Category — Climate science

A previous post at MasterResource described the findings and implications of a new scientific study published by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, ”On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Lindzen and Choi’s concluded that climate sensitivity to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is six times less than generally accepted—a conclusion that potentially overturns the current paradigm of scientific thinking.

Their paper is now under careful scrutiny–as it should be. As I wrote:

This is a major paper. And as with most findings with serious repercussions to our scientific understanding, it will doubtlessly be gone over with a fine-toothed comb and subject to various challenges. It is too early to tell whether Lindzen and Choi’s findings will prove to be the end-all-and-be-all in this debate. There are a few issues concerning the quality of the satellite data, how well the results from tropics represent the entire world, the impact that the eruption of Mt Pinatubo may have imparted on the results, and perhaps a couple of other details. But, even if the resolution of these issues bumps up Lindzen and Choi’s original determination of the climate sensitivity a bit, there is still a long way to go before it comes close to the IPCC’s “best estimate” of 3.0°C.

 Now some of the early results are starting to come in. [Read more →]

On October 16, 2009, the Houston Chronicle ran an Outlook piece by Dr. Ronald Sass– a fellow in global climate change at the Baker Institute and Professor of Natural Sciences emeritus at Rice University–complaining that Texas governor Rick Perry was getting his ideas about climate change from unreliable sources. Apparently, that Governor Perry is not hopping on the climate alarmism/policy activism bandwagon has Dr. Sass a bit concerned. Make no mistake about a political agenda of the giver of this advice that goes far beyond natural science issues.

Dr. Sass argues that the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be the end all and be all of the physical science debate. But he is behind the times. The IPCC report is several years old, and the latest theory and empirical data is pointing in more benign directions than at the height of the climate alarm in the late 1990s. Perhaps the governor’s stance isn’t as off-base as Sass would like his Chronicle’s readers to believe.

Some Good Points

Dr. Sass does make some good points about the science, but he attributes too much import to the implications of setting the Governor straight on them.

For instance, Dr. Sass, points out, and rightly so, that human activities—primarily the burning of fossil fuels for energy—have contributed to the build-up of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and an enhancement of the earth’s natural greenhouse effect. If Governor Perry is being advised otherwise, he is getting bad advice. 

And Dr. Sass is correct that an enhanced greenhouse effect will lead, in general, to a modified, and warmer, climate. Again, if the governor is getting advised differently,  he is being misinformed.

The Rest of the Story

However, from here Sass goes astray. 

It is not true that just because humans are modifying the climate that this will lead to a bad outcome and thus we should undertake immediate efforts to stop this (which is what Sass would like the Governor to do). [Read more →]

Accusations of cherry-picking—that is, carefully choosing data to support a particular point—are constantly being hurled around by all sides of the climate change debate. Most recently, accusations of cherry-picking have been levied at analyses describing the recent behavior of global average temperature. Primarily, because claims about what the temperature record says run the gamut from accelerating warming to rapid cooling and everything in between—depending on who you ask and what point they are trying to make.

I am often asked as to what is the “right” answer is. What I can say for certain, is that the recent behavior of global temperatures demonstrates that global warming is occurring at a much slower rate than that projected by the ensemble of climate models, and that global warming is most definitely not accelerating.

Choice of Cherries

But as to questions concerning just how far beneath climate model predictions the rate of warming is, or for just how long the average temperature of the world has not warmed at all, the answers depend on several things, among them the dataset you want to use and the time period over which you examine—i.e., which cherries you wish to pick.

Figure 1 illustrates the various cherry varieties that you have to choose from. [Read more →]

“Worldwide temperatures haven’t risen much in the past decade…. If you are a climate-change activist pointing to year after year of mounting climate crises, you might want to rethink your approach.”

- Richard Kerr, Science, May 2, 2008.

There has been a flurry of activity in recent weeks in the discussion as to the significance (scientific, political, social) of the evolution of the global average surface temperature during the past 10 years or so.

For those of you who don’t know, the surface temperature of the globe, as a whole, has not warmed-up by anyone’s calculation since at least the turn of the century (January 2001) and depending on your dataset and statistical technique of choice, perhaps as far back as January 1997. And all of this non-warming occurred over a period of time during which the global emissions of CO2 increased faster than ever before (thanks primarily to China). In fact, anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing is about 5 percent greater now than a decade ago (about 16 parts per million).

To many folks who have, for years, been fed a constant course of “the-world-is-heating-up-faster-than-ever-before-and-you-are-the-cause,” 9 to 12 years of no warming at all seems to indicate that something is amiss with this mantra.

This was reflected in a Gallup Poll last spring, which found the highest percentage yet of people who think that “global warming” is being “exaggerated.” And this number has been growing.

IPCC “Consensus” and Unwarming

The growth in climate realism (i.e., a realization that alarmists are overplaying the probable impact of CO2 emissions) has most certainly been sparked by the fact that the rate of the earth’s temperature rise has been slowing rather than accelerating, contrary to general IPCC conclusions. This development, naturally, plays into the political debate about (at the 11th hour if not midnight) “mitigating” potential climate change through carbon dioxide emissions reductions. [Read more →]

“On our current emissions path, we’re going to … warm more than 4°C by century’s end.”

- Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, August 11, 2009

“I will be happy to bet anyone that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset.  Any takers? Andy [Revkin]?”

Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, September 22, 2009

In a fit of rage, uber-alarmist Joe Romm of ClimateProgress has recently offered a temperature warming bet that he can win even if more than 85% of all climate models are shown to overpredict future warming.

Has Joe seen the light and become a “lukewarmer”—that is, someone who thinks that the human CO2 emissions will result in only a modest rise in global temperature, somewhere at or below the bottom end of the IPCC range of projections? Might he even be a closet ‘skeptic’–not a skeptic of climate change or anthropogenic climate change, but a doubter of climate alarmism?

For someone so strident on this issue, I would have thought that Joe Romm, would bet on climate catastrophe, not climate-model catastrophe.

Romm issued his bet after hyperventilating about Andy Revkin’s recent article in the New York Times, which suggested that the lack of change in the world’s average surface temperature since the turn of the century (or in some instances, a few years prior) has the potential to make it difficult to get CO2 emissions regulated in the name of “global warming.”

For what it is worth, I agree with Revkin on this (tune in next week to see why), as do an increasing number of science writers who are hedging their bets in line with recent data and what new peer reviewed articles are suggesting. And Romm is furious that Revkin has ‘mainstreamed’ lukewarming in the pages of the newspaper of record, the New York Times.

States Romm: “I will be happy to bet anyone that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset.”

Well, many climate realists the world over would feel vindicated if the average temperature of the 2010s was only 0.15°C hotter than the decade of the 2000s (the current warmest decade). For that would provide more strong evidence that the earth’s climate was responding to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in a far more benign manner than the ensemble projection of climate models.

In fact, the rejoicing wouldn’t be limited to climate realists but to just about anyone overly concerned about the potential for large negative impacts from climate change given a slower-than-model-predicted evolution of global temperatures. I imagine, though, that Joe Romm would be an exception because while he would have won the bet, he would have lost his Hell-or-High-Water war. He is emotionally attached to the issue with a public record of alarmism that is beginning to put Paul Ehrlich in the shade. (John Holdren, with his billion-death climate scare still on the table, might be another story.) [Read more →]

“For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled…. But I am confused [by recent developments]. Four years ago this all seemed like a fait accompli. Humans were unquestionably warming the climate and changing the planet forever through their emissions of carbon dioxide.”

- Eric Berger, Science Writer, Houston Chronicle, September 6, 2009 [SciGuy Blog]

In his post at MasterResource last week, Ken Green spoke of a potential “death spiral” for climate alarmism, in that the failure of the political process would make it less politically incorrect to challenge climate alarmism. “As hopes for a Gore-style ‘wrenching transformation’ fade,” wrote Green, “more mainstream scientists and opinion-makers will become more ‘practical’ toward the issue, meaning that alarmism may give way to sensible assessments of mitigation, adaptation, and geo-engineering.”

But the other problem for climate alarmism is nonalarmist data, as well as new studies by top climatologists questioning the guts of high-sensitivity climate models. Chip Knappenberger summarized a new study by Richard Lindzen that concluded that the “best guess” warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was radically overstated. Marlo Lewis’s summary, Is the Climate Science Debate Over? No, It’s Just Getting Very, Very Interesting (with welcome news for mankind), also lays out the latest from the quite unsettled–and nonalarmist–science. Are the Malthusians wrong again?

Enter Eric Berger, the open-minded, fair-minded science writer for the Houston Chronicle. With just a little courage, and no doubt a good deal of perplexity, he is asking the question that some have been asking for a long, long time: what is really going on here. And no doubt he will take some heat from his post, and no doubt he is going to get to the bottom of what is going on.

Jerry North (Texas A&M) Hints at the Problem

Eleven years ago, when I was director of public policy at Enron, I entered into a consulting agreement with Gerald North, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography at Texas A&M’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, to tell me what was going on. North was as close as I could find to a ‘middle of the roader’ between climate alarmism and (ultra) skepticism. He is also highly decorated. [Read more →]

MIT climate scientists Richard Lindzen and collaborator Yong-Sang Choi soon-to-be published paper (Geophysical Research Letters, American Geophysical Union) pegs the earth’s “climate sensitivity”—the degree the earth’s temperature responds to various forces of change—at a value that is about six times less than the “best estimate” put forth by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The smaller the climate sensitivity, the less the impact that rising carbon dioxide levels will have on the earth’s climate. The less the impact that CO2 emissions will have on the earth’s climate, the less the “problem” and ability to reverse the “problem.”

Lindzen and Choi’s findings should come as a solace to those folks who are alarmed about future climate and as a bulwark to those folks fighting to limit Congresses negative impact on U.S. energy supplies and our economy. Indeed, climate sensitivity to GHGs is the multi-billion dollar question in climate science. If climate sensitivity is low, then the earth’s temperature doesn’t react very much to variations in processes which impact it—such things as solar variations, volcanic eruptions, cloudcover fluctuations or changes in the concentration of greenhouse gases.

If, on the other hand, the climate sensitivity is high, then changes in the climate drivers can lead to large changes of the earth’s average temperatures. Another way to think of it is that the lower the climate sensitivity, the more stable the earth’s climate.

Climate sensitivity is hotly debated because we have don’t have a good enough handle on the magnitude of the earth’s past temperature changes and an even worse understanding on the magnitude of the variation of climate drivers. So while theoretically evaluating the climate sensitivity is as easy as dividing the temperature change by the forcing change, in practice, a poor understanding of both the numerator and the denominator have made it virtually impossible to pin down.

IPCC Estimatation and the ‘Wild Card’ of Clouds

In its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the IPCC claims that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations likely falls in the range of 2.0°C to 4.5°C. This is based on a combination of studies, some making determinations based on historical data, others basing their results on climate model output.

But again, the problem with the former is an observational record that is not accurate enough to make a reliable calculation; the problem with the latter is that the physical processes simulated by climate models are limited both by our less-than-perfect understanding of these processes as well as by modern-day computation power (which limits the temporal and spatial resolution of the climate simulation).

One area where climate models are particularly weak is in their ability to accurately simulate clouds and cloud variations. And, as you probably could have guessed, clouds and cloud variations play a pivotal role in establishing the earth’s average temperature.

There is a fast-growing evidence base that clouds respond to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations quite differently than the climate models predict that they should. Instead of acting to enhance the warming produced by increases in the earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations, it seems as if clouds may, in fact, act to suppress the rate of greenhouse gas-induced temperature rise.

New Findings

The latest findings to this effect by Lindzen and Choi add to the work that Roy Spencer and several other researchers have been doing for years in this arena. Instead of a climate sensitivity lying within the IPCC’s range of 2.0° to 4.5°C, Lindzen and Choi report it to be about 0.5°C—six times less than the IPCC’s “best estimate” of 3.0°C. [Read more →]

The August 4 issue of the New York Times features a rather illuminating article  by Andrew Revkin – the Times’ climate reporter – on sentiment within the ranks of the IPCC as that organization begins work on its upcoming 2014 report.  Revkin reports that the IPCC’s scientists are frustrated that the world’s governments – even those that are led by politicians who habitually give end-is-near speeches about global warming – are not taking the sorts of policy actions the organization thinks are necessary to head-off global catastrophe.   Hence, a growing number of scientists want the IPCC to be more explicit and prescriptive with regards to public policy, less inhibited when discussing scientific issues where a great deal of uncertainty exists, more concerned with best practices pertaining to public risk management, and more politically sensitive about the issues that are examined at-length in the upcoming report.

In other words, Revkin reports that the IPCC wants to spend less time on science in their next report than they have in past reports and more time on issues for which it has no relevant expertise or comparative advantage.  Of course, Revkin doesn’t put it quite that way, but that’s the unmistakable implication of what he reports.

Consider these complaints one at a time. [Read more →]

How many times have you been told that the debate on the science of climate change is “over”? Probably almost as many times as Al Gore has traveled in private jets and limousines to urge audiences to repent of their fuelish ways. 

Although tirelessly intoned by politicians, major media, advocacy groups, academics, and even some Kyoto critics, the “debate is over” mantra is just plain false. The core issues of climate-change attribution, climate sensitivity, and even anthropogenic detection remain very much in play.

Detection

The world has warmed overall during the past 130 years, as evidenced by melting glaciers, longer growing seasons, and both proxy and instrumental data. However, the main era of “anthropogenic” global warming supposedly began in the mid-1970s, and ongoing research by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts leaves no doubt that in recent decades, the U.S. surface temperature record–reputed to be the best in the world–is unreliable and riddled with false warming biases.

Watts and a team of more than 650 volunteers have visually inspected and photographically documented 1003, or 82%, of the 1,221 climate monitoring stations overseen by the U.S. Weather Service. In a report summarizing an earlier phase of the team’s investigation (a survey of 860+ stations), Watts says, “We were shocked by what we found.” He continues:

We found stations located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations–nearly 9 of every 10–fail to meet the National Weather Services’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 or every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

“It gets worse,” Watts continues: [Read more →]

At the G8 summit held in L’Aquila Italy last week, the G8 nations came up with a climate master plan aimed at keeping the total rise in global temperatures (above pre-industrial conditions) at a value of 2ºC or less. A cursory reading of the plan makes it seem as if the G8 nation’s are reaching out to the rest of world by agreeing to take on the harshest emissions cuts themselves, leaving the world’s developing nations with only a bit of mop-up duty in order to make all the final numbers work out. The opposite is true.

A close look at how the plan must actually work reveals a great semantics play by the G8. They know that they alone do not hold the power to substantially alter the projected course of future global warming through their emissions reductions. The real power is held by the developing nations of the world that want to develop, not accede to the rich countries’ notion of environmental sustainability. And no silver bullets have emerged in recent decades to effectively substitute for fossil-fuel-driven development, just as a seminal Science article several years ago explained and warned (1).

In an effort to entice the developing world to think differently about the problem, the G8 countries have devised a plan to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions which makes it seem as if they (the G8) are going to do most of the work and, therefore, it wouldn’t seem too much to ask of the developing countries to just help out a little to achieve the ultimate goal of keeping the earth’s average temperature to within 2ºC of its pre-industrial value.

Here is how the G8 described the plan that came out of its meeting in Italy: [Read more →]