Guest Post By Willis Eschenbach
OK, quick question: What do these weather phenomena have in common?
- Air Pollution Weather (temperature inversions)
- Aridity
- Avalanche (snow)
- Average rain
- Average Wind Speed
- Coastal Flood
- Drought Affecting Crops (agricultural drought)
- Drought From Lack Of Rain (hydrological drought)
- Erosion of Coastlines
- Fire Weather (hot and windy)
- Flooding From Heavy Rain (pluvial floods)
- Frost
- Hail
- Heavy Rain
- Heavy Snowfall and Ice Storms
- Landslides
- Marine Heatwaves
- Ocean Alkalinity
- Radiation at the Earth’s Surface
- River/Lake Floods
- Sand and Dust Storms
- Sea Level
- Severe Wind Storms
- Snow, Glacier, and Ice Sheets
- Tropical Cyclones
Give up? So would I.
What these phenomena have in common is that the IPCC says that there is no significant evidence that these phenomena have changed (either increased or decreased) in the “historical period”. In other words, there’s no evidence that “global warming” has changed the strength or frequency of those weather phenomena.
So when folks claim things like “We’re already seeing the effects of global warming in storms/cyclones/floods/fire weather/sea level/etc./etc.”, feel free to tell them that the IPCC and reality itself beg to disagree.
And when Yale360 reflects on the 2017 Hurricane Harvey by saying ” If not for climate change, 2017’s Hurricane Harvey might have flooded half as many homes in the Houston area, a new study finds.” and “Climate change is happening right now with real and substantial costs”, you can feel free to point and laugh.
Don’t believe me? Here, with a large hat tip to a Substack post by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., is Table 12.12 regarding “Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs)” from Chapter 12 of Working Group 1 of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, the most recent report:
Figure 1. IPCC AR6 WGI Chapter 12 Table 12.12
So … what weather phenomena does the IPCC say have actually changed? Well, they say global average air and ocean temperatures have increased by a few tenths of one percent. No news there.
Then they say “extreme heat” has increased. But they’re not talking about actual temperature. Instead, they’re using something called “Health Heat Index (HHI)”.
And while Table 12.12 in Chapter 12 says days with “extreme heat” increased in the historical period, the IPCC is disagreeing with itself. The problem is the previous chapter—Box 11.2 of Table 1 in IPCC AR6 WGI Chapter 11 says the increase in extreme heat is “Not assessed”, because the “baseline is 1981–2000”.
Sounds like dissension in the ranks …
Bemused by this “extreme heat” idea which the IPCC has both claimed and denied, I went to see how they calculate the HHI. Strap in and keep your arms and hands inside the vehicle, it’s a rough ride. Here are the calculations. The basic equation is:
HHI = c1 + c2 * T + c3 * T ^ 2 + RH * (c4 + c5 * T + c6 * T ^ 2) + RH ^ 2 * (c7 + c8 * T + c9 * T ^ 2))
“T” is the temperature in °F, and “RH” is the relative humidity in percent. As for the others:
- c1 = −42.379
- c2 = 2.04901523
- c3 = −6.83783 × 10−3
- c4 = 10.14333127
- c5 = −0.22475541
- c6 = 1.22874 × 10−3
- c7 = −0.05481717
- c8 = 8.5282 × 10−4
- c9 = −1.99 × 10−6
Zowie! Gotta love tunable parameters specified to 8 significant decimals. But wait, because as they say on TV, “There’s more!” Here are the further details.
If RH > 13% and T is between 80 °F and 112 °F, then HHI is adjusted by subtracting the following value:
Adjustment = ((13 – RH) / 4) * sqrt((17 – abs(T – 95)) / 17)
If RH > 85% and T is between 80 °F and 87 °F, the following value is added to HHI:
Adjustment = ((RH – 85) / 10) * ((87 – T) / 5)
If HHI < 80 °F, then HHI is recalculated as follows:
HHI = 0.5 * (T + 61.0 + ((T-68.0)*1.2) + (RH*0.094)))
In order to confuse the unwary, the result is given units of degrees Fahrenheit (°F). However, this is not physically possible, because the calculation includes T, T^2, and sqrt(T).
In any case, “Extreme Heat” in the IPCC lexicon is when the Health Heat Index goes over 105°F, referred to as “AT105F” … whatever that means.
To find out how unusual the AT105F threshold is, I gathered the NOAA daily temperature and humidity data for 1582 US cities, and calculated the HHI for a number of them. Turns out that in some cities in the US, like say Yuma, Arizona, annually on average there are 30 days or more with an HHI of 105°F or more. Sometimes far more. This is supposed to scare us?
What else does the IPCC say has changed in the “historical period”? Well, they say “cold spells” have decreased. And I might be missing it, but I can’t find anywhere that the IPCC defines exactly what they are calling a “cold spell”. The IPCC Working Group I Glossary doesn’t define the term at all … so we have no clue what they’re referring to. Science at its finest. In any case, whatever they might think “cold spells” are, they say they’ve decreased in Australia, Africa, and Northern South America. Since cold spells kill far, far more people than heat spells, seems to me this is a good thing.
Other than that? Well, they say that river, lake, and Arctic sea ice have decreased.
And they have “Medium Confidence” that permafrost has decreased, that there’s been a slight decrease in dissolved oxygen and a slight increase in salinity in some parts of the ocean.
Oh, and surface CO2 levels have increased.
And that’s it.
Call me crazy, but I’m not seeing any “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” visible in any of that.
Of course, they go on to use the most alarmist, most useless future scenario, the scenario called either “RCP8.5” or “SSP5-8.5”, to make all kinds of claims based on Tinkertoy™ climate models about how bad things will be in 2050 and 2100 … but we’ve seen how totally wrong all such climate projections have proven to be over the last 40 years. So there’s no reason to believe these projections.
To illustrate some of these issues, I took a look at the US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) extreme temperature and other extreme weather records for the US states. To start with, here are the decades when states hit their maximum temperatures.
Figure 2. State maximum temperature records by decade.
Now, bear in mind that the temperature has been rising, in fits and starts, over the entire period shown in these state extreme graphs. And more than half the states set maximum temperature records in the 1930s. Sorry, but given that data, I’m not believing that extreme temperatures are a problem in the US.
How about extreme minimum temperatures?
Figure 3. State minimum temperature records by decade.
No clear pattern in that one, which I suppose is why they specifically do not say there’s been a change in “cold spells” in the US.
Next, here’re the heavy 24-hour rain records:
Figure 4. State 24-hour rainfall records by decade.
Again, no clear pattern. Heavy rain peaked in the ’90s but has been decreasing since then.
Finally, here’s snowfall.
Figure 5. State 24-hour snowfall records by decade.
The period 1960-2000 was a time of heavy snow, but since then it’s dropped off.
This US data is just another part of the mountain of evidence as to why, despite all of the posturing, the IPCC doesn’t think there’s any significant evidence of any “climate emergency” or “climate crisis”.
However, don’t expect things to change soon. We now have what might be called the “Climate/Industrial Complex”, complete with lots of people making lots of money off the imaginary “climate crisis”, and as Upton Sinclair remarked,
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
I’ve covered this lack of any evidence for a climate “crisis” or “emergency” in my post “Where Is The Climate Emergency?“.
And the alarmists’ answer to that question?
“We doan gotta show you no steenkin’ emergency … we’re climate scientists!”
Yeah, right …
w.
PS—I’m done with trying to defend people’s misinterpretation of my words. So … when you comment, please quote the exact words you are discussing.
The Third Assessment Report had they could not predict any future weather as it was mathematicaly a chaotic system p741.
It needs to be pointed out that when they claim that [XXXX – insert your latest scary weather event here] is “Consistent” with whatever they have tortured the data to predict, it is even more consistent with the doings of those naughty witches.
That was always the advice given through the ages by contemporary well paid ‘experts’, when ‘bad weather’ showed up. And they didn’t need multi-million $$$$ Supercomputers to work out that “consistency” to eight decimal places.
Many an old lady met their end thanks to those early “experts”.
Didn’t make a darned bit of difference to the weather of course. But everyone apart from the old ladies had fun and the “experts” were well rewarded.
I have previously written why I think that using the term ‘acidification’ with respect to a claimed lowering of pH in the oceans is a bad idea. The IPCC Table 12.12, Figure 1, illustrates an additional reason.
The claim has been made that the open oceans have declined from a pH of 8.2 (derived from a model, not measurements), to the present day value of 8.1. However, Table 12.12 shows no entry for “Ocean Acidity” in the Historical Period column. There are entries for the other two columns of “High Confidence” of an increase in acidity.
One might be forgiven for concluding that because it is commonly accepted that the pH has lowered in recent time, but there is no entry for Historical Period, that what is meant is that we can expect that the open ocean surface waters will actually become acidic and then become more acidic. No less than Stanford geochemist Konrad Krauskopf has stated that he thought it improbable that buffering will allow any but some deep, stagnant, bottom pools enriched with hydrogen sulfide would actually reach a pH below 7.
Therefore, the conflicting implications leads to ambiguity in the meaning of the table with respect to the future pH of the oceans. Scientific statements should be as precise as the author is capable of writing. By giving ‘spin’ with words with pejorative meaning, the authors have managed to make their writing less clear than it should be. It speaks to their priority.
Given that SSP5-8.5 is considered highly unlikely, and SSP2-4.5 is likely by the IPCC and Hausfather, Zeke; Peters, Glen P. (2020-01-29). “Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading”. Nature. 577 (618–620). doi:10.1038/d41586-020-00177-3, why do they use it?
They are both worse than the plausible worst case scenario.
As such they are unquestionably the outer limits of what could happen.
Redge
Simple answer. To frighten and alarm the public.
w.
Answers to this sort of question are provided in the WG-II (adaptation) and WG-III (mitigation) contributions to the AR6 document cycle.
“Why use them at all ?” is answered in WG-III’s “FAQ 3.3 : How plausible are high emissions scenarios, and how do they inform policy?”, on page 386 :
The IPCC has to be able to model the “undesirable” cases of too much wealth creation (for non-elites, obviously …) or too many ignorant peasants still being around in 2100, hence the extensive use of RCP8.5 (/ SSP5-8.5), however “counterfactual” the WG-I scientists declare them to be.
They are politically “useful” scenarios.
. . .
The answers to questions like “But what’s the underlying point ?” are more concentrated in the WG-II report.
In “FAQ1.5 : What is new in this 6th IPCC report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability?”, on page 180 :
Forget your (/ our) “historic” focus on scientists publishing papers in “serious” journals, all we need to do now is listen to those “associated scholars” who tell the IPCC what they want to hear.
For AR6 both WG-II and WG-III shifted towards more “societal / political” objectives — as opposed to WG-I’s continued focus on “The Scientific Basis”, after you get past the SPM ! — as explicitly admitted in the third (of three) points made in section 1.1.4, “What is New in the History of Interdisciplinary Climate Change Assessment”, on page 131 of the WG-II assessment report :
The reasons the IPCC uses RCP8.5 (and SSP5-8.5) are clearly stated in the WG-II and WG-III reports, you just have to dip into them to read exactly “where they are coming from” … though be warned that you will probably want to take several showers afterwards …
Editorial note : For some reason I missed the following extracts when compiling my previous post, even though they were definitely in my sub-conscious at the time.
Note also that after re-reading it I definitely entered “school-marm mode” somewhere along the line …
. . .
The IPCC also provide some “historical perspective” on the development of the RCP and SSP “emissions pathways” for use in AR5 (2013) and AR6 (2021) respectively.
In the WG-III (mitigation) report Box 3.3, “The likelihood of high-end emission scenarios” on page 317, actually provides a decent summary of how RCP8.5 was originally developed :
NB : This is where my memory of RCP8.5 being “useful” to the IPCC in allowing the promotion of “high-end, high-risk” — AKA “dangerous” or “catastrophic” — scenarios came from.
. . .
In the WG-II (adaptation) report, sub-section “AR6 WGI Reference Periods, Climate Projections and Global Warming Levels” in “Cross-Chapter Box CLIMATE : Climate Reference Periods, Global Warming Levels, and Common Climate Dimensions”, on page 136, also has some “historical” background :
. . .
The IPCC actually used the term “counterfactual” rather than “highly unlikely”, and unfortunately you (/ we) have to infer RCP8.5 from what they wrote.
From the WG-I (The Scientific Basis) report, in section 1.6.1.4, “The likelihood of reference scenarios, scenario uncertainty and storylines”, on page 239 :
In the “Higher GHG (/ CO2) emissions = Higher atmospheric CO2 levels = More Radiative Forcing (RF) = Higher GMST anomalies” chain of reasoning you will find that RCP8.5 is neatly bracketed by SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5.
If SSP3-7.0 is above the IPCC’s “counterfactual” threshold then so is RCP8.5.
Attached is a graph I updated at the beginning of the year illustrating this, using “FF&I CO2 emissions” in this particular case.
Up to ~2014 emissions were following RCP8.5 — and remember that AR5 was published in 2013, using data up to 2011/2012 — but since then “we” have essentially been following RCP4.5 / SSP2-4.5 instead.
NB : Roger Pielke Jr. may have a point about SSP4-3.4 being the “most likely” emissions pathway in the medium term (up to 2050 / 2070).
SSP4 may well be politically more viable, with less “socioeconomic uncertainty”, than SSP1[-2.6].
I see that the IPCC has some proper mathematicians available. That equation for HHI is amazing, and all the undefined constants without any source! I wonder what the original curve they are presumably trying to fit looked like, because the output of that equation is going to be chaotic! But I do know that is the description of weather, why don’t they just say that, in place of ridiculous meaningless random numbers? And then those modifiers because they don’t like the answers from their magic equation? They also believe in dicontinuous functions, oh no that is a definition of “tipping point”!
/sarc
“Sounds like dissension in the ranks …”
Curious, but do the ranks openly discuss difference of opinions?
Hi Willis,
A while back I requested data to confirm your results. Here is the Chat GPT confirmation of the statement I made reference to:
============================
Default (GPT-3.5)
In November 2009, thousands of emails and documents from the CRU were illegally hacked and leaked online. These emails included conversations between climate scientists, including Phil Jones, and the leak was highly publicized. Climate change skeptics seized on the contents of these emails to cast doubt on the integrity of the climate science community and their research.
In one of the leaked emails, Phil Jones responded to a data request from Stephen McIntyre with the following statement:
“Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
=============================
Hang on wasn’t that reply about releasing the data made by Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes in Australia?
Chat GPT has got it wrong
Thanks. It is not important whether Jones wrote to McIntyre or Hughes. The issue is whether data used in an analysis is archived and made available for other researchers. WUWT should be the gold standard if it expects to convince the climate community.
A link to primary data is not sufficient for anyone who is not a paid climate researcher. Reanalysis of derived data is typically orders of magnitude faster at getting value for time spent, especially when methods are in dispute.
For example, the Holder Inequality restricts the use of the S-B Law to derive average temperature from average radiation. Holder says the solution is not unique, so a reanalysis of the derived data is a likely place to check the math.
Requesting derived data I was reminded of the quote I thought Jones had written in the distant past. I likely associated it with McIntyre because of ClimateGate. Chat GPT has apparently made the same mistake.
ferdberple says:
No clue what data you requested. Let me remind you of my request, which you are ignoring:
You then say:
ChatGPT is just as clueless as you are. The statement was made to Warwick Hughes, so you’re just blindly repeating a machine-generated lie.
Seems totally on-brand for you …
Finally, you say:
I do my best to put the source of my data on every one of my graphs. I also generally link to it in the text. That way, any competent analyst can replicate or falsify my analysis.
I’m not a “paid climate researcher”, I’m a self-taught amateur scientist who isn’t paid a dime to do what I do.
But I’m not bitching and whining about how the data is too hard like you are. I do what I need and learn what is required to analyze it.
If you’re too incompetent to analyze the underlying data, three choices:
Don’t like it?
Don’t care.
w.
If you try to present ChatGPT as a “gold standard” for producing “fact-checked truthiness” you will either :
a) be laughed at … a lot … and I really do mean a lot …, and/or
b) have people legitimately questioning your sanity
ChatGPT is one of the latest “most likely next word” software programs.
One example of just how “gold standard” ChatGPT is came from El Reg (AKA “Vulture Central”) around 5 months ago (direct link), which included :
NB : My guess is that you would consider the Graun to be a “reputable” media outlet. Other people here (and elsewhere) may disagree …
Programs like ChatGPT, which merely output the character string that will “probably” come next in its output, have a proven tendency to … if you’ll excuse the technical jargon … “just make shit up”.
. . .
Neither WUWT nor Willis (nor I, nor anybody else) is responsible for your erroneous assumptions.
Having admonished you for “unwarranted assumptions”, I will now immediately make the assumption that the members of “the climate community” that you hold in the highest regard are precisely those for whom Upton Sinclair’s astute observation about human nature that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” applies.
My opinion is that WUWT is aimed more at “convincing” members of the general public, including (but not primarily) “interested amateurs” like myself, rather than “the climate community”.
NB : It is always possible that ***I*** might be wrong on this specific point.
Instead of loftily pontificating on what other people “should be” aiming for, why not limit yourself to expressing your opinions instead, while keeping sufficient self-awareness to be able to admit to yourself (at least) that you may be wrong (/ misinformed).
https://electroverse.info/climate-scientist-breaks-ranks/
“In order to confuse the unwary, the result is given units of degrees Fahrenheit (°F). However, this is not physically possible, because the calculation includes T, T^2, and sqrt(T).”
I don’t see a sqrt(T) in the equation, also implies that the constants have units.
Phil. July 31, 2023 5:58 am
From the head post:
As to the units of the constants, good luck with that one.
Best regards,
w.
Sorry I missed the adjustment part, yes the units of the constants will be a bit messy. 🙂
A bit like the Redlich-Kwong equation: P= RT/(Vm-b) – a/(sqrt(T)*Vm(Vm+b))
Willis, you should do an article about how cold CO2 in the atmosphere cannot increase ocean temperature, which is what is claimed why the oceans are “near boiling.”.
Sorry to disappoint you, Richard, but a warm atmosphere can indeed leave the surface warmer than if there is no atmosphere.
See my post “Can A Cold Object Warm A Hot Object” for a full discussion.
w.
Yes, a good article Willis, however some of discussion was crazy!