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The rest of the article was even stupider.
Apparently, these dire economic forecasts are based on RCP8.5 and research funded by Tom Steyer…
4 Problems With the New Climate Change Report
Nov 27th, 2018
f you’re like me, you’re happy the White House released the latest version of the National Climate Assessment on Black Friday. Publishing the 1,700-page report the day after Thanksgiving saved me from unwanted dinner conversations about our planet’s impending climate doom.
But if your aunt calls you up this week spouting claims of mass deaths, global food shortages, economic destruction, and national security risks resulting from climate change, here’s what you need to know about this report.
1. It wildly exaggerates economic costs.
One statistic that media outlets have seized upon is that the worst climate scenario could cost the U.S. 10 percent of its gross domestic product by 2100. The 10 percent loss projection is more than twice the percentage that was lost during the Great Recession.
The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer’s organization, calculates these costs on the assumption that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That temperature projection is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.
2. It assumes the most extreme (and least likely)climate scenario.
The scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory that is known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5. In estimating impacts on climate change, climatologists use four representative such trajectories to project different greenhouse gas concentrations.
To put it plainly, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 assumes a combination of bad factors that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”
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3. It cherry-picks science on extreme weather and misrepresents timelines and causality.
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4. Energy taxes are a costly non-solution.
The National Climate Assessment stresses that this report “was created to inform policy-makers and makes no specific recommendations on how to remedy the problem.” Yet the takeaway was clear: The costs pf action (10 percent of America’s GDP) dwarf the costs of any climate policy.
The reality, however, is that policies endorsed to combat climate change would carry significant costs and would do nothing to mitigate warming, even if there were a looming catastrophe like the National Climate Association says.
Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposed a carbon tax of between $135 and $5,500 by the year 2030. An energy tax of that magnitude would bankrupt families and businesses, and undoubtedly catapult the world into economic despair.
These policies would simply divert resources away from more valuable use, such as investing in more robust infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or investing in new technologies that make Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 even more of an afterthought than it already should be.
[…]
The Steyer-funded study is not pay-walled and it’s a doozy!
Abstract
Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and process models. We use this approach to construct spatially explicit, probabilistic, and empirically derived estimates of economic damage in the United States from climate change. The combined value of market and nonmarket damage across analyzed sectors—agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality, and labor—increases quadratically in global mean temperature, costing roughly 1.2% of gross domestic product per +1°C on average. Importantly, risk is distributed unequally across locations, generating a large transfer of value northward and westward that increases economic inequality. By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income (90% chance) under business-as-usual emissions (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5).
They literally did refer to RCP8.5 as “business-as-usual emissions.”
Based on a realistic climate sensitivity (TCR = 1.5 K per doubling) and the simple projection of UAH 6.0 to the end of this century, we get about 1.5 to 1.9 °C of total warming by the end of this century. According to Hsiang et al., 2017, that equates to about a 1% reduction in US GDP from 2080-2099, relative to what it would be without any additional warming…
How much would you spend today to avert a 1% loss 80 years from now? Dean Wormer has the answer:
This is how President Trump should handle the purveyors of this crap…
References
Hsiang, S. et al. Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States. Science. 356 , 1362–1369 (2017).
Jay, A., D.R. Reidmiller, C.W. Avery, D. Barrie, B.J. DeAngelo, A. Dave, M. Dzaugis, M. Kolian, K.L.M. Lewis, K. Reeves, and D. Winner, 2018: Overview. In Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II [Reidmiller, D.R., C.W. Avery, D.R. Easterling, K.E. Kunkel, K.L.M. Lewis, T.K. Maycock, and B.C. Stewart (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA. doi: 10.7930/NCA4.2018.CH1
USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I[Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp.
Back when there was REAL science, had I ever turned in a paper with a hockey stick on it, I would have been FAILED and rightly so. Now, it’s standard to use the failed paper as representing reality. Science is so destroyed.
I’m picking RCP 2.6 as the answer to the question of what’s ahead for the future environment.
This NCA s so Cherry Picked that it is indefensible. Plus it uses a deceptive twisting of some of their references to try to mislead their readers.
Their heat wave histogram starts in 1960. To anyone who knows better, that is a truncation of data. Their is high quality temp data across the the entire 20th Century for the US lower 48. That quality data that clearly shows the heat waves of the 1930s-40s were worse, so they truncated it.
Their use of Mann’s discredited hockey stick paleo-temperature reconstruction (in Figure 1.8) turns their report into more of a farce.
And then there is this steaming pile of poo where they write:
(paragraph 7, Section 1.6, Global Changes in Land Processes)
“Many studies have documented a lengthening growing season, primarily due to the changing climate, and elevated CO2 is expected to further lengthen the growing season in places where the length is water limited. (ref: 173) ”
Their Reference 173 is:
Reyes-Fox, M., H. Steltzer, M. J. Trlica, G. S. McMaster, A. A. Andales, D. R. LeCain, and J. A. Morgan, 2014: Elevated CO2 further lengthens growing season under warming conditions. Nature, 510, 259–262, doi:10.1038/nature13207.
where the final part of the Reyes-Fox, et al. abstract reads:
“Elevated CO2 further extended growing, but not reproductive, season length in the warmed grassland by conserving water, which enabled most species to remain active longer. Our results suggest that a longer growing season, especially in years or biomes where water is a limiting factor, is not due to warming alone, but also to higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations that extend the active period of plant annual life cycles.”(end of abstract)
(My bold to highlight the authors’ relevant findings.)
That NCA wording completely turns around the Nature paper’s wording in order to deceptively misrepresent what the authors said. That plants in water limited areas become more water efficient and continue growing is an inconvenient message they try to erase through misrepresentation.
Earth climate is regulated by water. The huge effective thermal capacitance, mostly due to oceans, prevents rapid sustained temperature changes. Reported short term (a year or so) SST changes result mostly from roiling of the ocean surface such as shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ir1w3OrR4U
The ghg water vapor has increased about 8% since 1960. About 96% of the increase appears to be from increased irrigation. The added water vapor has contributed to average global temperature increase.
Total Precipitable Water (TPW) has been measured by satellite since 1988 and is reported by NASA/RSS. Graphed through Oct, 2018 here
CO2 increase has little, if any, effect on climate according to the preponderance of evidence from paleo to present (click my name).
Dan,
The NCA authors clearly had an agenda. That agenda had to be:
Do not present any benefit from increased CO2 or resulting climate change that (supposedly) emanates from it to make it into the report’s wording.
An analogy to highlight:
Imagine a Roman Catholic Vatican-sponsored conclave to pontificate on the Devil and the evil he represents on humanity. Now imagine that conclave writing a scholarly theology report that says, “The Devil bad, but occasionally, just occasionally, the Devil does good.”
That of course would never happen. The Devil has to be evil and bad 24/7/365. It’s a religious dogma both in scripture and in church teachings.
Climate change is now firmly a religious dogma too. That dogma says, “More CO2 is evil and nothing good can come of it.”
That is why this NCA is nothing more than climate religion dogma. The senior authors/editors clearly could not allow the report to contain statements or sections on the beneficial things of more CO2 or a warmer climate.
And that is why this NCA must be dismissed by all rational scientists.
To even see some of my meteorologist colleagues fall for this crapola is disheartening. We-do-not-and-will-not-ever-control-global-climate-and-weather.
Some incredible cherry picking and biased stuff.
They predict that crop yields will fall 12.1% because of weather/climate change, crop disease and insects which is already adversely effecting food production according to them.
What about atmospheric fertilization from carbon dioxide from the law of photosynthesis?
From the report. “effects of CO2 on crops are highly uncertain”.
For soybeans, the 6 highest yielding years, have been the last 6 growing seasons. This is not in spite of climate change and the increase in CO2 but because of it:
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld.php
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/co2benefits/MonetaryBenefitsofRisingCO2onGlobalFoodProduction.pdf
These scientists can’t even get the law of photosynthesis right. It’s not just crops but all plants:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject.php
And it’s not just plants in thousands of studies but plants on the entire planet:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
That even affects deserts:
https://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html
That doesn’t look highly uncertain to me.
They claim that the number of tornadoes in tornado outbreaks has increased because of climate change. They show a graph that has an increase since the 1990’s of tornado days that had 30 or more tornadoes on that day.
What a strange coincidence that this sudden bump up, coincided with the installation of the nation wide NEXRAD doppler radars at NWS sites in the 1990’s(last one in Indiana in 1997) which could now detect actual tornadoes that were not detected before!
Maybe they should have looked here and shown this graph instead:
They mention the possibility of the extreme cold from several Winters ago being caused by blocking from climate change. Yeah, we heard about that from the government before:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/john-holdren-video-polar-vortex/
“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues,” Holdren asserts. Watch it”
One can appreciate how powerful the brainwash is, when the brainwasher, tries to maintain the brainwash by convincing the brainwashed that extreme cold is being caused by global warming. ….and the brainwashed give a standing ovation to the presentation!!
They discuss atmospheric rivers and models forecasting a 50% to 600% increase in them for the West Coast……….but claim that there is no clear consensus on whether this increase in frequency and intensity will translate into increasing precipitation for California.
They discuss the 11 year major hurricane drought in the US, sort of in damage control mode. They are correct when they state that there has been no increase in number or strength of tropical cyclones……….from global warming/climate change so far, (even though models have predicted this). They site a study that suggests that climate change could result in less hurricanes striking the US. It sounds sort of objective………..but then claim that land falling major hurricanes is the wrong metric to use for measuring damage from hurricanes…………and they go ahead and use data from busted models for estimating economic losses from extreme weather from hurricanes being 10% stronger.
“I downloaded HadCRUT4 and UAH 6.0 from our friends at Wood For Trees. After converting to Fahrenheit and applying static shifts to match NCA4’s baseline, I overlaid the real data on the NCA4 image and projected UAH 6.0 to the end of this century.”
UAH starts during a cold AMO phase, that will artificially increase your trend projection. HADCRU4 shows about 0.5°C warming since the 1940’s. Continuing that trend to 2100 would be just over another 0.5°C.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut4gl/from:1900
the Fourth National Climate Assessment Report RCP 8.5 is a bad joke and useful only as a bad joke. It has no scientific basis, it exists only as a piece of ludicrous CAGW propaganda. Sadly no one is laughing much.
BTW, I have additional confirmation that they used 15F and not the 8F shown in the charts.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/28/delingpole-the-national-climate-assessment-is-a-national-joke/
I posted an earlier comment on this article with my analysis of what this means and how ridiculous this is.
I have never said anything like this before but I think the authors deserve public ridicule.
“The Climate Won’t Crash the Economy: A worst-case scenario projects annual GDP growth will be slower by 0.05 percentage point.” by Steven Koonin on Nov. 26, 2018
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-wont-crash-the-economy-1543276899
Mr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is a University Professor at New York University. He served as undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term.
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The final figure of the final chapter shows that an increase in global average temperatures of 9 degrees Fahrenheit (beyond the 1.4-degree rise already recorded since 1880) would directly reduce the U.S. gross domestic product in 2090 by 4%, plus or minus 2%—that is, the GDP would be about 4% less than it would have been absent human influences on the climate. That “worst-worst case” estimate assumes the largest plausible temperature rise and only known modes of adaptation.
To place a 4% reduction in context, conservatively assume that real annual GDP growth will average 2% in the coming decades (it has averaged 3.2% since 1935 and is currently 3%). That would result in a U.S. economy roughly four times as large in 2090 as today. A 4% climate impact would reduce that multiple to 3.8—a correction much smaller than the uncertainty of any projection over seven decades.
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If we take the new report’s estimates at face value, human-induced climate change isn’t an existential threat to the overall U.S. economy through the end of this century—or even a significant one.
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How many years has WUWT now been saying the IPCC reports are fictional, contain errors, etc, etc. It’s all quite clearly wrong even to a common layman who can type a few lines on a keyboard.
Yet, all these brilliant retired engineers who so clearly know better than the established science haven’t made a dint in it – not one, not in any way. 30years in which the sceptics have got absolutely nothing right while the evidence for serious AGW risks has mounted and the pause blown away in a couple of years exactly as scientists said it would be.
Meanwhile Anthony Watts racks up the advertising revenu and his cronies sell books and calendars as part of his self-described “enterprise”.
This site is now a shrine to narcissistic, arrogant ignorance and pig-headed denial of truly astonishing proportions. And it will only get worse as the days, weeks and months tick by.
At what point are the sceptics here going to realise that Anthony Watts is the presiding Emperor of WUWT who has been swanning around naked here for years? At the same time, robbing readers of their dignity and stripping them of their cash. I guess it will go on for a while, given that sadly, there’s probably one of them born every minute.
Nice rant Donald.
A perfect example of how WUWT is starting to get through to policy makers, the general public and frustrating the environmental extremists in control of climate science who want us all to go back to living in caves.
To quote Steve Milloy…”Winning”.