by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Concepts for dealing with complexity of weather and climate. [link]
Nature: Halfway to doubling of CO₂ radiative forcing (3.7W/m²), but doubling CO₂ ppm comes later due to log RF relationship [link] …
Sources, Seasonality, and Arctic-Antarctic Parity in the Hydrologic Cycle Response to CO2-Doubling [link]
More-Persistent Weak Stratospheric Polar Vortex States Linked to Cold Extremes [link]
Deep Uncertainty Surrounding Coastal Flood Risk Projections: A Case Study for New Orleans [link]
The greening of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau under climate change [link]
Methods and model dependency of extreme event attribution: The 2015 European drought [link]
Roles of wind stress & thermodynamic forcing in recent trends in Antarctic sea ice & Southern Ocean SST https://buff.ly/2jS8DzZ
Can measurements of near-infrared solar spectral irradiance be reconciled? New ground-based assessment [link]
Tropical ocean contributions to California’s surprisingly dry El Niño of 2015-16 — Indian/WPac SST spatial pattern [link]
Madden-Julian Oscillation remotely accelerates ocean upwelling to abruptly terminate 1997/1998 El Niño [link]
New observations will help models better reflect seasonal air-sea exchanges of #CO2. [link]
Variability and quasi-decadal changes in the methane budget over the period 2000–2012 [link]
New MIT research reveals spiral upwelling pathways and timescales of deep, overturning waters in the Southern Ocean. [link]
Fingerprints of Sea-Level Rise on Changing Tides in the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays [link]
Modelling past, present and future peatland carbon accumulation across the pan-Arctic region [link]
The evolution and volcanic forcing of the southern annular mode during the past 300 years [link]
On the causes of trends in the seasonal amplitude of atmospheric CO2 [link]
There are inherent uncertainties in all sea ice (e.g., extent) data sets. This presentation provides a nice overview [link] …
Warming & wetting climate during last century revealed by an ice core in NW Tibetan Plateau [link]
Understanding the effect of #Arctic sea ice decline on the AMOC [link]…
Driving Roles of Tropospheric and Stratospheric Thermal Anomalies in the Arctic Superstorm in 2012 [link]
Synchronous volcanic eruptions & climate change ∼17.7 ka linked by stratospheric ozone depletion [link]
Are the climate models running too hot? [link]
Climatic and synoptic characterization of heat waves in Brazil [link]
Carbon budget controversy
Nature: Limiting global warming to 1.5C may still be possible [link]
Richard Millar: Why the 1.5C warming limit is not yet a geophysical impossibility [link]
NEW #ClimateChange calculations could buy the Earth some time, if they’re right [link]
Climate change predictions — what went wrong? [link] …
How robust is Figure 10 in AR5 SPM? [link]
So there was a pause after all, says the Met Office, and the models have run too hot, as sceptics said: [link]
Different Ways of Thinking about Carbon Budgets, Three problems with Millar et al [link]
Possible good news about climate change leads to confused coverage [link]
How to interpret the news about an extended carbon budget politically? [link]
Social science and policy
Why (UK) politicians see #climate as an unattractive issue. [link]
Hurricane Irma: The Caribbean’s pioneering form of disaster insurance [link]
Flood insurance is broken. Here are some ways to fix it [link]
Disaster mitigation is cost effective [link]
Rethinking the infrastructure discussion amid a blitz of hurricanes [link]
Cultural multilevel selection: cooperative agreements are not likely to solve climate change [link]
About science
AGU’s new data policy [link]
Forcing consensus is bad for science and society [link]
Must read article from David Spiegelhalter: Risk and uncertainty communication [link] “Acknowledge the limitations of the information conveyed in its quality and relevance.”
Timidity and a hostility to competition have left Europe a scientific wasteland [link]
In a field where everything is, “dependent on modeling assumptions,” how can we ever be uncritical and lacking skepticism of scientific findings, especially when academics tell us they’ve digitized nature and can now predict the future?
Plug in CO2 and draw a straight line upwards… easy.
The snag in understanding global warming is due to infrared absorption of CO2, “seems to be,” says J. Curry, “the actual physical mechanism.”
“The doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations has become a standard experiment in climate science.” Whaaat?
That observation certinly aaplies to the bylineabover:
The greening of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau under climate change [link]
This region long ranked among the greatest refugia for cold climate species that evolved in the last Ice Age.
‘Greening ‘ seems an odd term to apply to their prospective extinction, but Mr. Pruitt will doubtless incorporate it into his narrative arc
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2017/09/pruitt-senseisjunk-science-dojo.html
The Himalayas are fairly young mountains serving as a natural border wall separating pre- and modern human and Neanderthal populations in China, India and Mongolia for 50-250,000 years.
Concepts for dealing with complexity of weather and climate
Weak echo of Robert I Ellison — who has cited Gihl, Dykstra, Tsonis and others.
If that article constitutes an advancement in the field of climate science then climate science isn’t very far along at all.
That’s a lotta links, Judith. Where do you find the time?
Thomas
these days its all done by a bot. A Russian bot one week, American the next and on the third week we get to vote for the bot. I think a North Korean one would be interesting.
Better read the links now I suppose
Do svidaniya!
tonyb
Or a troll farm (brings up a wonderful mental image, by the way).
I have 7 science news bots. Three climate news bots, 3 A.I. bots (is that redundant?) and 2 Genetic Engineering bots. It’s amazingly addictive.
“The conventional view on the connection between the AMOC and Arctic sea ice is that a weakening of the AMOC should reduce ocean poleward heat transport and, hence, expand sea ice. However, can sea ice changes affect the AMOC?”
Really? the Gulf Stream has not slowed, so if anything a slow AMOC means increased poleward heat transport because of reduced overturning. Such that a slower AMOC drives a warm AMO, and hence reduces Arctic sea ice.
AGU’s new data policy [link]
Read the whole thing.
My work is done.
Whew. Only took 10 years of pushing.
Now we just need skeptics to share their data.
And now we also have the mechanisms to store the data securely and forever.
IPFS. And coming soon. ..filecoin.
Your work may be done, but we still need you.
Link didn’t show. Here: http://publications.agu.org/author-resource-center/publication-policies/data-policy/
Wow.
Madden-Julian Oscillation remotely accelerates ocean upwelling to abruptly terminate 1997/1998 El Niño
Dr Curry, thank you again for linking to these interesting technical papers. That one strikes me as a step forward in the “normal science” vein of analysis. It will be interesting to see how well their model performs with respect to future El Niños.
Why not the 14-16 El Niño?
A rule of thumb approach to the issue of attribution is provided by the recent news report by the UK Met Office about the end of the pause due to a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, where they report 15-year rates of warming:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2017/a-pacific-flip-triggers-the-end-of-the-recent-slowdown
It is generally considered that the warming in the 1915-1950 period was essentially natural, as human emissions at the time were very small.
We can approach the issue by considering that natural oscillations that continue to operate are responsible for part of the observed warming. The excess warming that can be attributed to human causes then is about 0.05°C/decade, or half a degree per century. That works out at about 0.38°C since 1950.
This is a far more realistic approach to the problem of attribution than to consider that all the warming since 1950 is of human origin. By reducing emissions we might be able to affect a small fraction of the human caused warming, but not the natural warming.
The next several years will debunk this data, and show us all the warming that did take place was natural. This is supported by the fact that this kind of warming or more intense warming has happened many times in the past.
Until this period of time in the climate becomes unique AGW has nothing to stand on .
The more we do learn the more we realize that it will be impossible to assert climate uniqueness given that the Earth already has traversed the spectrum from ice age to grand scale flooding–e.g., Noah’s Ark (“Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that’s a big ice cube,” says Robert Ballard. “But then it started to melt. We’re talking about the floods of our living history.”).
I have some fun new stuff:
http://www.cfact.org/2017/09/16/climate-gov-rivals-nasa-in-climate-alarmism/
http://www.cfact.org/2017/09/19/harvey-defies-attribution-to-global-warming/
http://www.cfact.org/2017/09/23/harvey-attribution-games-begin-at-noaa/
Attribution is the new alarmist game. Busy, busy.
“The comprehensive assessment to attribute a human impact on the 2015 European summer drought presented in this study illustrates the complexity of the exercise. We find that the drought could be more likely , less likely or unaffected by anthropogenic forcing, depending on the methodology and data source.”
If the drought is associated with negative NAO, then it would the wrong sign to associate with anthropogenic forcing.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
AGU data policy. The amazing thing is not the new policy of open archiving, but that it only comes now when the need was obvious with Climategate.
The link only explains the policy:
http://publications.agu.org/author-resource-center/publication-policies/data-policy/
“AGU PUBLICATIONS DATA POLICY
First adopted by Publications Committee November 1993 [Revised March 1994, December 1995, October 1996, October 2013]. Adopted by Council December 2013. Updated in 2016.”
“Although we focused on the termination of El Niño in this study, MJOs are also known to trigger El Niño by exciting downwelling Kelvin waves with westerly wind bursts [McPhaden, 1999; Lau, 2005; Hong et al., 2017]; the triggering role certainly deserves a detailed investigation using the new ocean-coupled model.”
Although I can see the MJO triggering the relaxation that initiates El Niño – the critical problem they have is the lack of an explanation for regime like behavior in the system on multi-decadal and longer scales. It has long been considered that such persistent regimes cannot be explained by resonant patterns of the internal Earth system. Explanations have been sought in luni-solar tides. More recently the ~22 year Hale cycle of solar magnetic reversal has been suggested as the trigger for 20 to 30 year Pacific regimes. Most often the ultimate causality is left open and described simply as stochastic forcing of the spatio/temporal chaos of the system. The MJO seems unlikely to me to be the only drum to which ENSO marches.
The Hale cycle trigger seems intrinsically likely – linking as it does solar variability and climate change in a vaguely similar temporal signature. The proposed mechanism involves higher UV emissions from the sun modulating surface pressure at the poles and the blocking systems that form with a negative SAM and NAM – and which spin up sub-polar oceanic gyres resulting in increased upwelling. A brief explanation with links is stored here – in what was yesterday uncharitably defined as a dime a dozen, self published blog post. The blog – and the facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/Australian.Iriai/ – is a way of organizing thoughts and resources – and to see how good I can get at communicating complex and difficult ideas in climate science.
https://watertechbyrie.com/2017/09/21/anticipating-the-whims-of-the-dragon-kings/
Standing waves result from interference when two waves move through the same medium. The oscillatory modes of climate are described by analogy as quasi stationary standing wave-like structures. ENSO and the PDO are 2 globally coupled quasi standing waves that influence the energy dynamic of the planet in the tropical and sub-tropical Pacific though secular changes in cloud cover. It is suspected that this modulates climate over a very long time.
e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11719
There are claims that the Pacific has switched to another warm multi-decadal state. I am sure that it is not that simple. The chaos dynamic includes intensely fluctuating change as energy flows through powerful climate mechanisms and the climate system finds a new equilibrium – and then settles into a damped oscillation. It is a characteristic that has been called ‘slowing down’. Events that are especially extreme at the transition between states have been termed dragon-kings by Didier Sornette. I suspect that we are seeing a dragon-king and that the transition is happening – but I would not venture a guess as to where the system is heading. If the solar connection holds – it may be to yet cooler conditions.
Cooler conditions seem likely this century as the 1000 year high in El Niño intensity and frequency recedes. The wild card is anthropogenic greenhouse gases that may influence quasi standing waves in the spatio/temporal complexity of the Earth system a little or a lot. It depends.
For some reason this may be the most cognizant prediction I have seen.
Besides A Pope’s theory of bounded climatic means.
The PDO index for August is out; barely changed from last month; remains positive for a record 44 months in a row.
Peaks in the PDO: 1990; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2005; 2010; 2014; 2015; 2016
Warmest years —: 1990; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2005; 2010; 2014; 2015; 2016
2017 is looking very solid as the 2nd warmest year in the record.
What are you talking about? The PDO has cratered as a result of the new (and unexpected) ENSO situation.
PDO:
2017 Jan-Jun average: +0.83
2017 Jul-Aug average: +0.10
http://research.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest.txt
ENSO and PDO go hand in hand. Very strong El Niño -> very high PDO.
There is little doubt that a warm surface in the eastern Pacific influences surface temperature. The energy that was in the western warm pool has largely dissipated and the inevitable next phase is recharge in La Niña. There are in fact other possibilities in La Niña or El Niño Modoki that complicate the picture. One of the links show that some people have yet to come to terms with last years La Niña Modoki. These have an influence on global hydrology but the essential oscillatory mode of the system remains. Shifts in the means and variances in ENSO 20 to 30 year regimes are coincident with changes in the PDO over the 20 to 30 year oscillatory modes.
I have suggested recently that conditions are in place for a La Niña mode that will intensify over the Austral spring as the tropical convergence zone moves south with the sun. With Arctic storms penetrating deep into lower latitudes that seem likely to result in more upwelling and cooling of the north-east Pacific sea surface. As I have said to JCH before – even in a positive PDO there are intervals of enhanced upwelling – and vice versa.
JCH’s focus on the last monthly index seems less than a big picture analysis.
The JISAO PDO index does show a cooling in the north-east Pacific this year – it is currently only barely positive.
2017** 0.77 0.70 0.74 1.12 0.88 0.79 0.10 0.09
There has been cooling and upwelling in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that has been evolving over the past couple of months and a cold tongue has now emerged. This sets up current and wind responses that reinforce the La Niña mode.
I have suggested that the 20 to 30 year Pacific state may be shifting – but it seems delighfully uncertain where to and how much. A dynamical systems paradigm might explain Hurst effects in climate data – e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep09068 – but as Demetris Koutsoyiannis says – these are intrinsically less predictable than random events.
https://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/923/
2017 will be the second warmest
unless bali volcano has something to say about it
LMAO.
The PDO remained positive through the last La Niña and it possibly could remain positive through the one for which we are now watching.
But by all means, keep praying for the old PDO.
There was no La Nina – it was a La Nina Modoki. There is a difference.
Cool in the central Pacific and warm both west and east – with a double Walker cell. It is why both Queensland and California suffered a deluge at around the same time. I have said this before.
All year I have been cautioning JCH against premature – and let’s face it dogmatic assertions based on feral science and global warming fanaticism – El Nino predictions. I have said this before too – but the same motivated nonsense keeps popping up. How else to deal with it? Someone once suggested numbering memes. So someone could say for instance 6, 15 and 22. It would save a lot of time.
Now it is my turn to predict La Nina. We are well past the predictability barrier and the physical conditions in the system are shaping up. And I have studied it way before all the popular kids picked up the topic.
Rob,
JCH is a one trick pony. You are not.
Nerds rock Tim.
Australian: It is unbankable, so coal’s future has gone up in smoke
“Australia’s climate policy has been in a near constant state of flux ever since the Howard government proposed a carbon emissions trading scheme a decade ago. Labor ramped up the renewable energy target in 2009 and then vacillated over emissions schemes and carbon taxes with big swings in target prices. The Coalition abolished carbon taxes but endorsed Paris commitments and new renewable energy targets. Meanwhile, state governments are imposing their own regulations, with Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT all setting their own renewable energy targets. There have been 21 federal elections in the past 50 years. One can only speculate on how many carbon policies might emerge from the next 21 parliaments, but the parties to the Paris Agreement are talking about further deep emissions cuts beyond 2030. The fact there has not been a go-ahead for any new coal-fired power station in Australia for 15 years tells us there is a problem. Either the demand is not there, the numbers don’t stack up or the risks are too great.”
I just ran across (Mark Jacobson tweeted it) this interesting claim:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-21/pumped-hydro-renewable-energy-sites-australia-anu-research/8966530
Sure does!
It’s very simple really:
– GHG mitigation polices are bad for planet Earth!
– Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations are good for planet Earth!
“Rather than being a discrete problem to be solved, climate change is better
understood as a persistent condition that must be coped with and can only be partially managed more – or less – well.31 It is just one part of a larger complex of such conditions encompassing population, technology, wealth disparities,resource use, etc. Hence it is not straightforwardly an ‘environmental’ problem either. It is axiomatically as much an energy problem, an economic development problem or a land-use problem, and may be better approached through these avenues than as a problem of managing the behaviour of the Earth’s climate by changing the way that humans use energy.” http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27939/1/HartwellPaper_English_version.pdf
CO2 mitigation has immense benefits for communities and environments – but the choice is between effective and ineffective mitigation. It reduces as well the risk of serious and adverse climate shifts well outside the bounds of a simple warming paradigm.
The Australian carbon auction supports indigenous burning. Mosaic burning creates a diversity of ecosystems and prevents massive loss of carbon from the terrestrial system during hot dry season fires. It is supported by the Government at some $10/metric ton of carbon mitigation to the tune of $2 billion. A fraction of the cost of renewables subsidies. Strategies to improve land management and sequester carbon are in place across the continent.
There is no downside to cheap and abundant energy – unless you believe that humanity is a pestilence.
There is little doubt that improvement is soil quality – and drought and flood resilience – is a key to economic development and global food security – and shifts carbon from the atmosphere to soils and vegetation.
There are very simple, pragmatic and cost effective mitigation strategies possible. I suggest a couple of dozen or so at the link – drawing heavily on Bjorn Lomberg’s 19 sustainable best bang for the buck development goals. Most of the Copenhagen Consensus goals have climate implications – although that is not the prime objective.
RIE,
Maybe you have an opinion on this.
Giving money to land councils to get the locals to burn grass to a timetable is something you have taken time to comment on.
So it has some benefits.
The locals would have got handouts from another department if there was no burning.
There would still be fires like there was before.
They would still spend free money on grog like they did before.
So the gain has to be in improvement in soil and fertility.
I doubt this would be big enough to measure. It is not farmed in any case, mainly. Termite fodder in an age old cycle.
It would not be surprising if growth improved in the last 30 years. A good dollop of free CO2 does this.
Colour me confused but apart from employing more bureaucrats, what is so appealing about this fire program that makes you talk about it.
Is it actually no more than yet another rat arsed program signalling virtue in Conservation, environment and all things green? This one first came over my desk when I was FIFO President of the NT Chamber of Mines. It looked pathetic then. Has it bloomed, or is it still pathetic?
We’ve surely had a neck full of this 1970s hippy, anti science flower power thinking. Geoff.
There is a great deal of research on fire ecology in Australia – and methodologies endorsed by the Emmissions Reduction Fund.
http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/0b60cc73-9e38-4d59-a378-9abd635dc33d/files/savanna-burning-9jan2014.pdf
Yet you persist in blowing smoke up your own arse with only your utterly uninformed opinions and grossly irrelevant prejudice. You are such a ningnong
The CO2 emitted does not count because it is reabsorbedby the landscape next year.
The methane and nitrous oxide count for abatement $$$$ because the landscape somehow knows not to reabsorb them like happens to CO2.. Yet they are still there to be baddies in the next year and the next. Tell me another one.
This was why I opposed it in the 1980s. Someone keen to give other peoples’ money away was a bit fuzzy about logic? Geoff.
“Savannas occupy about one-sixth of global land area and is maintained by fire, yet fire is also a major source of global emissions. If savanna fire is managed properly, a large portion of these emissions can be avoided…
A current savanna burning project—the Western Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) in Northern Territory, covering an area of 28,000 km2 of the Arnhem Plateau adjoining Kakadu and Nitmiluk National Parks—provides an indication of fire abatement costs. After seven years of implementation, the project has reduced emissions of CH4 and N2O by 37.7%, relative to the pre-determined baseline [71]. The project delivered a mean annual abatement of 141,400 t CO2-e over the period 2005–2010 at an estimated annual cost of $1.75 M [72]. This amounts to $12.4/tCO2-e abated. This was an attractive price when the Australia Government carbon price was $23/tCO2-e. However, with the scrapping of the carbon tax by the current Government, there is currently very little demand for carbon credits in Australia and the average carbon price at the recent auction was just $10.23 [73]. However, this project will continue to be more attractive than afforestation, reforestation and forest management projects and comparable to soil and livestock management projects [72, 74]. Moreover, this type of project provides employment opportunities and financial resources for natural resource management and enables traditional land owners to restore and refine their management practices
https://cbmjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13021-016-0067-4
Australia is a continent whose ecology has been forged in fire. There are many benefits in managed fires including biodiversity conservation and fuel reduction. The carbon sequestration benefits are uncertain but potentially large. Because of the uncertainty carbon reduction from savanna burning is not an eligible mechanism. Methane and nitrous oxide reduction rely on the reduction of unburnt organic material as a food source for termites and faculative organisms in the soil – an not on the landscape ‘somehow knowing’.
Northern savanna burning has it’s place in natural resource management – and is a part of the effort. There are a number of other parts with multiple natural resource management benefits I did not mention specifically but that are covered in the link provided. The cost is very low as far as abatement goes – and the reward is much improved landscape management.
But the focus on greenhouse gases obscures the benefits – at least for Geoff – of better fire and improved natural resource management.
RIE,
So planned burning reduces GHG going into the air from burning. It just leaves the precursors in material on and under the surface for slower decay.
If the biomass of an area hardly changes over centuries, the mass balance for CO2 hardly changes or there would be either depletion or advancement of plant growth.
Are you not being misleading in claiming that GHG emitted during burning are different to GHG eventually emitted by natural decay cycles, or methane from termites etc?
There might be some argument in your favour for NO2, but it is of little concern because of short life time in the air.
You have seized on e theme of paying people to play with GHG and matches. It would help if you used other than taxpayer money.
There was a lot more on the “running too hot” debate than Climate Lab.
Gavin had a tweet on CMIP3, which is a longer forecast than CMIP5.
Fabius Maximus had an article in response entitled “A climate science milestone: a successful 10-year forecast!” that he also posted at WUWT.
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/09/21/a-small-step-for-climate-science-at-last-a-step-for-humanity/
Have you seen this still missing phenomenon? 28 million weather balloons must be dismissed so Sherwood can be right? Not…
The hot spot is part of the negative lapse rate feedback that hasn’t materialized yet. It only means it’s worse than we thought. Tell that to Jo Nova. They need to know.
Being worse than we thought is saddling the productive with the bill to care for sufferers of obsessive global warming alarmism, which may be the societal behavioral disorder of the modern age.
Just saying it is counterproductive to use the hot-spot argument, and I think Jo Nova will thank you for pointing that out. Tell her Climate Etc sent you.
Jo be sayin’, No hotspot = no water vapor feedback… i.e., no catastrophe (which is something global warming alarmists feel compelled to keep under their tin foil hats).
Tell her it would be hard to explain the observed 2 C per doubling with no water vapor feedback. CO2 itself only accounts for half of that, and the rest is the H2O that increases in proportion.
Are we are afraid to face the truth? This is more than just dancing around schoolteachers’ obvious self-interest in promoting global warming alarmism as another means of taxing all goods and services that require energy to provide. This is about refusing to admit it is cooler on a cloudy day– it is not just a political issue. It’s a moral issue. Can the Left tell the truth?
I don’t know if you are afraid of the truth. You tell me how afraid you are if it is 2-3 C per doubling like observed, and it could be 4 C of warming by 2100. I can’t get skeptics to seriously consider what a 700 ppm world looks like.
Exactly the point. Do we prefer the CO2 in 2100 stabilized as near 400 ppm as possible, or 700 ppm and rising which is far into the unknown? That is the question. Skeptics appear remarkably ambivalent.
Jim D sticks with his shibboleth of 700 ppm. He must have been a fan of Lovelock.
Jim D asks what a 700 ppm CO 2 world looks like.
“Verdant”? Geoff
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.” https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/505.htm
No – that is still the case. The best that can be done is statistics of perturbed physics ensembles – notwithstanding Gavin’s theoretically inapplicable opportunistic ensemble – and his use of compromised surface temperature data.
Yes, thank you.
They are in panic mode and resorting to any trick to defend their failed models. Gavin went back to CMIP3, and Zeke Hausfather went to RCP 4.5
Read the small print in the figure
The problem with the models is that they only perform during very strong El Niño events, in 1998 and now in 2016. To them the world is stuck in strong El Niño conditions. What a failure.
It is hilarious, because if they stick to their models they are going to become a laughing stock, but if they abandon them they will be labeled as failed prophets. That’s why they are using every trick to try to reduce their models output, CMIP3, RCP 4.5. It isn’t going to work as the differences are very small by 2020.
Look what The Times said a week ago:
Climate change predictions — what went wrong?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news-review/climate-change-predictions-what-went-wrong-78ckkbx2f
“As egg-on-face moments go, it was a double-yolker. Last week a group of climate scientists published a paper that admitted the estimates of global warming used for years to torture the world’s conscience and justify massive spending on non-carbon energy sources were, er, wrong.
…
Another author, Myles Allan of Oxford, told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”
Allan’s defence of the models, however, was peculiar. He said that they had been assembled a decade ago, so it wasn’t surprising they had deviated from reality. Yet these are the very same models used to make predictions for 50 or 100 years ahead which have saddled taxpayers with huge costs to pay for alternative energy sources. Anybody who doubted their predictive power was labelled an unscientific dolt, a “climate denier” fit to be listed with the Flat Earthers.”
Global warming predictions may have been too gloomy
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/analysis-why-climate-change-scientists-may-have-been-too-gloomy-on-global-warming-xlnctnxv8
“When 194 nations met in Paris in 2015 and agreed to try to limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5C, many scientists dismissed the goal as unattainable.
They said it would be politically and economically impossible to cut emissions fast enough and that the world would have to prepare for the effects of an increase of more than 1.5C, including worse droughts and heatwaves and islands disappearing beneath rising seas.
Now it turns out the scientists were being too pessimistic and had been led astray by computer models which overstated the rate of warming.”
Grubb and Allen are deeply regretting being so frank. The truth is very damning to alarmists.
And when the Arctic Sea Ice makes a recovery, there will be a massive run on Prozac by the establishment.
Define “recovery”, and when is that going to be? LMAO. Here comes Judy’s censor. Gotta protect her little bevy of stoopudd commenters.
Define “censor”.
I’m on a 4 hour train trip to Chicago. At times it can be boring. But knowing you’re in top form, I have no fear of boredom.
I give it to 2020. If not by 2025, I surrender.
When you read it all, nothing has changed and keeping it below 1.5 or even 2 degrees still means phasing out emissions starting now. I think this is why it didn’t take off much among the skeptics. The Paris agreement still needs to be reinforced in future rounds, not weakened. I think there are emission scenarios that keep us below 2 C, and they don’t involve stopping emissions completely by 2050.
Show me the satellites! Show me the satellites!
Fabius Maximus seems to have given up on the satellites as too uncertain. I didn’t see anyone defending them on WUWT or his site either. I think it has been one adjustment too far since RSS4 came out and agreed with surface temperatures.
Overall sea surface temperatures will determine what the overall global temperatures will do.
What has a major influences on overall sea surface temperatures ? The sun not CO2.
And guess what the overall sea surface temperature trend is down
A number of people have made the point that Patrick Moore did not found Greenpeace. I decided read some more on the subject.
“The Amchitka voyage sparked a flurry of public interest. The media went wild about the small group of activist who had sailed off in the face of great adversity – the first “media mindbomb”, as Bob Hunter conceived of those early Greenpeace actions, had been launched.”
“…The trip was a success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams.” So the boat attempts to confront a nuclear bomb test. “Hunter, Moore and a dozen other activists sailed up the coast on the first voyage of The Greenpeace armed with environmental ideals and public relations savvy.”
Greenpeace had its breakthrough moment. He was on the boat. Did he file the paperwork for founding it? Who cares?
“The Greenpeace Foundation was born and Hunter and Moore were its first co-presidents.”
Do we trust the Canadian Broadcast Corporation?
Moore was formerly listed by Greenpeace on its website as a founder. When he sharply criticized Greenpeace negative stance on golden rice, he was promptly disappeared.
Rud,
That claim can’t possible be correct. Greenpeace is totally objective, unbiased and has no axe to grind on climate change or environmental issues.
Uh-oh,
things go
missing ;
medieval
warming
periods,
ocean heat,
hot spots
‘n such,
down
that ‘ol
memory
whole.
My latest –> “A breakthrough in videos teaching sound climate science”
http://www.cfact.org/2017/09/25/a-breakthrough-in-videos-teaching-sound-climate-science/
Here is the beginning: “There has been a breakthrough in videos that systematically teach a skeptical view of climate science at the high school level. Two new videos are now available, free on YouTube. So far as I know these are the first of their kind (and we need a lot more). Both are excellent.
Although each video can be used alone, they form a sequence. The first is titled simply “A Better Understanding” and the second “A Better Understanding…The Physics.”
Of course the understanding in question is of the climate system. But it is also of climate science, because the thrust of each video is that the climate models are wrong and we need to understand why. Not to give away the story, but the short answer is that they are too focused on radiative forcing, especially from CO2. The basic message is that climate science has gone running off in the wrong direction, as it certainly has.”
There is more of course. This is just what my Climate Change Debate Education project is all about — collecting and/or creating this kind of teaching materials.
https://www.gofundme.com/climate-change-debate-education
first video mis uses the term begging the question.
stopped watching
Nothing for you to see anyway.
They seem to understand all the terms in the energy budget, but they give up and say it is too complicated when it is time just to add them together.
Dr. Curry was terrific on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight. I wish Sam Harris had asked her, rather than Joe Romm, to speak to the climate change debate on his podcast a couple of weeks ago.
The link in the following line near the end of the head post is inactive:
“Forcing consensus is bad for science and society [link]”
It seems very few CE denizens test the premise that global warming would be harmful. It seems they swallow the belief hook, line and sinker. They simply jump over this underlying premise and go onto arguing about how to avoid global warming.
Not me, Peter.
And there are quite a few others I know who refuse to reject ECS = 0.
ECS calculated from lab results is not the same as ECS calculated from real atmospheres.
While physics might indicate inescapable warming, that is from lab work.
Atmosphere work shown no CO2 effect if you regard all observed main changes as natural.
You have to, because nobody has demonstrated how to tell natural from anthro. And there the matter sits, stalled. Geoff.
Ecs cannot be 0.
Physicaly cannot.
Terra incognito –
Socrates’ ‘I do not know,
natural from anthro,’
not of much consequence ter
cli-sci-doofus-activists. –
More real when yer at sea
in a leaky boat,
facts matter when yer
hafta’ keep afloat.
Hi Geoff,
Thank you. However, my comments is about the economic impacts, not temperatures. Temperature change is neither beneficial not harmful. it is the impacts of the temperature change that many be beneficial or harmful.
TKS Beth,
I know you are one of thems that does get it.
:)
Beth, It’s a pity some of the other objectively and rationally sceptical commenters who used to post here have left for one reason or another):
– Max Anacker https://judithcurry.com/2010/11/12/the-denizens-of-climate-etc/#comment-211590
– Latimer Alder https://twitter.com/latimeralder
– Kim
Tony B is still with us and still making excellent contributions – politely!
“Ecs cannot be 0. Physicaly cannot.”
That’s incorrect.
I think it’s very unlikely that ECS is zero.
There are numerous ways Other Than Surface Warming that could physically re-balance an imposed radiative forcing.
Since warming at the surface has occurred, I think it’s unlikely that ECS=0. But, I also don’t think that ECS can vary much from the transient response. If ECS were materially higher than TCS, there would necessarily be an acceleration of warming rates, which we haven’t observed either.
The longer things go, the more likely that ECS is about the observed TCS.
Hi Beth,
If we cannot tell anthro from natural – then there the matter rests. The future is veiled but the beastly nature of the uncertainty monster cannot be ignored. And – just for you – I have some experience in leaky boats. – https://wordpress.com/post/voyageofthehoneyeaterblog.wordpress.com/32 –
horrors – https://voyageofthehoneyeaterblog.wordpress.com/
The difference between TCR and ECS depends on assumptions about ocean thermal inertia. The variability of ocean temps on an annual scale make it more likely that oceans retain heat rather than warm slowly.
Steven,
ECS can be zero when, during the life of CO2 in the atmosphere, any heat that it causes is released to space in a time that is short compared to its residence time.
End of argument. Geoff.
Yes Peter,
Sad when people go missing.
bts.
Thx Chief, THAT’s a leaky boat experience, ) and to be continued …
“The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing
nations predictably deadlocked as well.” https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/Climate_Pragmatism_web.pdf
Both sides of the climate war are fringe ningnongs with an inflated view of their significance in the scheme of things. In the middle ground the world is muddling through.
It seems there is a lack of valid evidence to suggest global warming would be harmful. On the other hand:
1. The planet is in about the severest cold house phase it has been in since complex life began (around 650 Ma ago) (Scotese, 2016, Figure 15) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275277369_Some_Thoughts_on_Global_Climate_Change_The_Transition_for_Icehouse_to_Hothouse_Conditions .
2. The average global temperaturewas about 7 °C warmer than now for the past half billion years (Scotese, 2016)
3. Life thrived when the planet was warmer, but struggled when colder
4. About 10 times more C is tied up in the biosphere now than at the last glacial maximum (IPCC AR4 WG1 Chapter 6)
5. Tol, 2013, Figure 3 (bottom panel), projects the economic impacts of global warming would be beneficial up to around 4 °C warmer than now if the projected negative impacts of energy are excluded. Empirical evidence does not appear to be consistent with the projected negative impact of GW on energy consumption – GW is likely to also be positive for the global economy.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-012-0613-3#page-1
Or (Free access to working paper version): http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/climate_change.pdf
Many lines of evidence indicate that GW would be beneficial, not detrimental, for life on earth, human well-being and the global economy.
The premise that many CE denizens apparently accept, without actually investigating, is that global warming would be harmful.
Good words on Tucker last nite; the studio should have done a quick makeover for you…
“You can see spatio-temporal chaos if you look at a fast mountain river. There will be vortexes of different sizes at different places at different times. But if you observe patiently, you will notice that there are places where there almost always are vortexes and they almost always have similar sizes – these are the quasi standing waves of the spatio-temporal chaos governing the river. If you perturb the flow, many quasi standing waves may disappear. Or very few. It depends.” https://judithcurry.com/2011/02/10/spatio-temporal-chaos/
Perturbing the flow in the Earth system carries unknowable risks and uncertain benefits. The middle ground is to reduce risk while fostering global economic development and conserving environments.
My latest –> National Science Foundation’s stealth climate campaign
http://www.cfact.org/2017/09/27/national-science-foundations-stealth-climate-campaign/
Here is the beginning: “As described earlier, NASA and NOAA both have big splashy websites promoting climate change alarmism and student indoctrination; in fact they compete with one another. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has nothing like this but they are just as activist, maybe even more so. Theirs is the stealth strategy of funding myriad alarmist activities, most of which are directly aimed at indoctrinating teachers and students.
NSF is the lead Federal agency for funding so-called science education activities, with an annual budget for that purpose of almost a billion dollars a year. There are so many different programs and projects that it would be a big job to track down every one of the climate alarmist propaganda efforts. What is certain is that there are a lot of them. Most will be funded via universities, because that is how NSF operates.
Here are just a few examples of NSF funded activities to show the broad scope of their alarmist activism:” (end of quote)
There is more of course. NSF needs to be investigated for alarmism. Tax dollars being worse than wasted — teaching teachers how to scare children for political purposes.
Hence my project to teach the debate, not alarmism:
https://www.gofundme.com/climate-change-debate-education
“The major El Niño of 2015-16 brought significantly less precipitation to California than previous events of comparable strength, much to the disappointment of residents suffering through the state’s fourth consecutive year of severe drought. ” From ” Tropical ocean contributions to California’s surprisingly dry El Niño of 2015-16″ in Journal of Climate.
Looks like a peer-review failure in the opening sentence.
Most of California’s reservoirs are filled. When the rains stopped, State officials worried that a warm melt season would produce massive flooding. One dam, Oroville dam, had to use its emergency spillway — with disastrous results.
In most of the State, more rain would have just flowed down to the Pacific — or produced flooding, then ran down to the ocean.