Reposted from Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
Posted on March 25, 2019 by curryja
by Judith Curry
“For decades, scientists and policymakers have framed the climate-policy debate in a simple way: scientists analyse long-term goals, and policymakers pretend to honour them. Those days are over. Serious climate policy must focus more on the near-term and on feasibility.” – Y. Xu, V. Ramanathan, D. Victor
On twitter, Joe Duarte drew my attention to an editorial published in Nature: Global warming will happen faster than we think.
No surprise that the article sounds the ‘alarm’, accelerated warming, speeding freight train, and all that.
Towards the end of the article, the authors make some very astute recommendations regarding climate policy, which is reproduced in its entirety:
Four Fronts
“Scientists and policymakers must rethink their roles, objectives and approaches on four fronts.
Assess science in the near term. Policymakers should ask the IPCC for another special report, this time on the rates of climate change over the next 25 years. The panel should also look beyond the physical science itself and assess the speed at which political systems can respond, taking into account pressures to maintain the status quo from interest groups and bureaucrats. Researchers should improve climate models to describe the next 25 years in more detail, including the latest data on the state of the oceans and atmosphere, as well as natural cycles. They should do more to quantify the odds and impacts of extreme events. The evidence will be hard to muster, but it will be more useful in assessing real climate dangers and responses.
Rethink policy goals. Warming limits, such as the 1.5 °C goal, should be recognized as broad planning tools. Too often they are misconstrued as physical thresholds around which to design policies. The excessive reliance on ‘negative emissions technologies’ (that take up CO2) in the IPCC special report shows that it becomes harder to envision realistic policies the closer the world gets to such limits. It’s easy to bend models on paper, but much harder to implement real policies that work.
Realistic goals should be set based on political and social trade-offs, not just on geophysical parameters. They should come out of analyses of costs, benefits and feasibility. Assessments of these trade-offs must be embedded in the Paris climate process, which needs a stronger compass to guide its evaluations of how realistic policies affect emissions. Better assessment can motivate action but will also be politically controversial: it will highlight gaps between what countries say they will do to control emissions, and what needs to be achieved collectively to limit warming. Information about trade-offs must therefore come from outside the formal intergovernmental process — from national academies of sciences, subnational partnerships and non-governmental organizations.
Design strategies for adaptation. The time for rapid adaptation has arrived. Policymakers need two types of information from scientists to guide their responses. First, they need to know what the potential local impacts will be at the scales of counties to cities. Some of this information could be gleaned by combining fine-resolution climate impact assessments with artificial intelligence for ‘big data’ analyses of weather extremes, health, property damage and other variables. Second, policymakers need to understand uncertainties in the ranges of probable climate impacts and responses. Even regions that are proactive in setting adaptation policies, such as California, lack information about the ever-changing risks of extreme warming, fires and rising seas. Research must be integrated across fields and stakeholders — urban planners, public-health management, agriculture and ecosystem services. Adaptation strategies should be adjustable if impacts unfold differently. More planning and costing is needed around the worst-case outcomes.
Understand options for rapid response. Climate assessments must evaluate quick ways of lessening climate impacts, such as through reducing emissions of methane, soot (or black carbon) and HFCs. Per tonne, these three ‘super pollutants’ have 25 to thousands of times the impact of CO2. Their atmospheric lifetimes are short — in the range of weeks (for soot) to about a decade (for methane and HFCs). Slashing these pollutants would potentially halve the warming trend over the next 25 years.”
JC reflections
Although these recommendations come from a position of ‘alarm’, I agree with each of these recommendations, since each can be justified in terms of ‘no regrets’ actions.
I most particularly agree with the first recommendation on focusing on climate variability/change over the next 25 years. This is the time scale that is of greatest relevance for city/regional planning and for industry/enterprise. While recognizing the key importance of natural climate variability on this time scale, the authors miss what is likely to be the most significant event during this period: a transition to the cold phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
The second recommendation recognizes the farce of the current international policy on emissions reductions.
Adaptation makes a lot of sense, and the adaptation objectives are mostly the same whether the cause of the extreme events or trend is caused by humans or nature.
And finally, the climate rapid response plan. I don’t know why this hasn’t received more traction, particularly related to soot.
It’s like allowing wolves to come up with four fronts discussing their roles, objectives and approaches to global sheep change. Near-term, long-term, it makes no difference. The science is just as bad.
They’re also giving themselves a nice clear escape route.
All these years of howling that the sky is falling, give us your money, surrender control, you’re not qualified madam, we only want what’s best for you .. all that BS is becoming more transparent, more people are doubting and the alarmists probably know their days are numbered.
While this might be good news, I’d lay money they watch the public us as much as the public watch them performing .. the proposals give the sods a chance to tone down their rhetoric, to reshape their tone and to absolve themselves of many sins. They got the money, the power, the prestige, they’re sitting pretty – why risk it all? Easier to settle into a long term stable role now that the foundations are laid and the bureaucracies established.
25 year projections means they can answer all the questions about what’ll happen with a rather bland ‘not much’. Sure the slathering self destructive greens won’t like that, but they were always a minority – they can be a convenient enemy for the former-alarmists to joke about with the general public, making the public more accepting.
I am normally not big on the whole revenge thing but this crime of deception and fraud is ongoing. There’s no remorse and their proposal allows them to get on with their crimes in a much less provocative way.
As it is now we can attack their broad sweeping plans for us all because they’re grand – It’d be hard to counter their slow nibbles at society, individual freedoms and purse dipping when it’s substantially less than at the current heights. We’d look petty. Chill dude.. it’s not like before..
Count me against this
“Global warming will happen faster than we think.”
Are these folks incredibly slow ‘thinkers’??? That’s a revelatory statement!
I find it incredibly annoying when people claim that their science is “more right” when things happen that they did not predict. If their forecasts are wrong, they are wrong, whichever direction the wrongness is. It is absurd to claim that the science is settled and then that things are happening faster than predicted. Both statements cannot be true.
Once again, the alarmists are hoist with their own petard.
The benefits of fossil fuels are huge. They are transforming our world into some kind of paradise where there is an increasingly peaceful world with a clean environment and less and less extreme poverty. link
All the Chicken Littles have come up with in 30 years of doomsday scenarios is: “AHHHHH!!!!! THE WORLD IS HEADING OFF A CLIFF!!!!!”
Unless. . . unless. . . the poor agree to get poorer by paying more for everything, the not-so-poor agree to get poor by paying more for everything; the abject billion or so Third World poor who don’t have electricity, gas stoves, refrigerators, mechanized transportation or agriculture, agree never to aspire towards those things.
And the climate priesthood gets to lord it over the rest of us, because they know best. It ain’t gonna fly (pun intended.) But for a handful of Westerners so rich they feel invulnerable, it’s not flying now.
From the text: “…fine-resolution climate impact assessments…”
Don’t they need some fine-resolution climate models that actually work, first?
Fine resolution would be recognizing that UHI effect is responsible for most of warming where the people actually live on Earth.
They state they are going to ‘bend the models’ !!
LOL! This cannot be a serious proposal (even from a famously cautious scientist, Judith Curry. The first question is “How do we know?” That Truth is: they don’t.
These recommendations come from a “its worth than we thought” perspective, ,..and why ever would we turn this over to the UN IPCC for a special report? It would be the same crew whose mandate would be to prove “its worse than we thought”.
However, if the actual effects of AGW are net positive, any alleviation strategy is therefore negative, both in effects and wasted effort.
This statement implies that it’s only interest groups and bureaucrats that are blocking action on climate change. Measures extreme enough to actually put a dent in climate change, such as massive taxes on gasoline (multiple dollars per gallon), would likely be opposed by 90% of the population. Even if such a tax were enacted, next election cycle, the majority of politicians who voted it in would be voted right out of office, and the tax would be immediately repealed, so it might last 2 to 4 years tops.
The real problem they need to solve is to convince the general public that the situation is so desperate that they should be personally willing to accept an immediate significant decrease in their standard of living. The general population only believes in solutions to climate change to the extent that they believe someone else will pay for them — as soon as you ask them to pay, support goes way down (except the environment nuts). And even environment nuts seem to have an attitude where they don’t want to do anything until everyone else is forced to by law (witness OAC’s proudly declared hypocrisy on use of public transit, plastic bags, and A/C).
Agreed. The public generally accepts the warmists’ allegations that climate change is a real danger, when they think about it at all. But the significant sacrifices that would be necessary to prevent the alleged dangers of climate change will never be accepted by the general public. Right now they think that “something” that involves no effort or cost will be done by “somebody” that will magically reduce CO2. When faced with the real changes to their standard of living that are necessary to accomplish those reductions, they will start looking much harder at the theory that would cause so much pain.
“But the significant sacrifices that would be necessary to prevent the alleged dangers of climate change will never be accepted by the general public.”
Especially not if other countries are getting away without sacrifices, and if they are educated to realize that their sacrifices will only DELAY armegadon by a few years, owing tok the increase in emissions from the rest of the world.
I am surprised they are talking about strategy over the next 25 years. Haven’t they heard we won’t be here after 12 years according to AOC and the Green New Deal gurus.
Then again, when have the numbers ever concerned the alarmists?
I’m with you. If AOC said 12, then that’s just gospel and we should go with it. Weren’t the little kids Boxer growled at also saying 12 and that the GND just had to happen? If little kids know we’re all doomed, just as well put a fork in us. (/sarc, if anyone hadn’t got that)
the farce of the current international policy on emissions reductions
+=========
Imagine back in the 50’s and 60’s when cars were killing people in large numbers, the government decided the solution was car reduction. Less cars on the road, less people killed.
Emmisions reduction is exactly the same as car reduction as a solution. Impractical.
We solved vehicle safety not by getting rid of cars. Instead we adapted the car design to make it safer.
If CO2 is a problem, harden the infrastructure. Weather related deaths are WAY down, so it appears we are already pretty far along in being able to handle any extremes.
Climate assessments must evaluate quick ways of lessening climate impacts, such as through reducing emissions of methane, soot (or black carbon) and HFCs. Per tonne, these three ‘super pollutants’ have 25 to thousands of times the impact of CO2. … Slashing these pollutants would potentially halve the warming trend over the next 25 years.”
What rot! Methane is on track to increase global temperature by essentially zero degrees by 2100.
steve case: Methane is on track to increase global temperature by essentially zero degrees by 2100.
Agreed!
Doesn’t applying their own math give them a clue? Since they claim a doubling of CO2 results in 1.5 degree warming, and ‘super pollutants’ can be thousands of times as impactful as CO2, then adding an equal amount of methane will result in ‘thousands’ of degrees of warming? Did I jump to the upper bound? Perhaps it would just be the lower bound and only 37.5 degrees of warming. But if methane isn’t ‘thousands’ of times as impactful, which one of the three is?
Thomas Homer March 26, 2019 at 1:09 pm
Doesn’t applying their own math give them … Perhaps…37.5 degrees…?
Follow this link
https://wg1.ipcc.ch/publications/wg1-ar4/ar4-wg1-chapter2.pdf
to page 212 where it lists methane’s Global Warming Potential as 25 times @100 years. You have to read the fine print on this particular manifestation of Climate Change bullshit to understand what it means.
If methane goes up a few parts per billion it will run up temperatures 25 times what an increase of a few parts per billion of CO2 would produce. The key in all of that is to notice that it’s part per BILLION not million. Increasing CO2 by a few parts per billion will do nothing and 21 times nothing is nothing.
Some research work in Australia has found that soil bacteria can absorb methane faster than the cattle grazing emit it.
http://www.abc.net.au/site-archive/rural/nt/content/200908/s2649444.htm
A climate policy? Do we have a plate tectonics/continental drift policy too? If not, why not?
The insanity never ends, and I guess the insane will always be with us. But why do we have to be ruled by it and them?
Skeptics who assume Dr. Curry as an alliance have always been delusional. There should be no “policy” since human emissions aren’t understood or quantified to impact climate.
Curry is soft soap alarmism, same authoritarian principals as any Greenshirt fantasy.
“Assessments of these trade-offs must be embedded in the Paris climate process, which needs a stronger compass to guide its evaluations of how realistic policies affect emissions. ”
More importantly they need to get a handle on how emissions affect atmospheric CO2. If , as Harde 2017 and (https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/12/19/co2responsiveness/ ) indicate there is little response to changes in emissions there can be little done by controlling them and the cost side of the analysis won’t have anything to balance.
I don’t think that is fair. When your opponents hold nearly all the political cards, preaching to your own troops has limited effect. It is wise to accept that the CAWG narrative holds the field, and then examine logically the consequences of some of their positions.
As JC says “Although these recommendations come from a position of ‘alarm’, I agree with each of these recommendations, since each can be justified in terms of ‘no regrets’ actions.” that’s a considered and sensible approach even if the warmists are wrong, or very wrong.
I particularly like the emphasis on a 25-year horizon, since we cannot know what technology will be available further in the future (and nor can we know the course of the climate), and after 25 years – or sooner – we can scrutinise the actual data to good effect in relation to the plans we have made.
Well said.
From the article: “I most particularly agree with the first recommendation on focusing on climate variability/change over the next 25 years.”
How do we focus on the next 25 years? We don’t have a time machine. And we can’t go by the recent past because the official records have been changed and distorted so much that they are worthless as predictors of the future.
How do we get from here to there?
By using UAH data.
Cheers,
Speed
someone is running out of time….and it’s them
Latitude: I wouldn’t count on that, you seem to ignore the impact of an emotional cripple screaming for what they want to a rational argument. The screamer seems to win more often in this world!
Policy Goals should go right down to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: how can the world future-proof itself for agricultural reliability and sufficiency? No lofty goal is worth having if 25% of the world is starving.
There are stories being put around now that the USA will have severe food deficits this year due to flooding throughout spring. Whether they are true or not is for others to know, but the USA cannot claim to be a world leader if it is totally incompetent in managing snow melt and major rivers overflowing (which has happened sporadically throughout history) such that its food growing belts are lost for a whole season.
River flooding is after all nature’s way of restoring fertility and groundwater through deposition of silt into riparian zones and returning water underground. Calling it a ‘disaster’ shows merely how alienated human life has become from the Natural World.
I suggest policy makers focus more on the question: ‘How has human activity divorced itself from climate variability and how can adaptation occur to ride out adverse annual weather events?’
The science that will add most value to humanity (not parasites) will address understanding of cold and how cold winters occur in different parts of the globe, developing prognostic capabilities months to years ahead; conditions which favour blocking weather patterns, be they Pineapple Expresses repeatedly hitting California, Nordstaus or Sudstaus hitting one side of the European Alps for weeks at a time, blocking highs preventing rainfall for months at a time; the cyclical nature of extreme weather patterns; links between events thousands of miles away (e.g. MJO patterns and weather in US or Europe).
The most valuable practical research will concern water management, from retaining water where it falls to slowing and delaying runoff; to using individual storms to initiate new green growth; to developing groundwater regeneration systems; right through to how to restore salmon runs in heavily dammed rivers.
That sort of stuff is rarely sexy to academics as low tech can often be high efficiency.
As for adaptation strategies, start thinking about the earth not answering to human beings: humans must respond to planet earth instead. Do not complain if a hurricane blows away your house if you built it on the cheap. Either build it properly or live somewhere without hurricanes. Do not complain if you built estates of housing in a flood plain: they WILL flood sooner or later.
On a more integrated levels, action a thousand miles upstream may be the most effective ways to abate major river flooding. That is when national/supranational cooperation becomes important. The US Mid West has far more cross-state issues around flooding than California will ever have: the whole Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio river basin is one giant constituency.
Rhys, I have been critical of much of your postings here, but I must say this one is a thoughtful keeper. Thanks.
Nice comments.
Nature always finds a way to humble us eventually. We humans are frequently just too impatient to see it.
Skeptics who assume Dr. Curry as an alliance have always been delusional. There should be no “policy” since human emissions aren’t understood or quantified to impact climate.
Curry is soft soap alarmism, same authoritarian principals as any Greenshirt fantasy.
It’s blindingly obvious to anyone at familiar with decision tree analysis that the IPCC has been inexplicably negligent in their reports. Where is the rank analysis of the economics and impacts of various options? What gives the most bang for the buck? How much CO2 is mitigated PER DOLLAR SPENT with the construction of a wind turbine? How about a nuclear power plant? What about carbon capture?
The fact that the IPCC gave a specific temperature target at all proves that they don’t know what they’re doing. The optimal temperature target depends not only on the climate science, but also on the cost profiles of all the possible mitigation strategies. How do they know that the optimum temperature target is 1.5 degrees if they haven’t even done the rest of the analysis. If you have one curve, you don’t know where another curve will intersect unless you know something about the other curve. You can’t just declare an intersection point of 1.5 degrees and say it’s Miller time.
Think of two curves — cost of preventing warming, and the cost of global warming. As one cost curve goes up, the other goes down. The total cost curve is the sum of the two curves, and will be a U-shaped curve. That you cannot determine the minimum point of the sum of two curves when you only have one of the two curves is not something that should have to be pointed out, yet there they are saying that the optimum point is 1.5 degrees.
Cost of warming = Curve A
Cost of prevention = Curve B
I think it’s unlikely we have sufficient data or knowledge to draw either curve let alone both.
What we do know is that the first 100 ppm of CO2 added has the most effect for warming, with logarithmic-diminishing returns then for each added 100 ppm. At some point, the Law of Diminishing returns dictates we find a rational mid-ground without destroying either the planet and our economies. Because sacrificing one for the other ultimately means both will be lost.
I suspect that mid-ground is somewhere between 600-900 ppm.
At 600-900 ppm, the plants are happy. And we humans are a bit warmer in winters, using less heating energy. And fossil fuel use is still reasonable for economic growth until the next stage of technology adapts us to something else. Something with higher energy density than oil, coal, and natural gas.
Extremely naive. The alarmists are not going to make 25 year projections. They are likely to be alive and have to defend their incorrect projections. I have simpler suggestion — let’s do an analysis of projections in each of the IPCC or Union of Concerned Scientists to determine the accuracy of their projections.
If alarmists achieve 1% of their policy goals they become rich and socially prominent. We’re talking about world wide regulations and authority, global industrial socialism as the target.
People might confuse a moderate sounding Curry as compared to the core Goreism or academic freak show of Michael Mann as the false choice. That’s GOP stupid.
AGW can’t be quantified relative to nature. It’s unknown. No policy is going to change that. Why surrender freedom and finance based only on populist fear with little measurable cause and effect science in evidence?
Curry is lukewarm trolling and goal post moving. People want a top down state run global economy they should advocate for that with corrupting “science” or reason in the process.
Changes in climate or sea level rise, land subsidence, etc. should be handled on the local and regional level as they always have been. People in Nebraska should not set mitigation policies for Rhode Island. The only logical reason to nationalize or internationalize this issue is to obtain funding from other jurisdictions. Climate is not a problem. A little warmer or cooler will be fine.
First it was “By the year 2100” So far ahead that no person alive today saying such things will be around to be held accountable.
Next its 25 years. That’s a bit closer, but in 25 years those still around will say that it was the best they could forecast on the figures available at the time.
If it cools they will say that their policies were working. If it warmed then they will say “We told you so”.
We are now told by some that we only have 12 years to mend our wicked ways. Now that’s a bit better, but its still covered by what I just said. After all we have seen and heard all of this before, but when things don’t occur they just move the goalposts.
Only by something like President Trumps proposed Commission, with the power of Government to then publish the results and to publicise the results, i.e. government propaganda, will we see any progress towards sanity over this massive scam.
MJE VK5ELL
“Only by something like President Trumps proposed Commission, with the power of Government to then publish the results and to publicise the results, i.e. government propaganda, will we see any progress towards sanity over this massive scam.”
Strongly agree. Skeptic’s arguments need an imprimatur before the emdia will publicize them and the consensus to engage with them.
Neville Chamberlain is smiling somewhere.
Judith is appeasing the Climate National Socialists. It is more clear than ever that socialists are driving the Climate Change agenda irregardless of any moderation and return to reality in cli-science now.
Appeasement may buy some peace for a while within the community for Judith to navigate, but it never ends well for everyone else. Climate change stopped being about science circa 1995 with Ben Santer’s handiwork on the SAR and the backpedaling cover-up that ensued.
Four Fronts:
And just what did they accomplish by focusing on climate variability/rate of change during the past 25 years (1993 thru 2018)?
Nothing, … absolutely nothing of importance, …. that’s what they accomplished. Dumping billions of dollars into personal “bank accounts” and down “ratholes” is their legacy and still on the increase.
Rethink policy goals.
Good grief, ….. 99% of all climate related “policy goals/infrastructure/etc.” that have been implemented and/or rejected during the past 40 years have been based solely in/on political and/or social “demands”.
Hold short, cancel all. There’s a huge fundamental flaw in the process.
Climate science. The one putatively precise science where confirmed by experience achievements are not required. Where models of the same planet produce divergent results and no questions are asked. The science that deliberately hinders data sharing.
So what’s about the “repetitive reproductible” fundamental requirements respected by other sciences ? Under the bus ?
I have a challenge for the most eminent physicists and climatologists.
Tomorrow morning I’ll touch the exhaust of a jet engine. It will be, by my past experience, at ambient temperature.
Ladies and gentlemen please come with your most sophisticated thermometers and help me find when was that engine running at take-off power. Last night, last week, or precisely January 12 2019 at 23:38:00 CET ? What is your error margin ?
It’s not happening. Information has been mathematically lost. Such a calculation would involve integrals and the more than obvious unknown additive constant. Which has to be determined by “initial conditions” compatible with the integration timeframe.
So even those eminent specialists knew with great precision that, this engine exhaust was at 586 degrees Celsius at a very precisely known moment last week, they’ll be still unable to answer if yes/no and how much it had run in the meantime or last night.
Because entropy has made it’s way, and it takes that long to void the time validity of initial conditions as the engine cools down to reach thermal equilibrium and the global system, the lowest possible energy level. Yes, global system, which is what it is, everything, including your kitchen sink.
Because in theory, if you warm your sink, convective air currents could come and slightly warm my early morning cold engine by an infinitely tiny fraction. Or create an updraft that would result in a low pressure zone and bring polar air to cool it ? Which one ? Both ?
All is related to all. And it goes as far as the acceptable simplification levels of our ignorance.
Just a simplistic example of thermodynamics, not even a paradox.
Despite that many entropy driven otherwise unknown constants and other simplification assumptions, climate science pretends to produce reliable results with error margins in the realm of a few hundredths of a degree over decades or centuries. How cool is that !
No Ladies and Gentlemen this is not science but a set of beliefs. The fundamental construction of a godless religion. With it’s dogmas to support the distinction of what is good and what is bad and should be punished and eliminated. And business plans.
And collection of sacrificial offerings. But it gets worse.
This climate religion claims to govern our states. Many religions have similar intentions. Business plan again.
And many wars are still ongoing on whatever ensues when religions take precedence over constitutions.
It would be interesting to finally see some proof that CO2 is actually having any deleterious effect on the climate/weather. So far all we see are benefits to plants.
Plan B. There is nothing remotely interesting going on in climate. Get some additional money to the Army Corps. of Engineers for some more flood control. Get HUD to design a prefab concrete house for the Midwest that can withstand a tornado. Add more water storage in California. That about wraps it up unless you want to get ambitious and north-south crosslink major Midwest rivers for flood control and irrigation. If it is going to flood in South Dakota, send that water down to Arizona, for example.
“If it is going to flood in South Dakota, send that water down to Arizona, for example.”
Excellent idea.
The (new) Grand Canyon Flood Control Dam ….. could easily impound all the Spring snow melt/flood waters (with capacity to spare) from the upper mid-west’s Missouri and Mississippi watersheds.
Just give up your mobile telephone. That’s all it takes
First, climate is not a thing, it is 1000 things. Second, the earth is not a thing, it is billions of things, so one thing to define the planet is imaginary and does not relate to anything real. If you have a global mean temperature, you can have a global mean person to represent the views of the world’s people, you can have a global mean cancer patient, you can have a global mean mammal, you can have a global mean rock to represent all the geology of the earth, and on and on. You can make a room and fill it with the global mean things of the planet and have people come to study them, and ignore the rest of the world. Why is this not done? Because the generalization that results is so vast and so much variation drops out that it becomes an imaginary construct. And so it is with global mean climate and within that, global mean temperature. So, any policy response to an imaginary thing is by definition, a waste of money because it won’t result in anything. We need to stop accepting a global mean temperature and a global mean climate if we won’t accept all science as global mean science. To which I declare that I am statistically the global mean person, so ask me anything, your viewpoint is noise and not relevant and should not be heard, just mine.
Of course the IPCC would love it! Send more money! Send lots more money!
And haven’t we been told that the current models can’t be used on a regional scale or short time periods? Of course they will say “We need better models, so send lots, lots more money.”
I say don’t give them another dime.
Gee, Judith, you may be blinded by just being a climate scientist. You rebelled to your credit and your cost, but what you rebelled against was only an iceberg tip that is the sciency part. The real Leviathin is what so-called climate science is fronting for.
Basically all the “research” done by the consensus is not science at all. Worse, I think many of its purveyors, possibly you, are (were?) unaware that they are serving a master with plans for us all that has nothing whatever to do with climate or concern for the planet, people, wildlife, forests, etc. The masters have even come out of the shadows enough for all to know climate ain’t really the point.
How is IPCC or the Wizard of Oz going to give us the guidance being asked for. Svante Arhenius, Tyndall in the 19th Century and Guy Calendar and Exxon scientists in the 20th, gave us a fair foundation to work from. Guy Callandar, a steam engineer in the 20s and 30s gave us a model that’s still the closest to today’s observations! Exxon scientists gave us an ECS of 1.5C but even argued that clouds and other agencies could make this less.
What kind of a science with hundreds of billions spent and tens of trillions laid out to combat a problem that hasn’t manifested itself, a science that has not progressed, has not refined and honed in on better numbers for the CO2 effect, has ignored natural variation which we know to be much greater than anything we’ve had to deal with today, has purposefully destroyed the database so that it’s useless for discovering real effects?
Nothing like having Trump beginning to set up a group to definitively investigate all this and arrive at real conclusions to have the status quo tripping over themselves to belatedly try get ahead of the parade. Gee, Judy its much worse than you think.
The greenhouse gases theory is so flawed, so based on wrong assumptions and misused theories that the first thing to do should be to evaluate its very basics particularly with respect to quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, radiative heat transfer and liable measured data such as the Earth’s energy budget.
My opinion, based on the confrontation of this theory with basic science and measured data, is that this scientific tragedy deserves to be thrown in the trash with all the CO2 based policies and that climate science needs to go back to the drawing board.
Some very basic questions :
– what is the only way for the atmosphere to lose heat into space (there is neither convection nor conduction in the vacuum) ?
– given the atmosphere temperatures range (from 150 K to 320 K), if any, in which spectral region does it radiate heat ?
– what are the only components which absorb / emit in atmospheric radiative heat spectral region* ?
– does the atmosphere comply to the Stefan – Boltzmann law or should we take into account each absorption / emission band of each atmospheric component in order to study its radiation properties* ?
– how can the atmosphere be warmed by the only components that allow it to radiate heat into space in the infrared spectrum** ?
*see Modest 2003, Radiative Heat Transfer, or Kondratyev 1969, Radiation in the atmosphere.
**According to Kiehl & Trenberth 1997 or NASA Earth energy budget 2009, the atmosphere radiates 165 to 170 W/m² into space in the infrared spectrum, which is much more than the 17 to 26W/m² it absorbs from the surface upward infrared radiative flux.
The one thing I can’t reconcile from the alarmist side and the political class is their utter and complete lack of concrete action to either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or implement a course of action to mitigate the most dire impacts of climate change.
If people really, truly believed in their core that climate change was an imminent and existential threat to humanity, we would be building nuclear reactors with abandon. There is simply no conceivable way that solar and wind power can fuel a modern economy. The sheer volume of land needed to build enough solar farms and wind turbines simply eliminates this as a real option. Yet many, if not most alarmists, dismiss nuclear out of hand.
Governments around the world spend trillions on climate research, subsidies for renewables and all kinds of questionable schemes, but I don’t see anyone building sea walls, or investing in projects to thin out the deadfall that make forest fires more dangerous. How much money is government spending on research to build better batteries? Is it even a fraction of the money spend on climate research?
If people really, truly thought climate change was an existential threat, we wouldn’t be spending trillions on things that don’t make a difference. We would be taking concrete steps to address the issue in a meaningful way.
People can talk, talk, talk, but I won’t believe they truly see climate change as a threat until they actually take steps to address the issues in a meaningful way. When I see governments investing in engineering projects to mitigate the impacts of climate change that’s when I’ll believe they actually see it as a threat. When I see people taking concrete steps to reduce their own carbon footprint that’s when I’ll believe they actually believe in the propaganda they foist on the rest of us.
If we look at the actions of governments and the most influential alarmists, this tells us what they truly think of the issue.
Go and get yourselves a bucket of water and a heat gun. Aim the the heat gun at the surface of the water and tell me if your kitchen fills with steam. Enough said.
“Some of this information could be gleaned by combining fine-resolution climate impact assessments with artificial intelligence for ‘big data’ analysis of weather extremes, health, property damage and other variables.”
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Again, the impossible creation of an independent artificial intelligence
gets equated to make, dress, manage a dependent, quasi remote-controlled machine.
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conducting a dishonest course of science.
Sometimes I read comments like
“02.03.2019 · From Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog , March 1st, 2019 by Roy W.
… Are you pushing Nikolov-Zeller hypotheses Johann?
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Be assured I’m not pushing hypotheses but citating NASA-Websites like
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6605
:
Not all Jupiters are created equal
Juno’s detailed examination of Jupiter could provide insights into the history, and future, of our solar system. The tally of confirmed exoplanets so far includes hundreds in Jupiter’s size-range, and many more that are larger or smaller.
The so-called hot Jupiters acquired their name for a reason: They are in tight orbits around their stars that make them sizzling-hot, completing a full revolution — the planet’s entire year — in what would be a few days on Earth. And they’re charbroiled along the way.
But why does our solar system lack a “hot Jupiter?” Or is this, perhaps, the fate awaiting our own Jupiter billions of years from now — could it gradually spiral toward the sun, or might the swollen future sun expand to engulf it?
Not likely, Ciardi says; such planetary migrations probably occur early in the life of a solar system.
“In order for migration to occur, there needs to be dusty material within the system,” he said. “Enough to produce drag. That phase of migration is long since over for our solar system.”
Jupiter itself might already have migrated from farther out in the solar system, although no one really knows, he said.
“Climate assessments must evaluate quick ways of lessening climate impacts, such as through reducing emissions of methane, soot (or black carbon) and HFCs. Per tonne, these three ‘super pollutants’ have 25 to thousands of times the impact of CO2. Their atmospheric lifetimes are short — in the range of weeks (for soot) to about a decade (for methane and HFCs). Slashing these pollutants would potentially halve the warming trend over the next 25 years.”
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“Researchers demand more modern filters
Federal Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks (SPD) rejected the criticism in the world on Sunday. Germany is one of the few countries in the world to have mercury limits, Hendricks said. These would be lowered continuously. “Germany has been working to re-launch low EU limits, including the reservations of our EU partners, who were not all ready to lower and monitor mercury emissions,” Hendricks said. But further mitigation measures are necessary. ”
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Former German Minister of the Environment, Barbara Hendricks, declares that German coal-fired power stations are no longer producing “environmentally harmful” mercury.
Of course, “polluting” soot, “long-lived” methane and similar “pollutants” have long since been regulated.
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To avoid misunderstandings:
Barbara Hendricks was and is a “died in the wool” “climate protector”.
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https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=3EOiXNXiIOqsrgT1gLzIDw&q=Barbara+Hendricks+Kohlekraftwerke+Quecksilber+russ&oq=Barbara+Hendricks+Kohlekraftwerke+Quecksilber+russ&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.