by Judith Curry
The U.S. House Subcommittee on Environment is holding a Hearing today: A Factual Look at the Relationship Between Climate and Weather.
From the opening statement by Committee Chair Lamar Alexander:
President Obama stated in his 2013 State of the Union Address that, “We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.”
However, the “overwhelming judgment of science” does not support the President’s claims.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there is “high agreement” among leading experts that long-term trends in weather disasters are not due to human-caused climate change.
Instead of trying to scare the American people and promote a political agenda, the administration should try to protect the lives and property of our nation’s residents from extreme weather by better weather forecasting.
I hope this hearing will make clear that the impact of climate change is often exaggerated. Politicians and others should rely on good science, not science fiction, when they discuss extreme weather. Otherwise, they will lack credibility when advocating new policy changes.
Witnesses (click on name to link to written testimony):
- Dr. John R. Christy, Professor and Director, Earth System Science Center, NSSTC, University of Alabama in Huntsville
- Dr. David Titley, Director, Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, Pennsylvania State University
- Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., Professor and Director, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado
John Christy
Summary statements from Christy’s testimony:
I see two things here, (1) the need to go back to the drawing board on climate modeling with special attention to the causes of natural variations and with a rigorously independent validation program, and (2) the world community needs to be exposed to the real debates in climate science rather than statements amounting to a consensus of those who already agree with a certain consensus.
I believe we missed a tremendous opportunity 17 years ago to develop a better understanding of the climate system because research dollars were directed to establish a climate modeling industry. To compound the problem as it developed, I believe we failed to fund substantial projects to examine the output of climate models in an independent, objective and methodological way. This has left us 17 years later still wondering what portion of the recent modest change is natural and what portion might be human-caused.
In this testimony, evidence is presented to demonstrate that recent weather events are not outside the extremes that have occurred in the past when human influences were negligible. Therefore in my view one cannot attribute these recent events with any confidence to something beyond nature. Climate models are promoted as tools that are able to discriminate natural climate events versus those that might happen as a result of the increases in greenhouse gases due to human activities and have been used by EPA for regulatory action. Unfortunately, as demonstrated here and discussed in the literature, climate models have not demonstrated acceptable skill in terms of depicting even very fundamental, large-scale climate variations, and thus are unable to identify natural versus human-influenced events on regional scales. Indeed, the lack of modeling skill regarding very basic processes such as tropical tropospheric variations, indicates that the modeling enterprise has not been subject to rigorous, independent “Red Team” oversight during its expensive growth period. In addition, significant advancements are needed in observing and understanding the natural processes of climate before reliable, though basic, forecasts are forthcoming. It is unfortunate, in my opinion, that recent policy has been made based on the projections of these faulty models. Climate science has a long way to go.
I find Christy’s testimony to be very effective and I don’t disagree with anything he says here. I note that at the end of his testimony, he appends my essay IPCC diagnosis – permanent paradigm paralysis. If you missed it the first time, take a look. Apparently Christy really liked this essay; he asked if he could include it in his testimony. I note that I prepared that essay as part of written testimony for a Senate hearing that was cancelled.
David Titley
Titley’s testimony starts with a summary of IPCC findings, general findings about warming. Some excerpts from the latter part of the talk:
What does all this mean? The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Or stated another way, saying we don’t know today the impact of climate change on these phenomena is very different than stating that climate change has no impact on typhoons and hurricanes. What we do know is that these storms are forming in a warmer, moister environment and above a warmer ocean. We also know that current research indicates our future may include more intense, and possibly more frequent, storms. That is a risk not to be summarily discounted.
I am frequently asked if a specific or extreme event (for example, typhoon, Sandy, drought, snowstorm) is or is not “caused” by climate change. Frankly, that is the wrong question. It’s like asking someone if their childhood upbringing “caused” him or her to attend a specific college. It’s more useful to think of climate as the deck of cards from which our daily, specific weather events are dealt. And as the climate changes, so does our deck of cards. For every degree of warming, we add an extra Ace into the deck. So, over time, the unusual hands, like a Full House with Aces high, become more plausible – and more common – with time.
A useful way to think about how to deal with this uncertain, but not completely unknown, future is through a risk management framework. Rather than wait for a series of extreme, or disruptive, events to occur and then react, an alternate way to approach our changing climate may be to adopt some proven tenets from the security community.
As we work on adapting to our changing climate we should not lose sight of the big picture: how to move the world’s energy system to a predominantly non-carbon based energy source to power the world. How can we unleash the innovation and energy that makes our country great to solve one of the grand challenges of the 21st Century? We are the country that is developing a self-driving car and whose private companies can send satellites to geosynchronous orbit. With the right policies I am sure our private sector can develop – and profit from – energy solutions that will power the world in a sustainable fashion into the future.
I don’t find Titley’s testimony to be effective. He didn’t sell hard the AGW-extreme weather link, rather his main argument was ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. With his deck of cards analogy, he discounts the possibility of AGW removing an Ace from the deck. He then brings in a risk management approach, and his final recommendation seems to be moving away from carbon energy sources. IMO, none of these seems effectively targeted (either logically or policy wise) at the issue of the relationship between climate change and extreme weather.’
Roger Pielke Jr
Take-home points from Pielke’s testimony:
There exists exceedingly little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.
Similarly, on climate timescales it is incorrect to link the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.
Here are some specific conclusions, with further details provided below:
Globally, weather-related losses ($) have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP (they have actually decreased by about 25%) and insured catastrophe losses have not increased as a proportion of GDP since 1960.
Hurricane landfalls have not increased in the US in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900. The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970 (when data allows for a global perspective).
Floods have not increased in the US in frequency or intensity since at least 1950. Flood losses as a percentage of US GDP have dropped by about 75% since 1940.
Tornadoes in the US have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since 1950, and there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined.
Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.” Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”
The absolute costs of disasters will increase significantly in coming years due to greater wealth and populations in locations exposed to extremes. Consequent, disasters will continue to be an important focus of policy, irrespective of the exact future course of climate change.
To avoid any confusion
Because the climate issue is so deeply politicized, it is necessary to include several statements beyond those reported above.
Humans influence the climate system in profound ways, including through the emission of carbon dioxide via the combustion of fossil fuels.
Researchers have detected and (in some cases) attributed a human influence in other measures of climate extremes beyond those discussed in this testimony, including surface temperatures (heat waves) and in some measures of precipitation.
The inability to detect and attribute increasing trends in the incidence of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and drought does not mean that human-caused climate change is not real or of concern.
It does mean however that some activists, politicians, journalists, corporate and government agency representatives and even scientists who should know better have made claims that are unsupportable based on evidence and research.
Such claims could undermine the credibility of arguments for action on climate change, and to the extent that such false claims confuse those who make decisions related to extreme events, they could lead to poor decision making.
A considerable body of research projects that various extremes may become more frequent and/or intense in the future as a direct consequence of the human emission of carbon dioxide.
Our research, and that of others, suggests that assuming that these projections are accurate, it will be many decades, perhaps longer, before the signal of human-caused climate change can be detected in the statistics of hurricanes (and to the extent that statistical properties are similar, in floods, tornadoes, drought).
This testimony is vintage RP Jr, who is quite experienced and effective in providing Congressional testimony on this topic. I don’t disagree with anything Pielke Jr says in this testimony, and I find it to be effective testimony.
JC comments:
All three witnesses are veterans at providing Congressional testimony. On this particular topic, I don’t think that Titley was very effective. While the Democrats had only one ‘slot’ in this hearing, Titley may not have been the best choice for this hearing. I note that most U.S. climate/atmospheric scientists are in San Francisco this week, attending the AGU meeting, which might have reduced the population of available witnesses.
The bottom line is that variability in extreme weather events depends largely on natural internal variability. Identifying any sort of signal from AGW is exceedingly difficult (this point was made well by Christy). Attempting to reduce the damages associated with extreme weather in the 21st century by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is very misguided IMO, and misses important opportunities to focus on better weather forecasting, better emergency management practices, and reducing infrastructure vulnerability.
David Titley is US Navy Admiral David Titley (ret), former Chief Oceanographer of the US Navy.
It’s unsurprising that climate-change skeptics are not impressed.
Probably because he did such a Lousy job of selling the con.
“”It’s unsurprising that climate-change skeptics are not impressed.””
Hey! You didn’t use the term “deniers”!
Progress!
Sorry Fan… It was there. Had to take it. Carry on my friend.
A fan of MORE pontification said: David Titley is US Navy Admiral David Titley (ret), former Chief Oceanographer of the US Navy. It’s unsurprising that climate-change skeptics are not impressed.
It’s sad that you think that your appeal to authority should be convincing here. I suppose it comes from the mindset that believes that arguments about consensus are valid scientifically.
Titley’s testimony was not effective from a scientific standpoint because it put the burden of proof on the wrong side. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the null hypothesis is generally one for absence of an effect. He is effectively saying that we should assume climate change will cause catastrophic changes in extreme weather until it is proven that it will not. While that may be a valid policy argument, it is not a valid scientific argument.
Skeptics aren’t easily mpressed fan. That’s why they don’t
fall in a heap o-//o-// regardin’ apocalypse now …if not,
next week!
David Titley is US Navy Admiral David Titley ret…. this does not validate his qualifications or ideology. From the material he presents (posted by JC) Titley is not great on logical inference since he makes several leaps of faith in his pointed call for action in the absence of any reasonable cause – effect. It is same ol’ same ol’ precautionary principle … we can’t demonstrate but it might be so we must act. Perhaps someone should tell Mr. Tiltely that there’s also no evidence he’s not a murderer or paedophile or spy or rapist, or …) so he surely oughta’ be restrained.
fan,
You should take note of the Admiral’s use of the words “indicate”, “may” and “possibly” on the topic of future storms and weather events.
And if you really want to be an honest broker, you should acknowledge the inaccuracy of his statement about what current research is saying.
If weather events are a function of energy flux, greater energy flux should, on average, lead to more extreme weather events.
But, as the greenhouse effect results in less outgoing energy flux, and as the incoming energy flux remains more-or-less constant, it follows that the total energy flux is, on average, reduced.
That should, on average, lead to less extreme weather events, not more.
Your point is completely confused phatboy. The point of GH induced “warming” of the climate system means more energy is available within the system for “fluxing” from once part to another. A hurricane, for example, represents energy “fluxing” from ocean to atmosphere in an extreme way. A more energetic climate system is what we get with more energy in the system. Everything is enhanced.
R Gates, you’re the one who’s confused.
For there to be an energy flux, there has to be a gradient.
Energy doesn’t move around more simply because there’s more of it.
You can’t just make up your own physics.
If weather events like hurricanes are a function of heat gradients, not of heat content, then it follows that raising Tmin more than Tmax, via atmospheric CO2, will cause their formation rates and their magnitude to fall
“A more energetic climate system is what we get with more energy in the system. Everything is enhanced.”
Yes, take, for example, the high number of Atlantic Hurricanes that were observed in 2013.
Oh wait… :-)
I have a notion that wind speeds decrease as temperatures increase, based on the trend of increasing planetary wind speeds as you get further from the sun. If you treat the atmosphere as a heat engine operating with a given delta T, PV=nRT says the change in gas volume for a given delta T becomes larger as the absolute temperature decreases. If you treat the volume change as purely a change in potential energy, the kinetic energy (as wind) that results would track with the square root of the volume change, which is inversely related to the absolute temperature.
Indeed. Weather is driven by temperature *differences* not by absolute temperatures. Everyone seems to agree that the poles are warming more than the equator, so global temperature differences must be reducing.
phatboy describes accumulating energy that results in heating. More heating means more moisture. Severe weather is driven largely by moisture.
Jim D,
The Earth loses energy at a rate of around 44 TW.
I believe when a body loses energy, this is commonly referred to as “cooling”.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Less outgoing flux means warming, but otherwise correct, MF.
Is that why I’m looking out my window right now and seeing freezing fog, with not a hint of a breeze?
Why are there severe storms on Mars and Jupiter?
…or, closer to home, in some of the driest places on the planet, such as the Sahara and Antarctica.
R. Gates said:
A more energetic climate system is what we get with more energy in the system. Everything is enhanced.
So, for example, you would expect more extreme weather on Venus than on, say, Saturn, right?
Right?
…”Severe weather is driven largely by moisture.”…
Here is the formula for the ‘SEVERE WEATHER THREAT’ index, used by forecasters to ‘parameterize’ the likelihood of severe thunderstorms:
SWEAT = 12Td850 + 20(TT – 49) + 2f850 + f500 + 125(s + 0.2);
Simplified, this is:
Severe Weather =
low level humitity
+ low level temperature
– mid level temperature
+ low level wind speed
+ mid level wind speed
+ wind shear
To be sure, low level moisture is a term.
But low level temperature – mid level temperature is a simple measure of vertical stability. And since humidity is constrained by temperature, an unstable mid level temperature also implies an arid over humid profile.
That may be one reason why severe thunderstorms are more frequent over drier ( in the mid levels ) Nebraska, than they are in more humid Florida:
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQV0lzSxQs-rlr52woXTRdjYtR6_Wn-MNC7HWHkCExqcuRTlJmY
And why thunderstorms are more frequent over land than (more humid ) oceans:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-abwAIFk-72M/T0HHQsL-1hI/AAAAAAAAF3o/ka1kRCotHRg/s400/Global_Lightning_Frequency.jpg
The wind speed term is also pertinent.
As noted, since ‘global warming’ is predicted to include ‘Arctic Amplification’, the pole to equator gradient would decrease, the thermal wind would decrease and wind speeds of the jet stream would decrease, which would be consistent with a reduced severe threat.
I note that most U.S. climate/atmospheric scientists are in San Francisco this week, attending the AGU meeting, which might have reduced the population of available witnesses.
If your livelihood depends on federal grants testifying before Congress is Job #1 – Job#99.
In the US the climate debate is Game is over, tilt, do not pass go, do not collect $200, stick a fork in it, that dog don’t hunt etc etc..
In other news the EPA is rolling back the Renewable Fuel Standard.
IMHO The politico’s that need to get re-elected in November are gently walking away from the more ‘alarmist’ position.
I like RP Jr’s research because it is based on carefully measured data and analysis. However, I don’t like his waffle on the potential future possibilities. Nowhere does he mention that future change could revert to cooling. Using words like could have “profound” impact, and the open door allowed by saying the projected future impacts are several decades away plays directly into the precautionary principle used by so many global warming advocates. Why not just say there is no current evidence supporting tying climate change/global warming to trends in weather events and that no one knows what the future will bring. Period!
I agree R2, but it kind of cuts two ways. Certainly no one can dismiss him as a wild eyed denier. For the purposes of the hearing, he’s got to be seen as credible.
And he asserts again that “various extremes may become more frequent and/or intense in the future as a direct consequence of the human emission of carbon dioxide.” The “considerable body of evidence” he hand-waves toward is composed of computer speculation. No real-world attribution is being observed as emissions climb strongly.
FAIL.
Roger Pielke Jr says …
“-Such claims could undermine the credibility of arguments for action on climate change, and to the extent that such false claims confuse those who make decisions related to extreme events, they could lead to poor decision making.
-A considerable body of research projects that various extremes may become more frequent and/or intense in the future as a direct consequence of the human emission of carbon dioxide.”
… yet his detailed evidence suggests strongly that arguments for action on climate change have no credibility and that extremes are unlikely to become more frequent. To me, that’s shocking evidence, as it allows the administration to cling to its current beliefs.
Here is a link to the video of the hearing.
http://science.edgeboss.net/wmedia/science/sst2013/EV121113.wvx
Speakers give short statements starting at about the 9.00 minute mark followed by Q&A.
Bob:
Thanks for posting the link. While it’s nice for the professors to get exposure, the whole thing has the appearance of competing confidence games with the invited speakers acting as shills for the respective political parties. However, Dr. Pielke Jr. did appear to be more balanced than the other two gentlemen.
Also, is the phrase “I’m late because I was at a hearing on Afghanistan” uttered by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., CA) congressional code phrase for a three-day bender?
Is the phrase “at a hearing on Afganistan” similar to the phrase here in Britain “engaged in Ugandan discussions”?
Love what Christy had to say. Pielke’s good too. Loved to have seen you there too, Judith. It’s true, I’m an apple polisher from way back (had to be with my grades), but of course I mean it nonetheless…
One of the great tactical blunders on the part of the hysterical warmists, will prove to be their transparent attempt to falsely tie perfectly normal weather events to “climate change.” If I wasn’t a skeptic 3 years ago, I’d have been well on my way to becoming one simply on the basis of McKibben’s risible statement concerning Irene. (Irene has a middle name, and the name is global warming.)
“Global warming has a middle name, and the name is who do you think you’re kidding.”
> less of a blind
Less of a blunder, damn autocorrect, you!
pokerguy,
Do you know who Avi Gilburt is?
I liked the playing card analogy. If you score the face cards as J=1, Q=2, K=3 and A=4 there are 40 points, and adding an ace increases the points by 10%. AGW is more like adding a J in 25years (41 pts), replacing it with a Q in the next 25 years (42 pts), leading to the extra A in the last 25 years (44 pts.) Each player would experience a slightly higher frequency of hands with higher point totals (good), but also a slightly higher frequency of other players with higher point totals (bad), but no hands could be directly attributable to the extra card (ignoring for now the identifiability of the extra card.) I think the analogy reasonably mimics the difficulty of attributing any event to global climate change, and reasonably mimics the slight quantitative effects.
I agree with the limitation that Prof Curry identifies: climate change could be equivalent to removing a face card. Also, it is not clear on the evidence to date that increasing warmth and absolute humidity, even if caused by CO2 increase, would be bad.
Pingback: Climate And Weather | Transterrestrial Musings
“absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence”
This is normally an admonishment in science; it means that you have overstepped the evidence and made a statement that cannot be supported. I have never heard of it being used to support a postulate.
This is a quite disgraceful distortion of scientific principles where the standards of proof have been inverted and perverted.
There is no proof that unicorns are NOT transporting heat from the oceans surface to the depths, therefore we must allow that this is a viable mechanism to explain the ARGO data.
That is not what it means. Evidence of absence means evidence for a negative hypothesis, typically that something does not exist. In fact absence of evidence for the existence of that thing, if that evidence has been looked for, is evidence of absence. If the harden collider had found no evidence of the highs boson that would have been evidence it did not exist. The saying is therefore wrong.
I see my speller got me. It is of course hadron and higgs. That no scientist looking for unicorns has found signs of one (absence of evidence) is strong evidence of their absence, albeit not conclusive. Negative existential hypotheses can be difficult.
DW it could have been worse with Hadron!!!
AGW theory is about science; and, it’s not a Left vs. right issue — it’s not! Really, it’s not — honest… I swear to Buddha.
Page 1 Headline – “Doctor’s Christy and Pielke flip President Obama the bird in a Congressional House Subcommittee hearing on Climate Change!
Yeah, like we’ll see that on the front page of the Post… :-O
> While the Democrats had only one ‘slot’ in this hearing, Titley may not have been the best choice for this hearing.
And the best one would have been…?
Why you, willard; go yap at them.
========
Seems to me the question is, what do you mean by “best?” The most effective propagandist? The most capable scare monger? The best statistician? (Which it seems to me would mean the worst if trying to tie perfectly normal weather to still unquantified Co2 driving “climate change.”.)
Topsy turvy is the warmist world.
Co2 “driven” climate change.
(What is that, a past participle? I used to know that stuff. )
“And the best one would have been…?”
Nothing good would come from her answering that question. It’s sort of like trying the answer “does this dress make me look fat?”.
> Nothing good would come from her answering that question.
Then nothing good can come from any claim which presupposes it, however vacuous it may be.
***
> go yap at them.
Only if Judy thinks the best Democrat is an Independent. And even then, why not Gavin, his dishonesty notwithstanding?
Maybe so, but it’s also better to stop digging.
Digging would have been to ask what is meant by “best”, John.
Willard
Trenberth
Mann
Hansen
etc.
They should have had a “big gun”, not a pop gun.
But it would not have made much difference, because the data are on the side of Christy/Pielke.
Possibly the reason no “big gun” showed up?
Max
> “big guns”
I thought Hansen was a Republican, MiniMax, and perhaps also a pathological altruist, just like Mike & Kevin.
Does it mean even a Republican who suffers from an altruistic pathology would be the best choice for Democrats?
“Digging would have been to ask what is meant by “best”, John.”
Back to square one, you want to waltz again?
Letting my point stand would be enough, John. It might even be your best strategy.
Some things are better left undogwhistled.
“It might even be your best strategy.”
Who said I have a strategy? ;^)
Don’t be so humble, John, you’re only one of my favorite Denizens.
If only you were one of my favorite independents.
==============
Or put another way, if you do not know what is going on, how can you decide you are going to “fix it”. If the evidence is not there for a supposition, how can you proceed on the basis it is?
None of the arguments seem to include the question: Can heat emissions from the burning of fossils (and from nuclear power) simply be ignored as a possible cause of global warming? How can any scientists studying the possible causes of increasing atmospheric temperature totally ignore the FACT that heat emissions alone add four times as much heat as can be accounted for by the actual measured rise in atmospheric temperature. So what is the contribution that CO2 makes? It is an indicator that fossil fuels are being burned at such a rate that the heat from them is causing disconcerting climate changes. Consider this: suppose we were getting hydrogen instead of methane from shale formations and were burning that instead of fossil fuels, there would be no by-product CO2, but the heat would be the same. Unless all that heat magically disappears we still have global warming. Likewise nuclear power produces no CO2 but does emit more than twice the total heat than its electrical output. CO2 is NOT the main problem. In going back to the start to study the problem we cannot ignore heat emissions and expect better results than we have achieved. Recent moderation in the rise in temperature may be due to the melting of glaciers at a rate of one trillion tons a year. Sea ice may be returning on a short time basis, but that may not be replacing the glaciers.
Philip, My calculations back in 2005 shows that the contribution of waste heat is 20% of the present warming. It is, however, a new experiment for the earth. As for CO2 emissions, the earth has been dealing with it for billions of years, it knows how to handle CO2. I a gree, we should pay attention to waste heat more than CO2.
Wildfires make their own weather for days — and, in some instances these fires may last for weeks — but, then they’re over and their effects and very localized. Volcanic eruptions have caused cooling around the globe and in some instances the effects were seen over several years. But then too, when it’s over… it’s over.
To make your case you’d have to compare humanity’s heat energy to natural disasters like wildfires and volcanoes–e.g., like burning forests day and night all the time and everywhere or huge volcanic eruptions. That will be hard to do. Volcanoes, for example, shoot more pollution into the atmosphere than ever produced by every single car that has ever been driven on the face of the Earth
According to wiki the world used 143.851PWh in 2008. That’s 32 mW/m², negligible.
It is also interesting that the “birth” of recent global warming in the ’70’s also coincided with China’s building another million person city every six weeks until earlier this decade (and when did the tapering off occur relative to the “pause?”). To me, waste heat cannot be ignored. Nor should it be by the “activist” perspective – the policy options if it’s all CO2 are very different than if waste heat is a major causative factor. For example, the environmentalist argument for nuclear power goes way.
IWhen the climate alarmists totally ignore France as a contributor to global warming and considering how little the climate alarmists think of the Sun’s energy –e.g., 137 mW/cm2 when directly overhead — I think you have to concede that the climate alarmism of the Left pales in comparison to those who fear humanity’s bonfires.
If you add it up the waste heat is tiny compared to the forcing from rising CO2
And for whoever said “the earth has been dealing with CO2 for billions of years, it knows how to handle CO2”
So how come CO2 levels today are rising faster than anytime in known history? Nature quite clearly cannot handle human emissions.
lolwot | December 11, 2013 at 7:41 pm said: ”So how come CO2 levels today are rising faster than anytime in known history? Nature quite clearly cannot handle human emissions”
WRONG! 25-50 thousand years ago. CO2 was raising much faster; when human invented how to make fire artificially, by rubbing two sticks. Human by uncontrollable fires created deserts on every continent. Shonky science doesn’t take that in consideration – instead prefer to lie about solar cycles..
Philip and Nabil
I come up with a more than 20%, but I am not just using “waste heat”, but ALL the heat generated from fossil fuels plus nuclear power, assuming this gives me an absolute upper limit.
TWh per year energy used (fossil fuels + nuclear):
53,200 electrical power
13,500 direct heating
32,900 transportation
99,600 total
0.022 W/m^2 per year
CO2 forcing
3.71 W/m^2 for 2xCO2
using logarithmic relation
+2.0 ppmv CO2 per year =
0.027 W/m^2 per year
Max
Regarding anthropogenic energy use, it is valid to point out that the global average is on the order of milliwatts per square meter.
However, it is worthwhile to reflect that the source of energy use by humans is very much more concentrated.
Very little of human energy use is expended over the oceans. And over land, more and more energy use is concentrated in cities.
Read Oke, and see that now decades old analysis of energy use for Manhattan amounts to 200w/m^2 !!!
Obviously, the atmosphere spreads this energy upward and outward – that’s what the atmosphere does.
But it’s worth reflecting on the ability of the atmosphere to shed this energy upward.
“But it’s worth reflecting on the ability of the atmosphere to shed this energy upward.”
This is why heat generation is negliable compared to the CO2 forcing.
What is it, something like 4 hiroshima bombs of heat a second I hear.
Waste heat rejected to surface water is not negligible, it is presently 20% of the total. With time, CO2 forcing will decrease to zero, as it has always done so, and waste heat will constitute 100% of surface warming.
CO2 forcing is cumulative.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Waste-heat-vs-greenhouse-warming.html
Using Skeptical science as a reference is like using your autobiography to prove you are great.
It is a bit funny to hear how nearly all accept the statement: A change in climate gives a change in the weather.
In fact it is the weather that gives the climate with different sorts of statistics.
The models can only give some estimate of the climate because the models can not model the weather, so any guess of which weather could give the estimated climate is as good as any other.
It seems to me that Christy’s and Pielke’s testimony rely almost exclusively on empirical data. Titley’s testimony seems to rely on the assumption that CAGW is occurring, though I am not sure that he states this explicitly. Now we know
1. No-one has the slightest idea what the value of the climate sensitivity of CO2 is, however this is defined.
2. There is no empirical data that proves that as you add more CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels, this causes global temperatures and sea levels to rise.
So the assumption that CAGW is actually happening is simply an unproven hypothesis. Therefore, Titley’s testimony is, basically, worthless. After the recent paper by Fritz Vahrenholdt, it would seem that there is as much science to support the idea that global temperatures will cool this century, as there is that these temperatures will rise.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.ca/2013/12/20th-century-data-supports-svensmarks.html
we have ideas about the sensitivity to C02. Christy does, he’s even published it.
Reposted with corrected formatting
Mosh
According to John Cook at SkS, John Christy’s opinion on the CO2 warming impact is:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_John_Christy.htm
Some excerpts
Sounds like Christy is a “luke warmer”, who has concluded from the data that the actual climate impact of CO2 in the real world is small.
(Of course, climate alarmist John Cook doesn’t agree. To paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies: “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?”).
Max
Steven, you wrote “Christy does, he’s even published it.”
If Christy has actually measured a value for climate sensitivity, my hat is off to him. You say he has published it. Can you give me the reference. please?
here ya go Jim,
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/E&E%20douglass_christy-color.pdf
Capt, you write “here ya go Jim,”
Thanks. If that is the reference Steven is referring to, then it is not an measurement of climate sensitivity. It is a paper explaining why such little data as we have, does not support the IPCC conclusion.
Jim Cripwell, yep, it is an estimate. Without knowing what “normal” is that is all you can do. There is also the newer Spencer and Christy, but pretty much the same thing. High sensitivity estimates pretty much require assuming the little ice as was “normal” or didn’t exist then all the gain associated with the recovery/warming “has” to be anthropogenic plus still “believe” faithfully that clouds will miraculously end up being a positive forcing while a colder stratosphere will magically suck up water vapor.
Capt, you write “Jim Cripwell, yep, it is an estimate. ”
That is my whole point. If all we have are estimates, then we don’t know what the value of climate sensitivity is.
“No-one has the slightest idea what the value of the climate sensitivity of CO2 is, however this is defined.”
That is not correct. We do have, at the very least, a slight idea what the value of CS of CO2 is. To not have the slightest idea would mean the value could range from + to – infinity. That isn’t likely. I can narrow it down to + or – 15 C pretty confidently. I can reasonably narrow it down to + 6 to 0 C. Through calculation I can get an idea of +4.5 to + 1.5. Heh, even you have an idea of the value of CS to be 0. Further, you are quite confident about that value, which is at least one person having at least a slight idea.
manaker.
Cripwell held the bar pretty low. He said nobody has any idea.
Well the skeptic he likes has an idea.
So he flips back to his nonsensical we cant measure it therefore we know nothing stance.
We kick guys like him out of Operations research which depends upon making projections and predictions of things we never want to measure and cannot measure. Even his hero did this.
Cap’n
The Christy paper you posted a link for states:
So, taking out oscillations (which cannot be a result of GH forcing), the record shows warming of 0.062±0.010ºK/decade, as “estimated from data in the tropical latitude band”.
CO2 forcing (from models) is expected to be “0.070g ºC/decade, where g is the gain due to any feedback”. All other anthropogenic forcings (aerosols, other GHGs, etc.) are estimated by IPCC (AR4) to have cancelled one another out over the past (AR5 actually has them slightly positive on balance).
At a value of g=1 (no added forcing from feedbacks) a doubling of CO2 would theoretically increase global temperature by around 1ºC. This is based on estimates (Myhre et al.) made from absorption characteristics of CO2 as determined in the laboratory, and not from actual physical data in our atmosphere.
The observed warming would correspond with a value of g= 0.62/0.7 = 0.9 (slightly negative overall feedback), which would mean that a doubling of CO2 would result in warming of a bit less than 1ºC.
This analysis is all well and good, BUT it is NOT and empirical study demonstrating that a doubling of CO2 would cause ~1ºC warming, simply (as I understand it) a confirmation that, if all other things were equal and the other assumptions were right, the observed warming would constrain the CO2 impact to this amount.
Max
1. No-one has the slightest idea what the value of the climate sensitivity of CO2 is, however this is defined.
I think we know it to within an order of magnitude.
2. There is no empirical data that proves that as you add more CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels, this causes global temperatures and sea levels to rise.
What do you mean by “empirical data that proves?” There does indeed exist a great deal of empirical evidence that, in the absence of other effects, increasing CO2 concentration causes higher temperatures.
The existence of anthropogenic warming is not particularly controversial (notwithstanding some of the more rabid skeptics). The notion that this warming will be catastrophic is, however, quite controversial. Alarmists try very hard to conflate the two, and to imply that accepting one requires accepting both. Don’t fall into that trap.
fizzymagic, you write “What do you mean by “empirical data that proves?””
I mean precisely what I wrote. There is no empirical data that proves that when you add CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels, it causes global temperatures to rise. We have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere for decades, and no-one has measured a CO2 signal in any modern temperature/time graph. Since no such signal has been measured, it follows that there is no evidence that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes global temperatures to rise.
You also write “I think we know it to within an order of magnitude.”
If indeed I am right that the climate sensitivity is indistinguishable from zero, what is meant by an order of magnitude greater than zero? 10 times zero is still zero.
Steven, you write “So he flips back to his nonsensical we cant measure it therefore we know nothing stance.”
Since when has the scientific method, developed by Galileo and Newton, been “nonsensical”? The whole concept of modern physics is based on the idea that it is perfectly proper to conceive of hypotheses on the basis on theoretical estimations, but you NEVER claim that these are proven until actual measurements have been made. That is why the international community spent billions of dollars to measure the mass of the Higgs boson.
I repeat what I wrote. You can hypothesise until kingdom come about the numerical value of a physical entity, but you do not KNOW it’s value until it has been measured. Period.
fizzymagic, Thinking after breakfast. Would you agree that it is possible for the value of the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 to be 0.0C to one place of decimals, two significant figures?
Hmm. I just asked this over at Climate Audit, might as well demonstrate my ignorance here as well.
Is there any reason to believe that atmospheric sensitivity (either or both TCR and/or ECS) is a singled, fixed value? I mean, it’s not a law of physics, so why are we looking for a constant, immutable number for either?
Tom Fuller,
I’d make three points:
1. A figure for Climate sensitivity is needed for doing the economic analyses that are needed to inform policy analyses, at least that is the case the way we are doing them based on projections of climate change and damages. If we move to analysing how GHG emissions effects the probability and consequences of sudden rapid climate changes, then that is a totally different analyses from climate science right through the policy analysis.
2. I would expect, if we could accurately and precisely measure/estimate climate sensitivity it would be a number with a very low uncertainty range for a given starting state, for example in the state the earth’s climate is in now. The uncertainty range might be +/- 0.1 C instead of 1.5C to 4.5C if we could measure/estimate it accurately and precisely.
3. I agree, we’d expect climate sensitivity to be a different figure depending on the starting condition; it would be different in an ice age than now because of different albedo, and may other factors.
I am interested to hear what others have to say on this.
Tom, in order for climate sensitivity to be a constant you’d have to get exactly the same feedbacks. This is obviously not going to be the case with changes in initial conditions and it is also not going to be the case with different sources of forcing.
The alarmists reached for the Ace up their sleeve, and it wasn’t there.
==============
Always a bad moment, Kim.
..the Ace was later found hiding in deep ocean.
Teddi
Naw.
The ace wasn’t “found” to be hiding in the deep blue ocean.
It was “postulated” to be hiding in the deep blue ocean.
Logic:
– Can’t find the missing heat and that’s a “travesty”.
– But we know it’s there, ’cause our models tell us it should be there.
– And our models are right by definition.
– Must be hiding somewhere.
– Hey, how ’bout the deep blue ocean?
(Great! Since there aren’t any real measurements, nobody can prove otherwise.)
Max
While I agree with the thrust of Dr Pielke’s comments, both sides of the debate should leave out any metric involving financial comparisons, related to GDP or otherwise. There are too many variables involved not related to the actual physical facts about the events and then the economists take over.
As an example is the recent tornado in Illinois that devastated a small community. You could tell from the road pattern in the demolished area that the subdivisions had been built in the last 50 years or so. If that storm had hit the same area 100 years ago, it might not have even been recorded or noticed. For all we know, depending on the location and amount of development in the area, the same storm could have hit in a radius of 50 miles this year and not demolished anything. For truly rural areas, the only evidence of some tornadoes is radar. All comparisons of these weather events should be as if there were no humans around and the focus should be on the actual non-man made physical evidence of the event.
‘Rather than wait for a series of extreme, or disruptive, events to occur and then react, an alternate way to approach our changing climate may be to adopt some proven tenets from the security community.’
I see the link quite clearly, there are some bad guys out there so we have to read everyone’s emails without their authority.
On the confusion between climate and weather the main issue is timescale. As I set in:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2VHpYemRBV3FQRjA
climate change can only be “observed” after many centuries (better after few millenia) of statistical data colletion.
I think that all these professors from US universities do not focus on this main issue. Why?. I honestly believe that is because of the enormous amount of money in play.
To Nabil Swadin: I would appreciate understanding more about your calculations regarding heat emissions and global warming. Thanks
philohaddad
Nabil estimates 20% of total warming caused by waste heat from human energy generation (all sectors).
I simply took ALL the heat generated by humans (all sectors) and came up with 45% of the total forcing (see above comment #424362).
It’s probably somewhere between these two estimates, since not only the “waste heat” ends up as warming for our planet.
At any rate, it is not “a tiny fraction” as lolwot would have us believe, but in the same order of magnitude.
Max
The current CO2 forcing is about 1.7wm-2
Waste heat forcing is about about 0.028wm-2
The CO2 forcing is 60x larger (and growing)
lolwot
Apples and oranges.
You are counting the cumulative CO2 forcing since 1750 and comparing this with the annual heat from all human energy sources.
Max
manacker, no the CO2 forcing is continually 1.7-2 W/m2 and growing. Some has been offset by warming already but an imbalance remains that represents future warming.
Judith,
after thursday, I’ll share a poster that we (Rohde) did on variability in climate models. Short story. On monthly and decadel time frames the models are more variable than reality.
We havent linked this to the debate about using GCMs to predict increases/decreases in extreme events and we might be able to take this down to daily measures. I dont expect them to get the daily stats right.
its hard to see how GCMs can get extreme events right.. maybe heat waves…
sounds good, a guest post?
The likelihood of models giving any idea of frequency and intensity of future extreme events is such a crucial link in the chain of reasoning that could be said to lead to evidence-based policy making that it’s not at all surprising that it’s seldom if ever mentioned in polite company. Chalk me up as another reader of any such post.
Ya, I’ll probably get to it this weekend.
Christy:…recent weather events are not outside the extremes that have occurred in the past …..
i.e. extreme climate events can not be linked to the climate change
however,
the climate change can be linked to the extreme natural events
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SST-NAP.htm
Judith Curry
Thanks for posting this.
Agree with you that the testimonies of Christy and Pielke Jr. were more effective than that of Titley.
Also very much agree with your closing comment:
Another imaginary hobgoblin laid to rest. R.I.P.
And a re-focus on realistic, practical solutions.
Let’s hope President Obama is aware of this, so he can re-focus his “war on carbon” to something more useful.
Max
“Let’s hope President Obama is aware of this, so he can re-focus his “war on carbon” to something more useful.”
If only, Max. Global warming, climate change, war on carbon, etc. are emblematic for liberals/progressives or alarmists, of the excesses of the West, their self-loathing, their assumed moral superiority and ultimately, sense of guilt. I can only hope that science and data win the day at some point.
> Let’s hope President Obama is aware of this, so he can re-focus his “war on carbon” to something more useful.
Indeed, like memorizing unemployment rates:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/12/11/fact-check-rand-paul-obama-black-unemployment/3988561/
Obama’s legacy will be far-reaching. Several decades in its past.
willard,
You can be thick, but this is dense even for you.
As your MMP (mixed martial progressivism) sensei would say – read harder
“…black unemployment in America is double white unemployment. And it hasn’t budged under this president.
…
I think a lot of African Americans voted for him, but I don’t think it’s worked. I don’t think his policies have worked.”
“it hasn’t budged under this president” – His point was that hopeychange has done squat for African Americans.
But then, progressive policies have been intentionally working to keep blacks uneducated, poor and dependent on government for decades. So that’s not exactly a new insight.
GaryM,
From the first paragraph from the article:
> Actually, the black unemployment rate is lower now than when Obama took office, and the gap between the races is below the historical average. The black unemployment rate has averaged *more* than double the white rate for several decades
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/12/11/fact-check-rand-paul-obama-black-unemployment/3988561/
If he existed, my sensei might say: read first, then read harder.
Gary –
Yes indeed. The only real question is which was of a higher priority – keeping blacks uneducated, poor and dependent on government, or starving tens of millions of children in Africa.
“The only real question is which was of a higher priority – keeping blacks uneducated, poor and dependent on government, or starving tens of millions of children in Africa.”
No, the socialists/progressives in Africa have been doing that all on their own. Though western progressives restricting the use of DDT and the availability of genetically modified foods have certainly helped increase the body count.
Yes, but not enough were dying, and they weren’t dying fast enough. Hence the whole DDT ruse to kill millions more, or is that tens of millions – I always have a hard time keeping count.
And even if it is only millions, at least we can keep African Americans poor and uneducated as a sort of compensation. Even if our priorities aren’t precisely realized, it’s still win/win when we can cause misery here in the U.S. as well as Africa.
You boyz do always amuse.
Here Gary –
This should warm the cockles of your heart:
Dude could be a “denizen.” Has anyone seen Gary and Shimkus in the same place at the same time?
As the long shadows of a winter’s sun are cast upon the snow of a frozen lake, I wonder: what is the factual basis for this spate of North American coolness? Why did the Jet Stream descend its Arctic course, poking its icy fingers into our heartland?
When the deer start running across the lake out back, then I’ll know the ice is safe for skating. Oh look! here come some deer. Time to sharpen my skates’ blades.
It’s hotter somewhere else. Looks like the USSR. If they’re hotter and we’re colder, who won the Cold War?
But North America is the center of the earth, so we’re cool, and that’s that.
JCH
“Russia hotter”?
Huh?
Check: Ukraine and Russia hit by extreme cold snap and heavy snow
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/9753603/Ukraine-and-Russia-hit-by-extreme-cold-snap-and-heavy-snow.html
Will it be as bad as the cold wave last year that killed hundreds?
The rest of Europe is also on the cold side:
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-app/reports?MENU=EuropeanSummary
Brrr!
Max
Wow Max, you’re really smart. By comparison, I’m comfortable I’m far better off being dumb.
Thanks Max
Knowing that Russia and members of the former Soviet Union are cold as…well…really really cold right now as we in the USA also feel really really cold helps reset my thinking on the mechanism that I think JCH was hinting at; namely, that the Jet Stream was taking cold air from Russia, leaving behind hot air in Russia, and then adding that cold air to our North American cold air making it really really cold here. The energy budget would have been preserved I guess. But that mechanism is just a lot of hot air since it seems to be cold two places at once.
The other thing I thought about: since the Arctic has been the fastest warming place on the planet, is that hot air pushing the cold air Arctic Vortices towards the Equator and that’s why we are freezing our….?
When I run out of facts, my mind seems to conjure up all sorts of theories, kinda like some people we know.
If the North is sending us cool and we are sending it warmth for example melting its ice, isn’t that what we want?
One hypothesis is that a warmer Arctic makes weather systems more sluggish, which encourages the build up of cold domes that end up as Arctic outbreaks, but that’s just a climate-weather connection, so we should be skeptical, I guess, based on this piece. Climate can’t affect weather in any way, of course, can it? Didn’t anyone at the hearing talk about winter?
It snowed 20 cm in New South Wales, Australia last week.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/snow-falling-in-australia-in-summer-that-is-all/story-e6frflp0-1226775945701
Why is it snowing in Australia? Summer starts there in 2 weeks. AGC is frigidizing the planet!
RiHo08 – you would have to read a lot of individual news stories on a lot of days in a row to figure this out:
News flash you probably won’t find – lower slobbovia is completely normal.
Or, you could look at monthly totals for November at a science website. And at the end of December, look again. Buy hey, I’m not a genius.
This is a great site for all things cold:
http://iceagenow.info/
Re: Hearing: A Factual Look at the Relationship Between Climate and Weather
The stock answer is that climate is the long term average of weather. But now man knows that cloud cover mitigates warming from all sources (a negative feedback to Global Average Surface Temperature), while at the same time amplifying short term variations in solar radiation (a positive feedback to solar variability). Neither effect is modeled in the GCMs. With those facts as background, consider the “Relationship” along the principle axis of cloud effects:
Weather forecasting primarily depends on clouds and their variability.
GCM climatology depends on setting cloud cover variability to zero.
The Relationship? The two are orthogonal.
“I believe we missed a tremendous opportunity 17 years ago to develop a better understanding of the climate system”
The above is from Dr Christy’s testimony.While I find that his evidence most adequately reflects the available .evidence on climate, I find the above statement inadequate. He needs to go back mot 17 years, but 73 years to 1940 and understand the global temperature singularity that occurred then, In 1940 global temperature did an unprecedented swing from +0.15C/decade to -0.15C/decade in a single year and no one has explained how that could occur. It was as if climate change had dramatically switched off and the cold oceans taken over the world’s climate. Thus the world never learned the 1940 lesson See my website underlined above for an explanation.
Thanks, Alexander. There are many unexplained changes in science from about 68-73 years ago, in 1940-1945.
The greatest mystery for me is the switch from Lord Francis W. Aston’s rigorously valid concept of “nuclear packing fractions” to von Weizsacker’s deceptively convincing concept of “nuclear binding energy.”
Thanks to open opposition to such propaganda, the consensus is now starting to disintegrate:
http://m.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/nobel-winner-boycotts-top-science-journals/article5443113.ece/
Civilian opposition to such false government propaganda, as AGW and von Weizsacker’s “nuclear binding energy,” is the most effective way to restore respect for the rights of citizens.
Climate is the average of weather. By definition. To declare that climate can change weather is just being silly.
Defining weather is difficult enough, in terms of defining “bad” versus “good”.
An air temperature of 35C may constitute horrendous heat in some locations, or blessed relief in others. Similarly with precipitation, wind, cloud cover, and so on.
Weather occurs. As far as I am aware, there has never been a documented occurrence of precisely identical weather conditions at either two different locations, or two temporally disparate times.
This is exactly what is to be expected if the atmosphere is defined in terms of a deterministic system exhibiting sensitivity to initial conditions – chaotic, in simple terms.
We seem to have placed the inmates in charge of the asylum. Naturally enough, the saying that one reaps what one sows would seem to be appropriate in the present climate. I seek your indulgence for my awful puns.
Nature, God, Gaia, the Flying Spaghetti Monster of the Pastafarians, all appear to provide equal consideration to the efforts of Man to bend the World to Man’s will. The weather continues to change from moment to moment, in spite of all our prayers, sacrifices and supplications. In the meantime, put your trust in Allah, but first tether your camel. In other words, listen to the weather forecast, but take an umbrella if it looks like it might rain.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike, it is plainly absurd to say climate changes weather.
I think it would be much better to say that changing climate may change our expectations for the weather to come.
Then we are back to “what is weather”, which seems ill defined.
How is a flood “weather” ?
Anytime someone reverts to using an analogy that amounts to little more than 3 card monty, you should know their argument has a very basic problem.
weather and climate are one and the same thing; GLOBAL warming is phony. Climate is in constant change – dry weather / climate, wet weather / climate, summer and winter weather / climate; there is no such a thing as ”OVERALL” global warmings, or GLOBAL cooling. Some places / places get warmer, instantly other place/ places gets cooler. Global warming is crap!
+1 :o)
Absence of evidence:
See http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Absence_of_evidence
“Because there is always this faint possibility that evidence hasn’t been observed yet, a common maxim is that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” – and is often used by people to hang on to their beliefs even when faced with a lack of evidence for them. However, this is technically an incorrect maxim; if evidence is lacking when we expect it to be abundant, then it very much allows us to dismiss a hypothesis, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., observed that the IPCC fifth assessment report (2013) concluded that it is improper to link the increasing costs of natural disasters to CO2. That’s logical given that, according to Pielke, the IPCC also accepts there is, “little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”
The primary reason to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is highlighted in the following graph.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-V7CB4YvFdPY/UqVwsBLXndI/AAAAAAAAEU8/2giwaZscUJw/s1600/Temperature_of_Planet_Earth_2.jpg
Unfortunately plenty of folk like to fool each other that the impacts of greenhouse gases are and will be “within natural variation” when quite clearly they are highly abnormal and sudden.
It will be like pressing a button and going from the relatively stable climate of the last 10,000 years, to a pre-human type of climate not seen for millions of years.
Will storms and extreme weather will remain the same in a completely different climate? I doubt it. Quite a shake up is in store if we continue down the failed path of greenhouse gas emissions.
The primary reason to ignore chicken little forecasts of thermageddon is the warmists’ unquestioned acceptance of WAGs as to past “global average temperatures”, which is matched only by their blind belief in the projections of GCMs as to future GATs.
Both of which core tenets of CAGW dogma are on full display in lolwot’s chosen graph.
And hey, what happened to the MWP in your graph? I thought it got a reprieve like Obama’s turkey at Thanksgiving.
MWP is there.
How can you know it’s too small when you say you think past global temperatures are WAGs?
Problem with skeptics is they know what conclusion they want to believe (recent warming is “within natural variation”) and then work backwards from that trying to justify it. Rather than looking at the evidence and working forward.
See the recent travesty at WUWT for example where they reinforced the myth that recent warming is insignificant by splicing satellite data to the end of an ice core record that ended in the 19th century. 1920s satellites?
you could examine the vostok ice record then compare it to the 50yr instrumental record,the later being problematic in their being a zero trend.
I didn’t say the MWP was too small. I asked where it was, given that I thought it was released from the climate gulag not so long ago. That graph makes it look like its still cooling its heels in “scientific” Siberia.
You’ve GOT TO BE KIDDING, Numbnut. Trying to scare people with ‘projections’ of 4 degrees C, over 7 degrees F, of warming this century ? ! ? ! ? Why are you trying to do . . . be a ‘Hansen’ ?
And the Roman and Minoan warm periods show barely anything ? . .oh, the ‘lighter dashed lines’ are the ‘bounds’ (which are more realistic) but the dark line stands out . . ? ) . . Yeah, right . . .
This is PURE ALARMISM at its best.
Oh, sure, you’ll come back with some pithy saying or something trying to belittle me. I don’t care. Let others review your link to the picture, and review other data on this, and make up their minds for themselves.
lolwot
Good graph.
Shows that we are about where we were during the MWP and earlier warm periods.
The only “alarming” part of the curve (other than the ice ages) is the future projection (which is worthless).
Duh!
Max
Lolwot,
Thanks for the lint to the chart of temperatures over the past 542 million years.
Points to note:
1. We have been in an extremely cold period for about the past 4 million years. In fact, such cold conditions have occurred once before, and that was 300 million years ago.
2. Coldhouse periods, as the planet is now in, are rare; in fact, this is only the third in the past 600 million years (the cool periods in the Jurassic-Cretaceous and Oligocene were minor from my recollection from long ago).
3. It’d a pity they didn’t start the last frame at 25,000 years ago to show the many sudden climate changes – some of which occurred over period as short as 7 years and 9 years in regions (Greenland and Ireland, e.g. see figure 15.21, p391 near the end of this http://eprints.nuim.ie/1983/1/McCarron.pdf )
4. Pity they didn’t show how flora and fauna responded to warming and to cooling.
5. Pity they didn’t show the amount of carbon tied up in the biosphere
That chart is a joke – period.
Moral of the story is, you can lead a skeptic to water, but you can’t make them think
The statistical problem of continually fine tuning parameters based on observations — which results in a picture of the world but not a model that actually captures the forces and relationships between forces that are involved — there is this supporting observation by Christy:
”For example, we were told by the IPCC that milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms… After the winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11, we are told the opposite by advocates of the IPCC position, Climate Change Makes Major Snowstorms More Likely… The non-falsifiable hypotheses can be stated this way, whatever happens is consistent with my hypothesis. In other words, there is no event that would falsify the hypothesis. As such, these assertions cannot be considered science, or in anyway informative, since the hypothesis’ fundamental prediction is anything can happen.“
Obviously not. The hypothesis that “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” is clearly falsifiable. As is the other hypothesis there.
What Christy is confusing, as many climate skeptics do in their urge to reject AGW, is that falsified hypotheses do not falsify the entire field they were based on.
The stereotypical skeptic would demand the whole of meteorology be thrown out if tomorrow’s weather forecast is wrong. And when we tell them that won’t happen they will complain that makes the weather forecast unfalsifiable and so conclude that meteorology cannot be considered science.
“The stereotypical skeptic would demand the whole of meteorology be thrown out if tomorrow’s weather forecast is wrong. And when we tell them that won’t happen they will complain that makes the weather forecast unfalsifiable and so conclude that meteorology cannot be considered science.”
Strawman arguments are not persuasive and do nothing to find middle ground. You cannot ignore the contradictory reasoning that has been presented to the general public by mainstream climate science spokespeople, including the IPCC, illustrated by the example given. Though such contradictions do not ‘disprove’ AGW, they certainly don’t help the public understand it any better either. Instead of making sweeping generalizations about what you perceive skeptics to be, why not own the fact that contradictory messages reduce public confidence and work to fix that problem?
lolwot,
Why not try responding to Christy’s actual point.
What would falsify CAGW?
What weather or climate phenomenon would falsify the proposition that there is a high risk that human emissions of CO2 will cause serious damage by warming global climate (whether defined by temperature or heat content)?
“2 days ago they were forecasting rain, and now they are forecasting sunshine! So either meteorology is falsified, or it’s unfalsifiable!”
hardly a strawman, that is what Christy’s argument boils down to.
How the hell does the hypothesis “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” even bear on CAGW in the first place?
It’s hard to falsify a premise that anything extreme: hot, cold, wet or dry could be caused by increased CO2 concentrations.
BUT the record shows us that extreme weather events have NOT become more frequent or intense as our planet has warmed, so there is pretty good evidence that these events do not become more frequent or intense as a result of global warming.
Even IPCC is now conceding that there is no evidence that severe weather events have become more frequent or intense as a result of global warming. This is a reversal of its stand in AR4, where these events were largely postulated (based on expert judgment rather than formal attribution studies) to have become more frequent and/or intense due to global warming.
Max
lolwot
Flash back to 2008, when we were told by the UK Met Office that snow would become so rare in England that our children would never know it. Of course the reason for this was AGW and human CO2 emissions, right?
Oops!
Max
“Flash back to 2008, when we were told by the UK Met Office that snow would become so rare in England that our children would never know it.”
No, it was a warmer climate.
Like I said before skeptics tend to confuse hypotheses, because they are so stuck on seeing everything through the lens of wanting to deny AGW.
What do you expect to happen in a warmer world to the UK? The UK will be warmer too. What will happen to snow? The UK Met Office predicted snow would diminish. Maybe it will.
This applies whatever the cause of a warmer world, although it just so happens that a warmer world is predicted because of AGW and that prediction remains.
What happens to snow is beside the point. It’s very likely though that AGW will end up either increasing or decreasing snow cover.
lolwot
You state (seriously?):
Or not changing it at all (null hypothesis and most likely alternate).
Max.
lolwot, in the past was: if you don’t give 10% to the church, St. Peter will get angry and will sent hailstorms and create floods; after Darwin published his book – the shonky scientists started with GLOBAL warmings and ice ages to scare the people – only now because of electronic media and communication technology – they are more loud – but the scare tactic doesn’t work; because people are not buying the new socialist religion of worshiping the CO2: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/q-a/
I get it, you are in denial of the dangerous changes that are unfolding. Far better to bury your head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening.
http://nca2009.globalchange.gov/sites/default/files/images/1_Global_Page13-e.png
Better? Better than running around like a chicken with their head cut off screaming doom and gloom like Chicken little?
Lowlot,
“the dangerous changes that are unfolding”. Does that mean that they haven’t unfolded enough for you to cite all the excellent examples of anthro caused dangerous weather disasters unfolded?
take a look at where we are on the graph
Yes, the science is settled on attribution. Just ask the big coal funded Sierra Club.
http://www.mrctv.org/videos/climate-depots-marc-morano-debates-climate-change-cnn
lolwot, you should see the plot of the numbers of pigs, chickens and sheep on planet Earth, they go up even more. Maybe its the chickens that are causing the weather to change, damned dinosaurs.
Lolwot,
Interesting observation for those who claim that the atmosphere cannot be experimented upon.
It appears Nature has done it for you. Parts of Antarctica experience surface temperatures of around -90C. The atmosphere above cools with increasing altitude. Now, CO2 freezes at around -80C. Therefore, all CO2 in the atmosphere is frozen into solid CO2, and it is known that the properties of solid CO2 are markedly different from the gaseous form. For example, if solid CO2 absorbs sufficient radiation of any wavelength (IR included), it will become gaseous again. But it doesn’t, it stubbornly remains below its freezing point.
The inference can be drawn that removal of gaseous CO2 from the atmosphere (absolutely guaranteed at temperatures below the freezing point of the gas) should result in a precipitous lowering of temperature by another 33C, if I comprehend the Warmist nonsense accurately – GHE and all that!
Alas, no such precipitous temperature drop occurs. In other words, the presence of gaseous CO2 in the atmosphere will occur only after the temperature rises enough for the solid to sublime to the gaseous state.
Nature has removed gaseous CO2 from the atmosphere. Observe what happens – nothing.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
It took until the 8 minute mark of the video to get to “deniers” and “for the children”. And if you last until about 10 minutes in you get the climate stylings of George Clooney.
I liked all three testimony summaries that I read here. i find Roger Pielke Jr to be a very effective communicator. He is very direct and understandable and seems to stick to the facts no emotional diatribes. I actually liked Tiltley’s analogy and the general thrust of his testimony which is to say we don’t know enough yet to count or discount it.
I liked the deck of cards too. It can stand in for any probabilistic effect, and I will be using it myself sometime soon, no doubt. I didn’t think Tiltley was ineffective either. Maybe not as convincing to a scientist, but in congressional testimony, the testifier’s goal is not to sway a peer after all.
I quote from JC:
“…Identifying any sort of signal from AGW is exceedingly difficult (this point was made well by Christy). Attempting to reduce the damages associated with extreme weather in the 21st century by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is very misguided IMO, and misses important opportunities to focus on better weather forecasting, better emergency management practices, and reducing infrastructure vulnerability.”
I agree with all of this. As to the exceeding difficulty of identifying any sort of signal from AGW, this is not surprising since AGW simply does not exist. Despite years of research, thousands of papers, and billions spent on it, there never has been any direct proof that AGW has ever existed. The cause of AGW according to the savants of IPCC is the greenhouse effect, the warming caused by carbon dioxide as it absorbs OLR and converts the absorbed energy into heat. Has anybody noticed that this has not happened for 15 years? The question you should ask is: “If not now. when?” Hansen & company deny that this is going on. Their global temperature curves are purposely drawn so you can’t see the “hiatus” as they like to refer to cessation of global warming. Actually, it is not a cessation because it never started. Lets look at the recent temperature history as shown by satellites. The satellite era goes back to 1979. From 1979 to 1997 we see a series of ENSO oscillations This segment of ENSO is comprised of five El Nino peaks, with La Nina valleys in between. Such alternation of warm and cool phases is characteristic of ENSO and is present in all global temperature curves from their inception. The middle one of these five El Nino peaks is the El Nino of 1988, the one Hansen presented as proof of global warming to the Senate in 1988. The mean global temperature stayed constant throughout these oscillations, a total of 18 years. That means another “hiatus” comparable to the current one that nobody knows about. The reason they don’t know it is that ground-based temperature curves used by IPCC showed a “late twentieth century warming” in that time slot. I discovered that it does not exist and even put a warning about it in my book in 2010. Nothing happened in two years but then the big three of temperature – GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC decided they did not want to show this phony warming any more. What they did was simply to line up their data for this period with satellites that do not show the warming. This was done secretly and no explanation was given. The explanation is that I had exposed their fakery. Hence, we can now combine those 18 years when global mean temperature was constant with the current hiatus and find that the last 33 years have been entirely greenhouse free. Between these two no-warming zones is only the super El Nino and its step warming. Fifteen years of temperature standstill is already enough to decide that the greenhouse warming does not exist. Thirty three years is more than enough, it is just icing on the cake. Give up the superstition that global warming is greenhouse warming. It isn’t, and the huge sums spent on “mitigation” of this non-existent warming are a total waste.
Climate alarmism flows from the nihilism of Leftist thinking and a belief that the rest of humanity is evil and engaged in activities that are destroying the Earth. The “new approach to environmentalism,” according to Dr. Patrick Moore, “requires embracing humans as a positive element in evolution rather than viewing us as some kind of mistake.”
Freeman Dyson was more positive: “As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
JC comments:
“The bottom line is that variability in extreme weather events depends largely on natural internal variability.”
The bottom line is that this weaker solar activity will continue to cause episodes of very negative Arctic and North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, it’s absolutely guaranteed.
Pingback: Is what we’re getting ‘weather’ or ‘climate’? « DON AITKIN
I think they needed this hearing because they are hearing from a lot of worried skeptics that all these extreme weather events are making them look bad. A congressional hearing should cure that, I guess, at least until the next event. I don’t think the climate signal should be obvious at 0.7 C warming, but a lot of the public have started associating extreme weather and climate change, so the skeptics are on a tough road now because they have to disprove this too.
Jim D
Nope.
You’ve got it a__backward. The skeptics don’t have to disprove that extreme weather events are increasing as a result of AGW.
It is those who promote this premise who have to provide scientific evidence showing that it is so.
And they can’t.
Max
Jim
Only 18 years olds believe we have had extreme weather events that are out of the norm. On the other hand, 70 years olds, say” What is the big deal. Seen it all before.”
This shows tornadoes are down and then there is the 3,000 days since a Cat 3 Hurricane striking the US mainland.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/tornado/clim/EF3-EF5.png
The skeptics are losing in the court of public opinion where severe weather is being more tied to climate change every time it happens. Sometimes their local weatherman or news anchor makes that connection. Some weathermen probably say there is no connection, but then just making that statement looks politically motivated and works against them. Anyway my point was, why have a hearing on climate change that has happened already when everyone agrees it should be hard to detect. I think it is because of their concern with public opinion, and this hearing won’t change it.
I think evidence indicates cooler climate equal greater storms.
And it make sense because warmer condition equal more uniform temperatures. And therefore greater temperature differences in temperature allow greater storms.
But now, I thought of slight different take on it.
In short term- so say less than 1000 years. More mixing of ocean results cooler global climate, but eventually [+1000 years] more mixing of ocean causes warmer climate.
So rather than correlation with cooler climate and more violent storms, the violent storms could be mixing ocean more and causing cooler conditions.
Or any time one has more ocean mixing, one gets cooler conditions [over short term] and anytime one has less ocean mixing, one gets warmer conditions [again over short term].
And of course all we really looking at is over period of less than 1000 years- in terms violent weather. There little evidence which supports whether intensity of storm has increased or decreased last 1000 year compare 5000 years, or knowing the weather over long time periods.
So in terms of science and falsification, how could one measure the amount of ocean mixing in paleoclimate?
One thing related to ocean mixing could be medium to small impactor which cause waves in excess of 50 meters over large part of ocean.
But I was thinking climate/weather related causes and don’t know how can measure violent weather with some kind proxy.
SOME GOOD SEA ICE NEWS
Globally, sea ice extent is almost back to the 1979-2000 baseline level.
-0.7% (below the baseline) for November and -0.1% for October.
Arctic sea ice (the one everyone is fretting about) was -9.5% in November (-12.4% in October).
Antarctic sea ice (the one that never gets mentioned but silently keeps growing) was +5.7% in November (+6.4% in October).
Max
Yes everyone loves ice. You just want to go barefoot and plant tomatoes and roses in it.
Yes, the recent increases in sea-ice and the lack of warming in the last 17 years are both contrary to alarmist predictions. Ditto the lack of predicted extreme weather events.
So, on the one hand the increased ice should make me happy, because I have not drunk the CAGW coolaid, and consider it nothing more than a “tax and control” scheme of the fascist left. I would like to see the CAGW fall flat on it’s face through lack of evidence.
On the other hand, a slightly warmer earth would be a net-positive for humanity, so I’d love to see the earth warm up 1-2C.
Color me conflicted. :-)
“Attempting to reduce the damages associated with extreme weather in the 21st century by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is very misguided IMO, and misses important opportunities to focus on better weather forecasting, better emergency management practices, and reducing infrastructure vulnerability.” – JC
I’ve been reliably informed that scientist have no business promoting particular policy options and in doing so they threaten the entire scientific edifice.
reversing the enlightenment, as it were.
But we forget – advocacy only exists if it is in support of policies that Judith doesn’t support. Supporting policies that Judith does support is un-advocacy, or perhaps anti-advocacy, or perhaps “responsible” advocacy.
“Skeptics” advocate = good. “Realists” advocate = bad.
Fits into the pattern… here is just a few of the many more examples of that pattern.
“Skeptics” appeal to authority = good. “Realists” appeal to authority = bad.
“Skeptics” call people “deniers” = funny. “Realists” call people deniers = “the worst form of intellectual tyranny.”
“Skeptics” associate their views with politics = “huh, what politics?” “Realists associate their views with politics = “See, they’re just political hacks.”
“Skeptics” understate uncertainty = “Well, they aren’t in the “community.” “Realists” understate uncertainty = “See, they’re just political hacks.”
A related argument…
“Skeptics” use vitriol to make inane arguments = “They’re only blog comments.” “Skeptics” write comments related to science on blogs = “We must give great credence to what “skeptics” in the “extended peer review” have to say.
Oh geeze – I forgot the best one.
“Skeptics” complain about vitriol = Victims of the “worst form of intellectual tyranny” appropriately demanding to be treated properly. “Realists” complain about vitriol = “They just need to put on their big boy pants.”
Pathetic.
Thanks for reading, Don.
Means a lot to me.
Explain why what you are habitually doing here is not just spewing trivial and tedious nonsense. Explain why you, little anonymous joshie, inventing a class of humans and labeling them “skeptics” and then assigning various pathologies and character flaws to the alleged members of that class should interest anybody but you and your fellow travelers. Maybe willard will help you. He is smart.
> inventing a class of humans and labeling them “skeptics”
By “skeptics”, I believe Joshua refers to the Denizens-formerly-known-as-skeptics, Don. I also believe that Joshua’s point is that “skeptics” do not show enough skepticism to be called skeptics.
Do you really disbelieve that Denizens-formerly-known-as-skeptics exist, Don?
willard –
Not necessarily. I think that some “skeptics” do, at least at times, engage in due skeptical diligence. Others, hardly ever if at all. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite so simple that the use of quotation marks denotes fake skepticism.
The use of quotes connotes that:
I have seen “skeptics” be skeptical
I have seen “skeptics” be unskeptical
I have seen “skeptics” be realistic
I have seen “skeptics” be unrealistic
I have seen “realists” be realistic
I have seen “realists” be unrealistic
I have seen “realists” be skeptical
I have seen “realists” be unskeptical
“Skeptics” like to think they’re skeptical. OK, so I’ll call them “skeptics” using quotation marks.
“Realists” like to think they’re realistic. OK, so I’ll call them “realistic” using quotation marks.
But more important than all of that is that Don reads my comments (and despite his frequent promises not to, comments in response). It means so much to me. All the rest pales in comparison.
Now let’s see if Judith deletes my response to Don’s attack but leaves his attack posted. Her habit of doing so seems to suggest her moderation rests on an arbitrary and capricious application of moderation criteria.
But hey, it’s her blog – she’s got the hammer.
It wasn’t an attack, joshie. Substitute any class of people for “skeptics” in your comments. Over your head. Right? I will go back to ignoring you now. If Judith wants to put up with your foolishness, it’s her blog.
You are not very bright, joshie. I never said anything about “they do it too”. The point is that you can label or invent a class of people (so as not to get snipped) let’s call it “x”, and you can smear that class with any stereotypical trait that you want to without naming any names and without the support of any facts. That is what you are doing. It’s trivial, boring, mean-spirited and dumb.
Don, you’re saying that if you provide no evidence, you can create a list of negative attributes and arbitrarily assign them to a group of people?
Really?
Is that what you’re saying?
You mean like arbitrarily identify a particular group of people and then categorize them with terms like pathological altruism when they say their motives are altruistic? And when other groups likewise claim altruistic motives, selectively determine that what those groups say doesn’t accurately represent their intentions?
Or perhaps you mean that if “skeptics” have a hypocritical approach to the word “denier,” you could substitute “realists” and say the same about them – but that wouldn’t be saying “they do it too?”
Let me appeal to your altruism, Don. Imagine you were as not bright as me. You, too, might be confused much as I am.
Please take pity on me as you don’t respond to me in the future, you know, like you haven’t responded to me so many times in the past.
Willard
I’m skeptical of what you just wrote.
Max
AGW theory says what’s happening now can’t happen: it’s too cold. The odds-on bet is that it’ll get colder as time goes by. Climate change is real but global warming may be a thing of the past.
Exactly who said what is happening right now cannot happen?
Remember the ‘hockey stick’?
Sure. Where does it say what is happening now can’t happen?
“4 of the top snowiest years for the northern hemisphere have been in the last 6 years.” ~Joseph D’Aleo
You seem to be trying to tell me that nobody said it.
“Recent observed global warming is significantly less than that simulated by climate models.” [Fyfe, JC, Gillett, NP, Zwiers, FW. Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years. Nature Climate Change. V3 (Sept. 2013)]
The above finding is based on a study of 117 GCM simulations over a 20-year period comparing the results of model predictions to the observed rate warming. From 1993 to 2012, the “global mean surface temperature… rose at a rate of 0.14 ± 0.06 °C per decade,” and the observed warming over the last 15 years of the period was, “not significantly different from zero.”
The GCMs simulated a “rise in global mean surface temperature of 0.30 ± 0.02 °C per decade.” Compared to the actual rate of warming, the simulated rate was more than double and, “only a few simulations provide warming trends within the range of observational uncertainty.” Moreover, simulations were more than four times higher than actual over the last 15 years–statistically, there is but a 1 in 500 chance this can happen so needless to say, the “null hypothesis that the observed and model mean trends are equal,” is rejected.
Climate alarmists vs. solar realists: “solar activity is now falling more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years.” ~Mike Lockwood
Wag – Is there a lag time between the solar activity and its resultant effect on climate ?
The oceans store heat, and expand, and seas rise as a result; and, they give off heat as they cool and contract causing sea levels to fall–e.g.,
The observed ocean heat content trends were calculated by Josh K. Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Craig Leohle of the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc. Loehle’s calculations have a smaller margin for error than Willis, because Willis only uses annual average data. The heat deficit shows that from 2003-2008 there was no positive radiative imbalance caused by anthropogenic forcing, despite increasing levels of CO2. Indeed, the radiative imbalance was negative, meaning the earth was losing slightly more energy than it absorbed.
Since the oceans are the primary reservoir of atmospheric heat, there is no need to account for lag time involved with heat transfer. By using ocean heat as a metric, we can quantify nearly all of the energy that drives the climate system at any given moment. So, if there is still heat ‘in the pipeline’, where is it? The deficit of heat after nearly 6 years of cooling is now enormous. Heat can be transferred, but it cannot hide. (William DiPuccio)
Shouldn’t be Teddi. If the Sun is more than a bit player on climate the oceans should have already started cooling. But they haven’t.
Various skeptics on various blogs have come up with unphysical “lags” by which they mean the cooling is just around the corner, but with ever rising GHGs and a warming planet they are just ultimately setting themselves up for greater embarassment when the promised cooling doesn’t materialized, and rather stuck on options for denying the role of AGW to boot!
I try to warn them of this of course, but they won’t listen.
Even many of them admit CO2 warming is likely as strong as 1C per doubling, yet still they refuse to see that such an amount makes CO2 the driver of global temperature.
Even talking about talking about it, I am sure it will fall on deaf ears!
Global Warming Litmus Test — what do the following best describe: Heat reservoir, heat sink, heat content, heat storage, heat capacity heat in the pipeline, thermal budget, thermal memory, thermal capacity, buffer…
True story: the heroes of AGW Theory (the idea that humans caused global warming by releasing carbon dioxide into the air) had a very poor grasp of the facts about the heat carrying capacity of Earth’s oceans. Either that or they simply never gave the slightest consideration to the possibility that their AGW Theory might be wrong; and, that they were wrong. Isn’t that funny? I guess the joke is on us. Everyone knows that it takes energy to fill a pipeline–especially if you are filling the pipeline with energy! AGW Theorists refuse to consider that heat is energy and ocean heat is the result of solar activity (if you’ve ever paid a utility bill you understand that it takes energy to heat a tub full of water). They could care less that solar activity changes over time. They never stopped to consider the time might come when all of us could see that the oceans were giving up their heat energy — instead of accumulating and storing it — like the water in a kettle that slowly loses heat when the flame is turned down.
“Even talking about talking about it, I am sure it will fall on deaf ears!”
Right lolly. So hard to understand why people don’t pay more attention to you guys standing on the street corners with your “Repent! The end is nigh!” signs.
Must be frustrating.
One thing we can agree on is that humanity’s influence on the climate system is clear. And, Wm. Gray couldn’t make it more clear:
”Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.”
In the creation of the IPCC with its monomaniacal obsession with human-causation as the explanation for all global warming — to the exclusion even of natural causes — Leftist governments essentially have been paying the UN and Western academia to lie to us. Climate change is real and government-funding of climate alarmism may go on for years but global warming may be a thing of the past for decades.
>>> “Or stated another way, saying we don’t know today the impact of climate change on these phenomena is very different than stating that climate change has no impact on typhoons and hurricanes. What we do know is that these storms are forming in a warmer, moister environment and above a warmer ocean” <<<
The represents some errors.
The common perception is that tropical cyclones derive energy from 'warm moist air', indicating a belief that it is the convective energy that causes them. I examined the analysis fields of the Global Forecast System (GFS) and found that somewhat surprisingly, the Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) within hurricanes, while positive, is quite low compared to average thunderstorm conditions over the US in spring and summer.
How could this be? It's because the convection within hurricanes is 'conditionally unstable'. The condition being the rapid convergence toward the cyclone. Tropical cyclones and thunderstorms are thus inter-dependent – the convection depends on the cyclone (for lift) and the cyclone depends on convection (for exhausting air to maintain low pressure). But remember that the ocean is warm before the hurricane, when the weather is calm – there are many more days there there are NO thunderstorms even though the water is warm. Tropical cyclones represent a manifestation of the conservation of angular momentum provided by earth's rotation.
That's not to say the convective energy is not important – when a TC traverses from less warm water to warmer water there is an intensification because convective potential increases and furthers the pressure gradient.
But this spatial occurrence does not necessarily correlate to a temporal one with a warming world which, we may recall, is modeled to warm the upper tropical troposphere the greatest! If the models were correct, tropical convection would be suppressed not enhanced!
Question What enduring purpose (if any) is served when *weak* climate-change skepticism focuses upon *partisan* congressional testimony?
Answer No enduring purpose is served when weak forms of skepticism confront weak forms of science.
Proposition The public purpose is best-served when the most *rational* skepticism confronts the *strongest* available climate-change science.
Recommendation In regard to climate/weather relations, Climate Etc readers should bring their most *rational* skepticism to bear on this month’s multi-author PLOS article “Assessing Dangerous Climate Change: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature”
Two hundred and fifty-nine references follow.
Conclusion This is what (in Judith Curry’s phrase) “the strongest available climate-change science” looks like.
Aye, Climate Etc lassies and laddies, it’s time for skeptics to bring to bear their most cogent reasoning … and it’s time for ideology-first denialists to abandon themselves to despair!
Over a twenty year period ending 2012, Climate alamists’ GCMs simulated a “rise in global mean surface temperature of 0.30 ± 0.02 °C per decade,” compared to the actual rate of warming, was more than double. Simulations were more than four times higher than actual over the last 15 years. Reality has falsified AGW theory: the “null hypothesis that the observed and model mean trends are equal,” have been rejected. (See, Fyfe, JC, et al., Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years, Ibid.]
From the abstract of Fan’s linked paper
“Continuation of high fossil fuel emissions, given current knowledge of the consequences, would be an act of extraordinary witting intergenerational injustice. “
Dispassionate scientists, cooly going about their work.
By the way, aren’t these the folks who take a fee for publishing work? Wonder what their rejection rate is.
Leading with the Wrong Type of Knowledge
Although it has failed to produce its
intended impact nevertheless the Kyoto
Protocol has performed an important role. That role has been allegorical. Kyoto has permitted different groups to tell different stories about themselves to themselves and to others, often in superficially scientific language. But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values. Nor is that to be seen as a defect. Of course choices between competing values are not made by relying upon scientific knowledge alone. What is wrong is to pretend that they are. http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/mackinder/pdf/mackinder_Wrong%20Trousers.pdf
So the usual suspects continue the usual activities of seemingly endless bickering and posturing on their pet themes. Science matters little in this other than as a rhetorical device to advance cultural ambitions.
The are certain realities in climate. Climate is wild with implications for recent and future decadal warming – and for sensitivity. There is lots of science saying this and the rest is simply based on an inadequate theoretical framework.
From the right it makes little difference. They argue for the status quo in economics and politics. A social and economic system in which the rule of law, democracy and free markets prevail. Free markets and social contracts in this model are best defined by F. A. Hayek. The extreme left is committed to radical social and economic transformation as usual.
It is amusing that markets are themselves chaotic and yet simple diagnostics are applied with a misguided certainty that has parallels with climate.
The secret with both markets and climate is to minimise the quantum and rate of changes in control variables. Control variables rather than forcing in the case of climate – the latter being a quite inapplicable concept in a chaotic system.
It is often known, from modelling studies, that a certain mode of climate tipping (of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, for example) is governed by an underlying fold bifurcation. For such a case we present a scheme of analysis that determines the best stochastic fit to the existing data. This provides the evolution rate of the effective control parameter, the variation of the stability coefficient, the path itself and its tipping point. By assessing the actual effective level of noise in the available time series, we are then able to make probability estimates of the time of tipping. http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1376
For economic stability you need a government that is some 25% of GDP, effective prudential and market regulation and management of interest rates to minimise asset bubbles. How the 25% of GDP is spent depends on the evolving social contract in Hayek’s world. A government share of around 25% maximises economic growth in economic theory.
For climate it is a matter of minimising emissions of climatically active compounds (black carbon and multiple gases) and land use changes – being the factors marginally under our control. Albeit with little confidence that there are not many other control variables contributing to chaotic instability.
The ways of mitigating climatically active substances have both social and economic impacts that need to be taken into account with potentially serious downsides.
Can I try again?
Leading with the Wrong Type of Knowledge
Although it has failed to produce its intended impact nevertheless the Kyoto Protocol has performed an important role. That role has been allegorical. Kyoto has permitted different groups to tell different stories about themselves to themselves and to others, often in superficially scientific language. But, as we are increasingly coming to understand, it is often not questions about science that are at stake in these discussions. The culturally potent idiom of the dispassionate scientific narrative is being employed to fight culture wars over competing social and ethical values. Nor is that to be seen as a defect. Of course choices between competing values are not made by relying upon scientific knowledge alone. What is wrong is to pretend that they are. http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/mackinder/pdf/mackinder_Wrong%20Trousers.pdf
So the usual suspects continue the usual activities of seemingly endless bickering and posturing on their pet themes. Science matters little in this other than as a rhetorical device to advance cultural ambitions.
The are certain realities in climate. Climate is wild with implications for recent and future decadal warming – and for sensitivity. There is lots of science saying this and the rest is simply based on an inadequate theoretical framework.
From the right it makes little difference. They argue for the status quo in economics and politics. A social and economic system in which the rule of law, democracy and free markets prevail. Free markets and social contracts in this model are best defined by F. A. Hayek. The extreme left is committed to radical social and economic transformation as usual.
It is amusing that markets are themselves chaotic and yet simple diagnostics are applied with a misguided certainty that has parallels with climate.
The secret with both markets and climate is to minimise the quantum and rate of changes in control variables. Control variables rather than forcing in the case of climate – the latter being a quite inapplicable concept in a chaotic system.
It is often known, from modelling studies, that a certain mode of climate tipping (of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, for example) is governed by an underlying fold bifurcation. For such a case we present a scheme of analysis that determines the best stochastic fit to the existing data. This provides the evolution rate of the effective control parameter, the variation of the stability coefficient, the path itself and its tipping point. By assessing the actual effective level of noise in the available time series, we are then able to make probability estimates of the time of tipping. http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1376
For economic stability you need a government that is some 25% of GDP, effective prudential and market regulation and management of interest rates to minimise asset bubbles. How the 25% of GDP is spent depends on the evolving social contract in Hayek’s world. A government share of around 25% maximises economic growth in economic theory.
For climate it is a matter of minimising emissions of climatically active compounds (black carbon and multiple gases) and land use changes – being the factors marginally under our control. Albeit with little confidence that there are not many other control variables contributing to chaotic instability.
The ways of mitigating climatically active substances have both social and economic impacts that need to be taken into account with potentially serious downsides.
Chief,
In bold or not, I’m still stumped on the sentence:
“It is often known, from modelling studies, that a certain mode of climate tipping (of the oceanic thermohaline circulation, for example) is governed by an underlying fold bifurcation.”
I could only get the abstract from the link.
You’ve probably explained it before, but I still don’t understand what is meant by “climate controlled by a fold bifurcation”.
Would you please point me in the right direction to read more? If I come back and ask for help again, please don’t be harsh on me, sometimes I’m a bit slow.
The study can be downloaded at arXix – but here’s the link.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.1376v4.pdf
It is a better place to start than most.
Dazed and confused, Western climate science staggers into a future about which they did not predict and have no clue. Michael Mann has become the Karl Marx of the fairytale field of science we call Climatology. It’s no wonder that non-Westerners give Climatology about the same respect they reserve for the ancient science of astrology.
Right now we have over 65% more Arctic sea ice area, a record high sea ice area around Antarctica, a record low tornado season, record late start hurricane season, 15 years of no global warming, a cooling tropical Pacific and a “strongly cooling Southern Ocean”.
The above are just some examples illustrating just how embarrassingly wrong climate science has been. ~P. Gosselin
Now that climatologists have discovered “natural variability” as in, Oh, that is simply natural variability,” I wonder how long it will take for them to discover… the Sun?
Losing energy at the rate of around 44TW, the Earth continues to cool.
As it has done for about the last four and a half billion years.
Good luck with trying to stop Nature from doing what comes naturally.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Well, some of my comments were removed/censored, so I won’t being coming back Judith. You had a good site, but censoring is exactly why CAGW has created the mess it has………
the comments that were deleted were content-free unjustified insults on other people
Oh noes, RC moderation!
Calling a liar out for lying is content. I’m sorry you feel the need to censor – good luck with your site.
“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” (Emerson)
With nuthin’ but a fine toothed comb.
============================
It’s cooling folks …kim do something!
We’ll be warming again, Beth, but when, even kim doesn’t know.
==============
I endorse every word that Christy wrote. His statement is clear, concise, to the point, and altogether brilliant. I endorse every word that Pielke wrote. I endorse every word that Curry wrote except one. The phrase “natural internal variability” should be replaced by the phrase “natural variability.” The former is an artifact of some modeler’s mind. For modelers, natural variability is something that is internal to models but has nothing to do with nature.
Titley wrote:
“What we do know is that these storms are forming in a warmer, moister environment and above a warmer ocean. We also know that current research indicates our future may include more intense, and possibly more frequent, storms. That is a risk not to be summarily discounted.”
If children were present, Titlely should be prosecuted for child abuse. Everyone not inoculated to this dribble reduces his intelligence considerably just by reading or hearing this nonsense. It is not obvious that the only thing the two sentences say is that stronger storms are possible? Then why would a serious scientist bother to say it? It must be a mantra.
True, it’s like he really wanted to say something Gore-Clintonish like, “to believe America is not awfully guilty and is liable for heating up the entire globe will really require the willing suspension of disbelief.“
Aw, give the poor ol’ sea dog a break, no one else had enough sense of duty for the ugly task.
==============
“Because the climate issue is so deeply politicized […]”
That about sums it up.
I’d finish the sentence with:
“…climate politics = tired bored yawn.”
Tom Fuller
Tom Fuller
Is there any reason to believe that atmospheric sensitivity (either or both TCR and/or ECS) is a singled, fixed value? I mean, it’s not a law of physics, so why are we looking for a constant, immutable number for either?
.
Yours is an interesting and important question.
You would be surprised how many people didn’t seriously think about it.
The short answer is no and yes.
There are very good reasons, indeed a tautology, that ECS is a single well defined value. Indeed what you do here is to start with an initial state with well defined initial properties, perturb it and postulate that its evolution will lead to an equilibrium (a weaker postulate would be a steady state). As this equilibrium is unique, the final state is unique. What you do is an integral between fixed initial and final states and you obtain per definition a single fixed value called ECS.
Now, of course, as this value corresponds to an asymptotical final state you know that it will never happen because the REAL system will never have enough time to reach this asymptotical state. That’s why the ECS even if well defined is totally useless and irrelevant because you know that the asymptotic final state (e.g equilibrium) will never happen in reality.
On the other hand the TCR which is a differential (as opposed to ECS which is an integral) is a real dynamical parameter and is actually a function. For the sake of simplicity you can define it as dT/dF where T is some temperature somewhere at some time and F the energy fluxes at the same place and at the same time. Here, trivially, dT/dF = f(x,t) e.g it varies with location and time and is neither unique nor constant.
However this function is relevant (even if not very interesting) because the laws of nature are in our case expressed by differential equations like Navier Stokes and they ARE what governs the dynamics of the system. Of course these laws of nature also tell that the system never was and never will be in any kind of equilibrium.
That’s why you expect a single, fixed but irrelevant value for ECS while you expect a mulitivalued, unknown but relevant function for TCR.
Very interesting.
Do either or both of TCR or ECS vary by the starting temperature, or in other words why can we not say dT/dF = f (x,t,T)
It makes sense why you did not think Titley was effective. Titley was speaking of uncertainty and uncertainty can be difficult to understand.
Especially when explained by the clueless.
Re Tomas Mianovic, 12/13/13 @ 5:41 am, who said,
That’s why the ECS even if well defined is totally useless and irrelevant because you know that the asymptotic final state (e.g equilibrium) will never happen in reality.
IPCC admits that its estimate “should ideally be based” on objective standards, and for its predictions (insidiously called “projections”), its assessments “ideally would have strong connections” to measured patterns. AR4, 8.6.4 How to Assess Our Relative Confidence in Feedbacks Simulated by Different Models?, p. 639. Even lacking those attributes, its experts felt the chances of climate sensitivity being less than 1.5ºC was “very unlikely”, meaning less than 10%. In fact, that estimate is supported by IPCC’s report on seven ostensibly objective studies (computer climate models) that produced probability density functions (pdfs) for climate sensitivity. AR4, Figure 9.20, p. 720. The average of the corresponding cumulative distribution functions (call them PDFs) puts the probability that ECS ≤ 1.5ºC at exactly 10.01%. This is not much of a margin for a scientist to accept the null hypothesis that the GCMs fail to predict global climate.
However, investigators are now providing estimates of ECS from satellite and MLO data which run between 0.5 and 0.7, and sometimes as high as 1.0ºC. The PDFs permit quantifying these results objectively, and the latest estimates have probabilities of 0.07%, 0.15%, and 1.6%, respectively. If the GCMs were valid, the 1ºC would be “exceptionally unlikely”, the least likely category in IPCC’s terminology. AR4, Technical Summary, Box TS.1, p. 23. For an ECS of 0.5 to 0.7, the probability would be an order of magnitude less. Exploiting the other end of IPCC’s touchy-feely probability scale, its climate models are no less than “virtually certain” (>99% probability) to be invalid for an ECS as small as 0.7, and worse for ECS = 0.5.
These estimates stress the meaning of the parameter ECS, which is
>>In IPCC reports, equilibrium climate sensitivity refers to the equilibrium change in the annual mean global surface temperature [i.e., GAST] following a doubling of the atmospheric equivalent carbon dioxide concentration. AR4, Glossary, p. 943.
Ignoring the problem of the existence of any kind of equilibrium, the definition of ECS implies that CO2 is a cause of GAST. When CO2 lags GAST, as it does in the Vostok record and still does in the modern era, assuming CO2 causes GAST is an error in causality. But whichever the cause, GAST has a slope and CO2 has a slope, and the ratio of the slopes provides a prediction. So the current estimates of ECS invalidate the GCMs under the assumption that CO2 is the cause and GAST the effect. In fact, the assumption is false, the relationship is the reverse, and the GCMs are invalid irrespective of the magnitude of ECS estimates.
Pingback: Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup | Watts Up With That?
Do either or both of TCR or ECS vary by the starting temperature, or in other words why can we not say dT/dF = f (x,t,T)
Well you should more accurately write dT/dF = f (x,t,T0) where T0 is the temperature at all locations X at time t=0 and it is trivially true for TCR because the solution of any differential equations depends on initial conditions.
In a different way it is also true for ECS because ECS is just a TCR where you prescibed the final state (e.g equilibrium)