Fraser Institute fires off a damp squib
New addition: Download an annotated pdf of the Fraser report. An interactive pdf file, to be read on the screen, is here, and a printable version is here. Suggestions for further commenting are welcome. Additions to the pdf have to be short, and tied to particular pieces of text or figures. And of course we will only incorporate comments that we deem to be scientifically sound and cogent.
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While most of the world's climate scientists were following the IPCC fest last week, a few contrarians left out in the cold were trying to to organize their own party.
An unofficial, "Independent Summary for Policymakers" (ISPM) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report has been delivered by the Fraser Institute. It's a long, imposing-looking document, resembling, come to think of it, the formatting of the real Summary for Policymakers (SPM) document that was released on Friday after final negotiations of the IPCC in Paris last week. The Fraser Institute has assembled an awesome team of 10 authors, including such RC favorites as tilter-against-windmills-and-hockey-sticks Ross McKitrick, and other luminaries such as William Kininmonth, MSc, M.Admin — whose most recent paper is "Don't be Gored into Going Along" in the Oct-Nov issue of Power Engineer. To be fair, he did publish a paper on weather forecasting, back in 1973. According to the press release, the London kickoff event will be graced by the presence of "noted environmentalist" David Bellamy. It's true he's "noted," but what he's noted for is his blatant fabrication of numbers purporting to show that the world's glaciers are advancing rather retreating, as reported here.
Why go to all the trouble of producing an "independent" summary? The authors illuminate us with this wisdom regarding the official Summary for Policymakers: "A further problem is that the Summary for Policy Makers attached to the IPCC Report is produced, not by the scientific writers and reviewers, but by a process of negotiation among unnamed bureaucratic delegates from sponsoring governments." This statement (charitably) shows that the Fraser Institute authors are profoundly ignorant of the IPCC process. In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists, and are publically acknowleged. Moreover, the lead authors of the individual chapters are represented in the writing process leading to the SPM, and their job is to defend the basic science in their chapters. As lead author Gerald Meehl remarked to one of us on his way to Paris: "Scientists have to be ok, they have the last check. If they think the science is not represented, then they can send it back to the breakout groups. "
A common accusation at the time of the Third Assessment Report was that the SPM didn't reflect the science in the rest of the report. A special National Academy panel was convened at the request of President GW Bush, to consider this and other issues. The Panel found no significant disconnect between the SPM and the body of the report. The procedure followed this time is not in essence any different from that which has been used for previous IPCC reports.
One of the strangest sections of the Fraser Institute report is the one in which the authors attempt to throw dirt on the general concept of radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is nothing more than an application of the principle of conservation of energy, looking at the way a greenhouse gas alters the energy balance of a planet. The use of energy conservation arguments of this type has been standard practice in physics at least since the time of Fourier. We have heard certain vice presidents dismiss "Energy Conservation" as merely a matter of personal virtue, but we have never before heard people who purport to be scientists write off the whole utility of "Conservation of Energy." From what is written in the Fraser report, it is not even clear that the authors understand the first thing about how radiative transfer calculations are done. They criticize the radiative forcing concept because it "fails to take into account the lifetime of greenhouse gases" — as if we really needed to know anything more about CO2 in this regard than that it stays around for centuries to millennia. They say that radiative forcing "is computed by assuming a linear relationship between certain climatic forcing agents and particular averages of temperature data." Nonsense. It is computed using detailed calculations of absorption and emission of infrared radiation, based on laboratory measurements carried out with exquisite accuracy, and meticulously checked against real atmospheric observations.
Hockey-stick bashing and solar-explains-all advocacy are favorite activities of the denialist camp, so it is no surprise to see both themes amply represented in the Fraser Institute report. In neither case does the Fraser report break new ground in bad behavior. It's just more of the same old same old. On climate of the past millennium, the Fraser report misrepresents the recent National Research Council report , which concluded quite the opposite of what the Fraser report claims it concluded: The National Research Council, like the official SPM, affirms that recent warming really does appear anomalous in light of the past millennium. The Fraser report obscures this point by cleansing the recent period of warming from their graphs. The discussion of solar variability consists of a lot of vague talk about unexplored possibilities, while skirting the basic problem with solar variability as an explanation of recent warming: There is no observed trend in solar activity of a type that could explain recent warming, and if the problem were an unobserved trend in solar ultraviolet, it would make the stratosphere (where UV is absorbed by ozone) trend warmer relative to a constant-solar baseline. In reality, the stratosphere is cooling strongly, and at about the rate the models predict.
The basic approach taken by the Fraser Institute Report is to fling a lot of mud at the models and hope that at least some of it sticks. Of course, if one looks at enough details one is bound to find some areas where there is a mismatch between models and reality. Modellers do this all the time, as a way of improving the representation of physical processes. However, to highlight a few shortcomings without asking what their implications might be for climate sensitivity, or whether the mismatch might be due to data problems rather than model problems (as in the case of tropical lapse rate), gives a distorted picture of the state of the art. An examination of the model shortcomings in the light of the vast range of important things they get right leaves the fundamental premise of the cause of warming unchallenged, and to see why, one needs to turn to a balanced assessment of the science such as represented in the full IPCC report.
The Fraser Institute authors also raise the curious objection that models have not been "formally proven" to be suitable for predicting the future. We are not sure what it would mean to "formally prove" such a thing (Kurt Gödel, are you listening?), but the specific objection raised in the Fraser report makes no sense: the authors suggest that the number of tunable parameters in models is so great that it may exceed the degrees of freedom in the data being "fit." In reality, there are at most a dozen or two parameters that modellers touch, most of these are constrained to certain limits by data, and there are physical limitations to what one can do to the output by changing such parameters. In contrast, adding up time series of temperature and precipitation and pressure as a function of latitude and longitude, seasonal cycles, surface radiation balance, ocean heat storage, ENSO events, past climates, and vertical structure, there are literally thousands of observational constraints involved in the evaluation of model behavior.
There are so many bizarre statements in the Fraser Institute report that some of us think that spotting them could serve as a good final exam in an elementary course on climate change. Take your pick. The report states that "The IPCC gives limited consideration to aerosols …" whereas aerosols have been a key part of the scenarios since the Second Assessment Report, were the key to explaining the interrupted mid-century warming, and cannot in any way be mangled so as to spuriously give the warming of the past decades. The ISPM regales us with tales of natural global warming in the distant past, without pointing out that these happened over millions of years, had often massive consequences nonetheless, and were linked to processes like continental drift which are unlikely to be part of the explanation of the recent warming. The Fraser report describes the climate changes of the past century as "minor" (a value-laden and subjective term if ever there was one), failing to realize that climate change so far has been the fire alarm, not the fire. The climate of 2100 is not forecast to be mild.
We could go on, but why bother? We'll leave off with a quote. "most places have observed slight increases in rain and/or snow cover"
Actually, consulting the draft of Chapter 4, snow cover kinda looks likes it's been decreasing, not increasing. But take a look at the artful use of "and/or". The sentence is not "formally" wrong. Superb! When you hear "ISPM," just think "Incorrect Summary for Policymakers."
Note: In the interests of timeliness, this commentary has been based on a January 8 draft of the "ISPM" which was leaked to us. If the final released version differs substantively from what we have seen so far, the changes (for better or worse) will be discussed in the comments.
5 février 2007 at 12:52 AM
I’m hoping some real climate scientists take the Exxon funded Competitive Enterprise Institute up on its $10,000 offer for evidence disputing the conclusions of the IPCC WG1 FAR. What fun it would be to collect for laying out all the new information regarding melting glaciers and sea level change to point out that the IPCC is too conservative in its estimation of what seems to be sure to become dangerous climate change.
5 février 2007 at 1:09 AM
Good to see a timely defense of the science.
This could have been written as a fill in the blank form. Instead of “Frasier Institute” you could write “insert one of various individuals and organizations who don’t like the implications of the science in the regulatory arena”
This would save a great deal of time. You would not need to do new posts for what the other contrarians are saying about the SPM.
5 février 2007 at 1:38 AM
Mankind was not able to bring peace to the very local Near East region for some 60 years, Bush was not able to keep his fingers out of Iraq when he felt strong. Reading this dispute about science and i-science I come to the conclusion that mankind is unable to cope with problems of global scale. Please convince me from the opposite!
5 février 2007 at 2:41 AM
Your link to “Fraser Institute” doesn’t go there!
5 février 2007 at 4:13 AM
@ Andreas Mueller:
“the uncertainty of our times is no reason to be certain about hopelessness” — Vandana Shiva
5 février 2007 at 4:20 AM
Thanks! It does now.
5 février 2007 at 4:55 AM
I’m very disapointed concerning the very weak amount of Realclimate authors comments following the SPM publication.
I believed, naïvely, that it was an important event.
In this topic you speak about aerosols , but can you give us the “best estimate” of aerosols concentration and their global radiative effects between 1950 and 2006.
And try to be as precise as possible, please.
5 février 2007 at 5:38 AM
It is only to be expected but it seems to me that this is another big Oil/coal attempt to delay mandatory restrictions on their efforts to provide the USA with the energy it needs in the cheapest an most profitable manner and hence corrupt their power base on capital hill. No doubt the money will keep on flowing for these people and why an environmentalist like David Bellamy of all people would dispute climate change is beyond me but he always was a bit to enthusiastic for my liking and hence a TV personality.
Expect another 5 years of the same until the next IPCC comes out.
5 février 2007 at 5:47 AM
The WSJ has produced a real eyeball roller in response to the FAR ExSum- Viscount Moncton as star witness, no less-
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009625
5 février 2007 at 5:55 AM
I thought the leaked draft said “DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE”. I didn’t know they intended to publish it. These documents are very valuable to know, because they form the basis of what the denialists are going to refer to when they come forth with their misinformation. A common tactic in a live interview is for the denialist to draw the subject into a discussion about some nitpicking issue in which they can manufacture a dispute, and thus divert attention away from the main issue.
If you can force the denier to concede that they obtained their particular factoid from a page of the Fraser Institute report or other briefing document, you ought to be able to assert the fact that all the points within it have already been discussed and sorted out at length by the scientific peer review process; a process they were free to submit their points to at the time of discussion — if they were actually interested in having scientists check them out.
5 février 2007 at 6:13 AM
RE: #3 “Please convince me from the opposite!”
Wish I could but I can’t, my basic reasoning leads me to the “monkeysphere” every time. Let’s hope we’re both wrong, perhaps we are witnessing a new phase in “The Enlightenment” but condsidering the monkeysphere theory I think extinction within the next 150yrs is more likely.
Frasier institute: Ding dong the witch is dead, ignore them from now on. Replace the empty space that the deniers have become, perhaps with some articles by marine biolgists, agriculturalists, ect. I think one of the most dangerous ideas “out there” is that rising sea levels are the worst side effect (ie: wet feet as most people see it). If rainfall patterns change dramatically and drought becomes more permenant then there will be a global famine of trully “biblical” proportions, combined with mass migration due to rising water. Argiculture takes place where the ground is fertile and has adequate rainfall/irrigation, it does not work on semi-molten permafrost or flooded desert sand. The ground is fertile because the rivers have been there for millenia, because the rain falls there or the glacier feeds the river, ect, ect…
We need to be aware of the effects on our agriculture and the food chain of the oceans, just finding figures on world/regional agricultural output is difficult for an educated layman. I know Australian figures have suffered over the last 10yrs for grain and I know many N. Atlantic fisheries have collapsed but getting a picture of how it’s all connected and what the net effects are on food supply (over say 50yrs) is beyond my spare time.
BTW: I live in SE Australia, we were singled out by the head of the UN’s climate body as “drought-ravaged and water-challenged Australia entering an election year”. That pretty much sums it up, in the last year Australian attitudes have gone from Howard/Bush style arrogance to “what the hell have they been doing for the last 10yrs”?
5 février 2007 at 7:34 AM
Re #6: “I’m very disapointed concerning the very weak amount of Realclimate authors comments following the SPM publication.”
As a computer scientists I have played my small bit part in building the internet over the past couple of decades, others have filled it with knowlage, art, and conspiracy theories (the spam filter won’t let me say ppoorrnn). I’m kinda proud of the bit I played in building a “machine” where one billion people can talk personally to a group who make (IMHO historic) news, your comment is just plain rude! BTW: You are welcome to use “my” machine to find out what is “known to science” and let the rest of us know how you fare with an easily digestable blog open to constructive critisim.
Besides, scientists rarely oil a “squeeky wheel”, they normally rely on an engineer. ;-o
5 février 2007 at 8:03 AM
Fraser Institute is inline with the other right-wing think tanks like Cato, CEI, and Reason. All have taken money from Exxon-Mobil and deny the science of climate change, and all took money from Big Tobacco and denied the health threats of second-hand smoke.
Here’s Fraser on second-hand smoke.
http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=nr&id=386
5 février 2007 at 9:00 AM
“It’s true he’s “noted,” but what he’s noted for is his blatant fabrication of numbers purporting to show that the world’s glaciers are advancing rather retreating, as reported”
My opinion is that Mr Bellamy is a noted botanist.
I see no evidence in the link that you gave that he fabricated evidence. The report states he that probably mistyped whilst copying some figures that he believed to be correct. Am I wrong?
[Response: Bellamy was a (non-notable) botanist some time ago; nowadays he is notable as a media person. We can test this, of course: what major contributions to botany do you think he has made? - William]
5 février 2007 at 9:55 AM
Strange behavior persists this morning.
5 février 2007 at 10:30 AM
Re #1: The Competitive Enterprise Institute has nothing to do with the advances made by the American Enterprise Institute. Nor have we received any money from ExxonMobil since 2005.
5 février 2007 at 10:41 AM
I’m a little surprised that they are still in the denial stage. I had thought that all of the belief tanks and climate contrarians would have moved on already to the “Well climate change is happening, but any attempts at mitigation will fail so let’s try and adapt.”
That’s the fallback defensive position in denialist trench warfare.
5 février 2007 at 11:00 AM
This is of course the same McKitrick whose supposed global warming “bombshell” publication turned out to be an artifact of not knowing the difference between degrees and radians!
5 février 2007 at 11:04 AM
RC, I don’t really understand why you devote time and space to such a worthless and insignificant document. It seems to me you are inadvertently conferring legitimacy to the Fraser institute’s tripe by posting on their ISPM.
5 février 2007 at 11:25 AM
Gee Sean, “Know your enemy”, “Keep your enemies closer” etc etc. To laymen these guys are just believable enough to put the guilty mind at ease, you have to respond to challenges put up by denialists or they’ll walk all over ya.
Reminds me of Mike Moore’s stupid white men. “While we’re all getting our first latte and still waking up for the day ahead, republicans have been working for hours finding new ways of ripping you off” Something like that anyway, just replace republicans with denialists.
5 février 2007 at 11:31 AM
Re 9
I hope someone is busy writing a reply to the WSJ editorial. It’s not hard to spot the howlers. Guess I’m surprised that RC doesn’t have a kind of form letter for these instances, they seem to occur so often. Scientists cannot hold themselves aloof from reiterating the facts and correcting errors in the science when an influential broadsheet persists in publishing rubbish. If you want to influence policy, you have to go head to head with the papers that are read by the policy makers, and that means, in this case, the WSJ.
BTW, letter from VP of ExxonMobil denying attempts to exert influence at the AEI: www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,2005907,00.html
5 février 2007 at 11:44 AM
#7
I share Pascal point of view. Are controversies about ISPM prose more important than a thorough explanation of IPCC AR4 ?
I’m also interested by RC answer to his question. SPM explains us: it is very likely that most of the observed 1950-2005 warming is due to GHGs. “Most” and “very likely” are quite vague in my opinion (for “very likely”, I mean there is no quantitative estimate of likelihood here, I suppose it express the “elicitation of expert views” as precised in the IPCC Guidance notes for lead authors on adressing uncertainties). But more important than these rhetoric speculation, a transient temperature change 1950-2005 should be analysed in comparison with a transient forcing budget for the same period. Second Draft shows that aerosol direct and indirect forcing is still poorly understood or constrained, and aerosol emissions trends still poorly measured, even in present time, a fortiori in past decades. And all other forcings except GHGs have still a low scientific understanding. How do we have with this respect a 90-99% confidence about the recent warming trend, limited to 1977-2005 (for a statistically significant trend), and most pronounced in 1990-2005? How do we exclude (or simply evaluate) the aerosol-nebulosity-insolation part of recent trends?
5 février 2007 at 12:05 PM
While you can find fault with the WSJ article, this is a point we must not lose sight of: “There are also other problems–AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example–whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.” As someone who recognises the debate is not over, I can’t help feeling that these ‘other’ issues currently get rather less attention in the Western press than climate change, because, although very real problems, they are not perceived to affect the West directly (we in the Developed world can be self-centred). And to answer one commentator here, I am certainly not a Republican. I commend this site for at least recognising alternative viewpoints exist.
5 février 2007 at 12:37 PM
RE#9, “For example, the Center for Science and Public Policy…” This is Pete du Pont’s conservative think tank in Dallas I believe. He’s a WSJ columnist, so the idea that the two agencies are equivalent is false on its face. Talk about incestuous.
5 février 2007 at 1:26 PM
RC: Please keep debunking these kinds of things. I’m sure I’m far from the only regular reader of this site who needs all the help you can provide in arguing against the CC deniers. For example, just this morning I read the following letter in my local (Rochester, NY) newspaper. (Quoted in its entirety, including the writer’s credentials.)
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Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and other proponents of the theory that global warming is man-made use the term “consensus” as a primary argument for their hypothesis. Inconveniently for them, truth is discovered from credible scientific finding, not consensus. Furthermore, as a former atmospheric physicist, I can vouch that there is nowhere near a consensus for this hypothesis among the community of credible scientists who study our planet.
Repeated scientific verification supports the theories of relativity, the double-helix structure of DNA and even the theory of natural climate change, providing indisputable proof that these theories are in fact the truth. Nowhere in thousands of climate studies is there an instance of incontrovertible evidence that global warming is driven by the activities of humans. If there was even one, it would be widely cited and referenced. We would know the scientist’s name as we do Hubble, Einstein and Crick.
A mere 10,000 years ago, the Rochester area was encased beneath thousands of feet of glacial ice. Global warming is a truth. The hypothesis that it is driven by human activity is false.
JOEL WOJCIECHOWSKI
HENRIETTA
The writer has a master’s degree in atmospheric physics and a doctorate in biophysics.
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5 février 2007 at 1:45 PM
Re # 22:
Life presents us with an enormous number of problems. The question is, how do we prioritize these problems, and budget resources? The line you are taking here is right out of the Bjorn Lomborg playbook, and it is exactly the kind of ‘divide and conquer’ rhetorical tactic you would expect to see pushed from certain socio-political quarters. I seem to recall that the earliest defenders of slavery used the same trick to pit the temperance movement against abolitionists (”Sure slavery is bad, but look what the demon rum is doing! We can’t fix both of these scourges at the same time.”)
There is no reason we can’t address both global climate change and the other calls to conscience the WSJ editorial page has suddenly and conveniently discovered. The former requires changes in the way the developed (and developing) world allocates its energy investment dollars (away from hydrocarbon fuels) and the latter involves questions of international aid and third world infrastructure investment.
We can do both at the same time. Both are important. False dichotomies like this are all about diluting the energies of those advocating change.
Anyway - this is a political discussion, and not realy germaine to TFB (The Fine Blog).
5 février 2007 at 1:45 PM
Just got a call off the Hill. Pielke Jr. is going to be testifying this Thursday for House Sience. Guess which party invited him…again!?
Stay tuned.
[Response: I wouldn’t knock it. If RPJr is now the fair-haired favorite of certain political parties, that’s certainly a big improvement over Michael Crichton. As a shift in the terms of the debate, it’s a distinct move in the right direction. –raypierre]
5 février 2007 at 1:45 PM
Gavin et al
Could you comment on a recent article in Science , January 26th, about jet streams? Jet Stream Conundrum by Baldwin states: Eath’s atmospheric jets have shifted poleward by about 1 degree since 1979. How does this impact AGW or the other way around?
Also, in AGU Geophysical research letters an article about methane hydrates titled Origin of pingo-like features on the Beaufort Sea shelf and their possible relationship to decomposing methane gas hydrates, sheds new information about this menace.
Finally, any comments on the recent controversy that the AR-4 may be too conservative especially with respect to sea level rise, particularly ignoring results from GLACE and meltwater pouring down moulins?
thanks as always
Tony
[Response: I promise my next post will be pure science — and the jet stream post is the very next I will do. Look for it as part of our review of what’s in the full IPCC report. I won’t be able to quote the report itself until it’s issued, but the jet stream shift does make an appearance and I can certainly talk about the published literature, of which there is a good deal by now. The jet shift post will be the long-awaited “part 3″ of the series Rasmus and I were doing on global warming and atmospheric circulations. (For those of you with a good memory, Part II dealt with the hydrological cycle in the tropics, discussing the Nature paper by Vecchi et al). –raypierre]
5 février 2007 at 1:58 PM
re #25
link to your post
(February 5, 2007) â?? Proving that man causes warming
JOEL WOJCIECHOWSKI
HENRIETTA
The writer has a master’s degree in atmospheric physics and a doctorate in biophysics.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070205/OPINION03/702050303/1040/OPINION
5 février 2007 at 2:35 PM
is it true?
During most of the last 1 billion years the earth had no permanent ice.
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/
[Response: It is true. Watch out for the paleoclimate chapter when the full IPCC report is released, which discusses climate changes in Earth’s history and their causes. Or if you can’t wait, a good start is the paper by Royer et al.. -stefan]
5 février 2007 at 3:06 PM
RE: 23 For people who think that disease, hunger, and hygiene are tough issues now, imagine how that picture would appear with the influence of fully-engaged AGW. In my view, not doing what we “can” to avert full-blown AGW would be equivalent to providing antibiotics (or maybe more apt, drinking cups) to users of dirty water rather than cleaning the water. The WSJ’s use of the scare phrase “scarce resources” is a red herring in at least one important way: energy conservation does not involve using scarce resources, other than the political spine to do it. THAT resource has been non-existent in the government(s) of the United States of Entertainment since at least 2000.
“While you can find fault with the WSJ article, this is a point we must not lose sight of: “There are also other problems–AIDS, malaria and clean drinking water, for example–whose claims on scarce resources are at least as urgent as climate change.”
5 février 2007 at 3:11 PM
I was a bit curious about the panel of experts, so I semi-randomly pickes three of the names (Prof. Friedrich Schneider, Prof. Erwin Diewert, Prof. Ronald W. Jones) and checked their qualification. Now this is a small sample, but all three turned out to be economists. Diewert seems to have a reasonable qualification is statistics, but none of them is a climatologist or even a physical scientist…
5 février 2007 at 3:13 PM
i have a basic question: what is the estimated TOTAL amount of CO2 pushed into the atmosphere yearly, from ALL sources? What is the amount from man’s activities? Oddly, I’ve never noticed these figures in a layman’s source.
5 février 2007 at 3:19 PM
re #14 response
The question was “am I wrong?”.
I purposefully stated that it is my OPINION that Dr Bellamy is notable so I fail to see how I could be wrong on that point.
The link given is a newspaper article that states that Dr Bellamy apparently made a mistake while copying figures that he believed to be correct and Dr Bellamy does not deny this. I see no evidence in the link that he purposefully (blatantly?) fabricated anything, or am I wrong?
(The article is from The Guardian, the newspaper commonly known as The Grauniad because of its many typo’s.)
5 février 2007 at 3:27 PM
Re: http://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the-climate-skeptic-scam
Deblogsmog’s been giving the Fraser stuff a good beating and the above link is music to mine ears but the site seems to attract the denial brigade and hey presto the following turned up:-
“”"I think you are missing the point: you still refer to RealClimate when two prestigious scientific committees have made clear that there are reasons to consider anything that comes from this site with suspicion. These people are in deep trouble, because although they use the word ’science’ very very often…. “”"”
What’s all that about? Were those “prestigious” outfits the usual clowns?
Keep up the good work
Mike
[Response: Thanks Mike. Well, maybe they were referring to “Scientific American”, “Nature”, or “Science”. Oh wait, no, they all actually gave us a hardy endorsement. So perhaps they are referring to the prestigious “Cranks of Science”, er, I mean “Friends of Science”. –mike]
5 février 2007 at 3:29 PM
…red-faced addition: The people I checked are from the editorial advisory board, not the actual author list. Still…
5 février 2007 at 3:45 PM
“…red-faced addition: The people I checked are from the editorial advisory board, not the actual author list. Still…”
Well, Kinnimouth and Karlen do have relevant backgrounds.
5 février 2007 at 4:24 PM
Re #25 & the science journalist’s need for “repeated scientific verification” for acceptance of a fact.
Well, let’s see, we could emit as much GHGs as possible & complete this global warming experiment on laboratory earth, & get the whole thing up to par with the law of universal gravity. Though there may not be people left (or at least educated, scientific types) to appreciate the experiment’s fine results. Guess that’s just the risk we must take in the name of scientific advancement.
Or, we could use what data we do have, plus ingenious proxies, plus sophisticated computer models, and try & figure out whether a huge catastrophe is upon us, so as to give us a chance to avert it.
5 février 2007 at 4:36 PM
Hi Juli; I’m just another amateur reader here, not a climate scientist. I answer questions if I think I can, with the hope they’ll correct me so I learn something (grin).
> basic question: what is the estimated TOTAL amount of CO2 pushed
> into the atmosphere yearly, from ALL sources?
You’re asking about the sum resulting from natural biogeochemical cycling and the added amount from human sources.
First, natural sources — the total annually is approximately zero.
This may surprise you — you can look it up.
That’s because “Push” and “pull” matched, averaged over each year, at least since the end of the last ice age — about eleven thousand years.
That was true until the last few centuries.
See the tables here for a start: http://www.plantphysiol.org/cgi/content/full/125/1/25
> What is the amount from man’s activities?
The excess, above what nature has been handling, because nature adjusts rather slowly; the ocean has absorbed about half what people have added.
Here: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/thumb/d/d3/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr_Rev.png/350px-Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr_Rev.png
5 février 2007 at 4:41 PM
Those who frequent conference rooms may find this interesting:
“At 1000 ppm, nearly all the occupants were
affected. These effects were observed in humans with
only a transient exposure to an atmosphere containing in-
creased levels of carbon dioxide and not a lifetime expo-
sure. At present, the conditions giving rise to these symptoms
can be readily reversed by moving into the outdoor at-
mosphere. In the event that the atmospheric concentration
of carbon dioxide reaches 600 ppm, the planet will have a
permanent outdoor atmosphere exactly like that of a
stuffy room. The conditions indoors in buildings of the
type now available will become even more unpleasant and
could easily reach 1000 ppm permanently with the results
outlined above. Office buildings exist which are described
as `sick’, in which workers display symptoms of carbon
dioxide poisoning. Office levels of carbon dioxide pres-
ently reach 800 to 1200 ppm and in overcrowded conference
rooms, the level can reach 2000 ppm. These conditions
will be greatly elevated under conditions where the general
atmosphere has reached a carbon dioxide concentration of
600 ppm.”
http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/jun252006/1607.pdf
CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 90, NO. 12, 25 JUNE 2006
5 février 2007 at 4:48 PM
Groan. I thought the Fraser would have rolled over by now, given that their political representatives in Ottawa (our ‘new’ conservative government) have suddenly become enthusiastic converts to global warming (including the human role in causing it). But you can never overestimate the stubborn head-burying-in-sand capabilities of a right-wing think tank. More seriously, I do expect the next phase will be all about how we can’t really do anything about GW, GW may not really be that bad, and, gee, why would you do anything at all that won’t benefit you for decades? (At that rate, we might as well just go on smoking, using asbestos in our houses, etc…)
5 février 2007 at 4:51 PM
re #38
what huge catastrophe?
let’s see, global warming sea level rise…
ice age sea levee falling and most of the northern hemisphere covered by glaciers…
now that would be a catastrophe…..
5 février 2007 at 5:37 PM
Re #34: Anyone can make a mistake. The problem with Bellamy is that he failed to retract his claim after being confronted with the evidence that he was wrong. Note that the typo error only served to compound his original error in citing a figure that turned out to be fraudulent (and could have been esaily checked at the original source). If as you imply Bellamy ought to be given some degree of credit for his scientific expertise, why should he be cut any slack for the sort of elementary research error that a science undergrad would lose points for? But to repeat, all of the pales in contrast to his failure to retract the mistaken claim.
5 février 2007 at 6:01 PM
In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists, and are publically acknowleged.
Sounds like there are some exceptions. Can I ask who they are and what was the need to put non-scientist there? It seems to me that there is no shortage of better qualified authors.
5 février 2007 at 6:15 PM
>38, 42
> what huge catastrophe?
Glad you asked. http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html
Hope that helps.
5 février 2007 at 6:38 PM
re #45
at last, a link that mentions over population….
why is that not in the kyoto treaty or in any of the solutions to global warming? china, india, muslims all claiming over one billion people…..
5 février 2007 at 7:17 PM
re 46.
China & India might be fair enough, but there are muslims in many countries. This is not a similar situation. There are over two billion christians too.
[Response: Comment 46 slipped through by mistake. Population policy is off-topic to the present discussion, but is certainly a relevant factor in determining future CO2 emissions. How that population is distributed amongst religions is irrelevant, and shouldn’t have been brought up. Let’s leave it at that. –raypierre]
5 février 2007 at 8:12 PM
Re Sashka’s query (44):
I’ve appended the complete SPM author list below. Actually, I’m pretty sure that they’re all scientists, but there were two or three names whose work I wasn’t familiar with, so I wrote “virtually” just to be on the safe side. You can check out credentials for yourself, by looking on Google scholar.
Drafting Authors:
Richard Alley, Terje Berntsen, Nathaniel L. Bindoff, Zhenlin Chen, Amnat Chidthaisong, Pierre Friedlingstein, Jonathan
Gregory, Gabriele Hegerl, Martin Heimann, Bruce Hewitson, Brian Hoskins, Fortunat Joos, Jean Jouzel, Vladimir Kattsov,
Ulrike Lohmann, Martin Manning, Taroh Matsuno, Mario Molina, Neville Nicholls, Jonathan Overpeck, Dahe Qin, Graciela
Raga, Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, Jiawen Ren, Matilde Rusticucci, Susan Solomon, Richard Somerville, Thomas F. Stocker,
Peter Stott, Ronald J. Stouffer, Penny Whetton, Richard A. Wood, David Wratt
Draft Contributing Authors:
Julie Arblaster, Guy Brasseur, Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen, Kenneth Denman, David W. Fahey, Piers Forster, Eystein Jansen,
Philip D. Jones, Reto Knutti, Hervé Le Treut, Peter Lemke, Gerald Meehl, Philip Mote, David Randall, DaÃthà A. Stone, Kevin
E. Trenberth, Jürgen Willebrand, Francis Zwiers
5 février 2007 at 8:21 PM
Re #42: “ice age sea levee falling and most of the northern hemisphere covered by glaciers… now that would be a catastrophe…”
Actually, that’s probably not the case. Suppose we could return to the conditions of the last Ice Age. Sure, we’d lose some productive land in the far north, but that would be more than compensated for by the new lands exposed by the lower sea level. Add in the now-arid lands (such as most of the western US) that were then much wetter, and the increased ocean productivity, and I do believe we’d see a considerable net benefit - except we’d have complaints about the illegal Canadian immigrants
5 février 2007 at 8:31 PM
I’m no supporter of David Bellamy’s position of glaciers, and last I heard he announced he wasn’t going to say anything about global warming for a while (to avoid further embarassment presumably). But I agree with “English” that “blatant fabrication” is not fair. The 55% to 555 thing was surely inadvertent fabrication at worst (though I’m not aware that he’s ever admitted it publicly) and the 55% he got from someone else.
5 février 2007 at 10:01 PM
What are the relative proportions of areosols from industry, land clearing, and bushfire? How are those numbers projected to change over that 21st century?
5 février 2007 at 10:27 PM
Re: Bellamy,
I have no idea how credible he is on climate, but he is/was a well know science communicator. He went to jail in Tasmania while protesting the proposed Franklin dam, we still have the Tassie wilderness and for his part in that outcome I thank him.
[Response: I like wilderness as much as the next guy. Whatever Bellamy did in the past, the confusion he spread about glaciers and global warming (and given the history it is difficult to see this as anything other than wilful) is hardly a good example of communicating science to the public. It’s especially sad to see people who have done some good in the world give themselves over to leading others up a garden path. I won’t presume to understand Bellamy’s motivation or psychology, but you could hardly say he makes a good poster-child for accurate scientific communication and integrity when it comes to climate change. If the glacier incident were an aberration, it’s hard to see why he’d lend credibility to the Fraser crowd by appearing at their little do in London. But I don’t know, perhaps he backed out? Does anybody know if he actually put in an appearance? After all Prime Minister Harper backed out of a Fraser Institute event when he found they were using his name to raise money by selling high-priced tickets to the event. –raypierre]
5 février 2007 at 10:57 PM
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/02373921169204-2719700.html
More scepticism from Dr. Marohasy. She prefers denial and hoping for rain as the antidote for the IPCC who she thinks must be subverting their real findings for later. You know after the bill of goods is sold to the public. The plot in this really is diabolical as I portrayed it in Warm Front. The Kookaburra Consortiun lives.
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976900570
http://www.markyork.blogspot.com
6 février 2007 at 12:46 AM
I like the snark. It is more than they deserve, but necessary.
Best,
D
6 février 2007 at 3:26 AM
…”The basic approach taken by the Fraser Institute Report is to fling a lot of mud at the models and hope that at least some of it sticks. Of course, if one looks at enough details one is bound to find some areas where there is a mismatch between models and reality. “….
Somehow they do manage to make themselves come across as ignorant in their comprehension or understanding of the concept of models and modeling.
What Models Can (and Can’t) Tell Us About Risk
Tom McKone
Science@Berkeley Lab, (Jan 2007)
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Jan/pollutant-models.html
…”McKone sees models as descriptors of the physical and chemical processes that govern the behavior or chemicals in the environment. “You can build relationships between factors that you can’t otherwise do without a model,” he says, including chemical properties, transport within and among different media, and abundance in the environment. “…”But just understanding how the pieces fit together doesn’t guarantee correct results, McKone says. “You can still get results that don’t correlate to the real thing. So models are both potentially powerful, and potentially dangerous.” While a model can hint at what interventions have the best chance of reducing pollutant concentrations and exposures, “A lot of people think models provide predictions,” McKone says, “but they don’t do this. Models are not very useful if you don’t have something with which to anchor them. You need observations to confirm the model and move it closer to a representation of reality.This is a particular problem for policymakers, who “don’t like to make choices involving uncertainty,” McKone says. “A danger is that they may just use model results to tell them what to do. “Adding more detail into a model doesn’t necessarily get you a better result if you don’t understand the basic science,” says McKone. “Model development has to be paced with the science.”…”Says McKone, “The reliability of the calculation depends on the reliability of the least well known element. If you don’t know how uncertain this weak link is, then you are making the model results look more accurate then they really are.”"…”He stresses that “an important quality in a good model is called parsimony. This is defined as making the model as complicated as needed to solve a problem, but not more so. You don’t want to add details that make the model overly complicated.”"…
6 février 2007 at 4:55 AM
#26 Paul : “Life presents us with an enormous number of problems. The question is, how do we prioritize these problems, and budget resources? The line you are taking here is right out of the Bjorn Lomborg playbook, and it is exactly the kind of ‘divide and conquer’ rhetorical tactic you would expect to see pushed from certain socio-political quarters.”
Paul, you referred to my previous comment (#22), but I don’t understand your point. My question (and Pascal in #7) deals with a precise point, the way we estimate forcings in the past five decades (precisely local + global and direct + indirect effects of aerosols) and we can attribute with a reasonable “likelihood” a mean global warming of 0,65 K (mainly pronounced over NH lands and past 20 yrs). Political questions are of no interest for me. I’m skeptic on some points of SPM but anyway, I rather advocate a post-fossil ernergy mix for many reasons and, as a French, I’m lucky enough to already live in a much less oil-addict society than many others.
6 février 2007 at 5:52 AM
Re: 52
Yes, it is sad; I think there are mixed motives - Certainly Bellamy is/was agahast at the prospect of half of Britain’s uplands being covered in wind turbines and it was this prospect that (I think) made AGW-skepticism attractive.
More generally, I often find that the more ’skeptical’ scientists in any related field (geology especially) seem to be the over-50s. Witness the AAPG controvsy..
6 février 2007 at 7:18 AM
I wondered if you’d be so kind as to answer a quick query for me please?
In the UK we have just had data released saying that this January was the 2nd warmest January on record (The 1st warmest being January 1916). A letter denying the anthropogenic influence on climate change and trying to assert that climate scientists are somehow biased, published in my local paper yesterday, really annoyed me in light of the strong evidence of the new IPCC report.
This letter refused to believe in anthropogenic climate change by asking “how come January 1916 was even warmer then”?
I know there are other climate forcings and natural variations also at work, and that most models cannot explain the recent warming without including anthropogenic influence, but could not explain this eloquently enough to write a reply. Does anyone know, in the words of the letter “What then is the explanation for January 1916 which was warmer?”
Much thanks,
Peter
6 février 2007 at 8:17 AM
Raypierre
Thanks in advance for the upcoming jet stream article.
I know that RealClimate has covered the Younger Dryas and the Laurentide Ice sheet meltwater in past posts but there appears to be new research published in Paleoceanography, 21. Is that worth a new post?
Thanks again
Tony
6 février 2007 at 9:28 AM
Neal Boortz is at it again….
http://boortz.com/nuze/index.html
However, he mentions a 15000+ scientist petition against global warming,
http://oism.org/pproject/s33p37.htm
what’s that about?
6 février 2007 at 9:36 AM
Re 58, any one off year can be warm, there is natural variation all of the time but its all about the trend or the average temperatures over decades times that matters. Average nightime and daytime temperatures are increasing over time although you will find some exceptions, the trend is warmer overall hence the term global warming or AGW.
6 février 2007 at 9:46 AM
6 février 2007 at 10:14 AM
#60: That’s an old one: 1998, a letter from Dr Fred Seitz. Recycling, one might say. Following information is from exxonsecrets.org:
Dr. Seitz is a former President of the National Academy of Sciences, but the Academy disassociated itself from Seitz in 1998 when Seitz headed up a report designed to look like an NAS journal article saying that carbon dioxide poses no threat to climate. The report, which was supposedly signed by 15,000 scientists, advocated the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol. The NAS went to unusual lengths to publically distance itself from Seitz’ article. Seitz signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration.
On 21 April 1998, Fred Singer (SEPP) 21 April, 1998 released a statement that “More than 15,000 scientists, [8/4/98: now about 17,000] two-thirds with advanced academic degrees, have now signed a Petition against the climate accord concluded in Kyoto (Japan) in December 1997.” The petition said that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” Journalists and others investigating the petition, known as the Leipzig Declaration, had difficulty verifying the number and authenticity of the signatures.
Source: SEPP website
6 février 2007 at 10:37 AM
#60 - Karan, see:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine
6 février 2007 at 10:45 AM
#60 (Karan)
“a 15000+ scientist petition against global warming” Thats the Oregon Petiton, its old news to most of the regular readers of RealClimate. This petition is a sham. I knew about this for a while, but recently someone pointed out this, its funny:
“environmental activists successfully added the names of several fictional characters and celebrities to the list, including John Grisham, Michael J. Fox, Drs. Frank Burns, B. J. Honeycutt, and Benjamin Pierce (from the TV show M*A*S*H), an individual by the name of “Dr. Red Wine,” and Geraldine Halliwell, formerly known as pop singer Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls. Halliwell’s field of scientific specialization was listed as “biology.”
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine
6 février 2007 at 10:48 AM
Re #58: Peter: I think that the key point is in the word “global” in global warming. Go to the GISS website (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt) to look at global average temperatures, and you will see that the global trend is much clearer than the trend for any one location (such as the UK).
(comment #61 also addresses the issue of recognizing that there is temporal variability which should be corrected for: averaging over a year is better for discerning trends than averaging over a month, or a single day. And taking the average of several years gets you clearer trends yet)
(I might guess that the anomalous UK 1916 January was due to a temporary shifting of the jet stream, for example, which would lead to a shifting of heat from one place to another rather than being any indication of a global temperature trend)
[Response: The local vs. global comment explains part of the story, but the letter-writer’s question about 1916 is a fair one in this sense: if we are emphasizing global patterns, why do we make a big thing of new regional extremes (”North America’s hottest year” “Central England’s Second Hottest”). Is it just misconceived to take regional extremes as an evidence that climate is changing? A few years ago the answer might have been “yes” but the magnitude and frequency of regional extremes is getting to the point where we can begin to say that the global warming signal is showing up even at the regional level. The thing to keep in mind is that the smaller region you deal with, the more chance there is to confuse a general trend with what you might call “climate noise,” due to just moving a small bit of hot air an unusually long distance and letting it stagnate over one place. The point is that it takes a really unusual circulation event to hit the CET temperatures of 1916, or the Dust Bowl temperatures in Chicago. As the world generally gets warmer, it gets easier and easier for blips in the circulation to make the climate hit the extreme conditions. In Chicago our summers are already starting to look like the dustbowl years, but looking at the graph (see the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Great Lakes Report), our local temperature trend is flat to up at a point where the dust bowl years were recovering toward normal. Already we have more over 97F days than in the dust bowl summers. The simple answer, then, is that there are always more fluctuations at the regional level than at the global level, but the global warming signal has gotten so strong that the climate change is starting to become clearly evident even at the regional level. Very extreme and rare circulation events in the past can nonetheless cause similar temperatures. The main point is that, as time goes on, what used to be considered a rare event in the past will become quite common. –raypierre]
6 février 2007 at 10:52 AM
Re 58: the UK is a but a very small region of the planet, and the CET but a small region of the UK. In the same way that one warm January in central England can’t be used (on its own) as evidence for global warming, nor can an earlier one be used (on its own) as evidence against.
The heat gets moved around and local temperature can be heavily influenced by the synoptics. What drives the synoptics is the question, and Raypierre’s upcoming article on the jet stream will help add one clue I think.
6 février 2007 at 11:21 AM
In reality, there are at most a dozen or two parameters that modellers touch, most of these are constrained to certain limits by data, and there are physical limitations to what one can do to the output by changing such parameters.
In other words, the model runs where the observed global mean temperature variability is satisfatorily explained when all natural causes and all human emissions (CO2 and sulphides) are taken into account - these successful runs were achieved by tuning a dozen or two parameters. How do we know that accurate projections for year 2100 would not require a different set of parameters that would lead to perhaps dramatically different results? In statistics, this would be similar to fitting in-sample and using results out-of-sample - a technique that doesn’t enjoy a great reputation.
[Response: Remember, there’s physics involved here. This is not something like an ARIMA or box-jenkins statistical model. One does have a certain ability to tell, from the comparison to the past data, whether the model is getting the mechanism right. In large measure, the question of effect on the future of different parameter choices is dealt with by the ensemble runs (e.g. ClimatePrediction.net) or by the wide variation in parameterization schemes amongst the ensemble of different models. There is nothing in the physics at present that suggests that a model which has an awful performance for the 20th century would get the year 2100 better. If you have some reason for thinking that, write it up and submit it somewhere. Otherwise, your suggestion is little better than “space aliens moved the heat around.” –raypierre]
6 février 2007 at 11:26 AM
Re: 58
Remember that the UK is, in terms of weather, a constant battleground between Maritime warm/wet/southwesterly weather and Continental cold/dry/easterly weather during the winter, the difference being quite drastic; so if the former persisted through January 1916 it could have been just as warm. It’s more the thing that (anecdotally) it just seems to happen every year now..
6 février 2007 at 11:58 AM
[[How do we know that accurate projections for year 2100 would not require a different set of parameters that would lead to perhaps dramatically different results? ]]
Yet again, you’re using the tactic of inferring that something exists because there’s no evidence for it either way. They must be flying saucers!
Show that accurate predictions for 2100 would require a whole new set of parameters. If you can’t do that, you’ve raised a non-issue.
6 février 2007 at 11:59 AM
#32 - no wonder us lay sceptics are sceptical. You picked the editorial board of the institute, not the authors. The authors are (apologies just cut & pasted from google): Chief WSI/INTELLICAST Meteorologist; Consulting Meteorologist, Unionville, Canada. (Retd) Research Scientist, Environment Canada; senior administrator at the Bureau of Meteorology; professor of applied mathematics; Professor of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University; no idea, seems to work at Tartu Observatory Estonia (lucky guy) his name is all over various climate studies; an expert in meteorology and physical oceanography, who is an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth Sciences; Distinguished Professor, Meteorology & Oceanography; Professor, isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology. That’s all of them. Maybe the applied mathematics bloke doesn’t pass your criterion of having relevant climate knowledge. The report is littered with “not enough evidence” and “not fully understood” and “level of understanding low to very low” and so forth. We don’t understand why they have got it wrong and you have got it right; the qualifications look pretty good for all of you. They lack your certainty which surely is an attractive trait in a scientist.
6 février 2007 at 12:28 PM
Now that you have had at the bovine dung from the Fraser Institute, perhaps you can move on to Christopher Monckton’s at the Center for Science and Public Policy?
6 février 2007 at 12:29 PM
“Does anyone know, in the words of the letter “What then is the explanation for January 1916 which was warmer?”
Much thanks, Peter
If this were simply the question of the variations of a single month, he might have a point. But it’s not….
The whole of Northern Europe was exceptionally warm, from the British Isles to Moscow, until the change in wind patterns restored more “normal” temperatures.
Similarly for the North Eastern United States until quite recently.
Nor is it a question of a single month. It follows a series of exceptionally warm months/seasons and years:-
Summer ‘06 and Autumn ‘06 were record breaking seasons in the CET data.
The July average of 19.7C was the warmest since 1659, so was September at 16.8C.
2006 was the warmest year on record for min HadCET and mean HadCET.
In terms of annual averages, try downloading the CET data from the Met office web site and then counting how many years the annual average is over 10C.
It’s quite a clear marker.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Daily/HadCET_act.txt
Notice how much more frequent this is since 1975 compared to previous decades.
Remember that this is the longest temperature record available ( even if some of the earlier data is reconstructed)
When you look at the overall picture the evidence becomes quite convincing!
MONTHLY MEAN CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE (DEGREES C)
1659-1973 MANLEY (Q.J.R.METEOROL.SOC., 1974)
1974ON PARKER ET AL. (INT.J.CLIM., 1992)
PARKER AND HORTON (INT.J.CLIM., 2005)
[Response: Questions like “what was the cause of x event” can sometimes be answered, though it’s often hard to pin down a single specific cause in a system like the atmosphere where everything globally affects everything else. Some very nice work along these lines has been done for N. American drought years, tracing the circulations back to sea surface temperature patterns in the tropical Pacific. The 1916 European event would be an interesting one to study in a similar vein. I myself am not aware of a study of that sort, but my knowlege of the literature on this subject is far from comprehensive. If any of the readers know of a dynamical treatment of the 1916 pattern I’d be very interested to hear about it. –raypierre]
6 février 2007 at 12:31 PM
“Does anyone know, in the words of the letter “What then is the explanation for January 1916 which was warmer?”
Much thanks, Peter
If this were simply the question of the variations of a single month, he might have a point. But it’s not….
The whole of Northern Europe was exceptionally warm, from the British Isles to Moscow, until the change in wind patterns restored more “normal” temperatures.
Similarly for the North Eastern United States until quite recently.
Nor is it a question of a single month. It follows a series of exceptionally warm months/seasons and years:-
Summer ‘06 and Autumn ‘06 were record breaking seasons in the CET data.
The July average of 19.7C was the warmest since 1659, so was September at 16.8C.
2006 was the warmest year on record for min HadCET and mean HadCET.
In terms of annual averages, try downloading the CET data from the Met office web site and then counting how many years the annual average is over 10C.
It’s quite a clear marker.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/CR_data/Daily/HadCET_act.txt
Notice how much more frequent this is since 1975 compared to previous decades.
Remember that this is the longest temperature record available ( even if some of the earlier data is reconstructed)
When you look at the overall picture the evidence becomes quite convincing!
MONTHLY MEAN CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE (DEGREES C)
1659-1973 MANLEY (Q.J.R.METEOROL.SOC., 1974)
1974ON PARKER ET AL. (INT.J.CLIM., 1992)
PARKER AND HORTON (INT.J.CLIM., 2005)
6 février 2007 at 12:38 PM
#56 - Charles Muller -
Sorry. My comment was addressed to #23, not to you. I’m not sure if it was a mistake on my part or mangling by the comments manager. Either way, my bad.
6 février 2007 at 1:33 PM
Ray, one thought — by 2100, the biologists expect plankton populations to crash and new species to dominate in the Antarctic waters. So a model that has some constants assumed in the physics may need some (admittedly hugely scientifically unknown) change in rates of biological cycling of carbon. This is just speculation on my part, and I may not understand how this is handled now in the models, so please correct me.
I would guess the biologists will tell you that the odds are extremely likely this will cause an excursion, but I don’t have a clue which direction or how long.
Probably only a decade or two, given the rate at which planktonic organisms reproduce, before it settles down, and I’d _guess_ the total throughput of carbon will be about the same if we’re lucky (if dying non-shelled organisms sink to the sediment the way calcite- and aragonite-shelled organisms sink now, taking the carbon out of circulation).
If on the other hand we get a huge bloom of salps, consuming whatever takes over at the bottom of the food chain primary productivity, and keeping that carbon in circulation in the upper ocean, I imagine all bets are going to be a bit skewed.
And that has already been observed:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?sourceid=Mozilla-search&q=jellyfish+clog+fishing+nets
6 février 2007 at 1:49 PM
Perhaps you can clarify for me. My understanding is that the Fraser Institute has prepared a summary of the IPCC 4AR itself. They are not introducing any new or different information. Just summarising what is already there.
Surely if this is so, can someone please explain in detail how the Fraser Institute summary seems to be so very diffferent from the SPM. Aren’t they summarising the same information?
I would have thought that a professional approach would require that the two summaries be compared on a point by point basis by reference to the 4AR to establish which is correct. I have to say that I find your piece on the issue unconvincing.
6 février 2007 at 1:54 PM
Please ignore my comment (#50) about David Bellamy. When I submitted it I hadn’t noticed Steve Bloom’s comment (#43) which said it much better.
6 février 2007 at 2:05 PM
Re: 68
your suggestion is little better than “space aliens moved the heat around.”
I wonder if it would be considered as ad hom if I said something like that …
One does have a certain ability to tell, from the comparison to the past data, whether the model is getting the mechanism right.
I though we were discussing science here. Now, if I’m getting the message right, we are down to abilities that some people have. I’m afraid this is a shaky ground, Ray. Some very able people are known to have been wrong - we discussed Linzen only recently, for example. I hope you will forgive me if I refuse to take anybody’s word for granted. BTW, I don’t doubt that the models are getting the mechanisms right. I don’t even doubt that they are getting the sign correctly: it will be warming, not cooling. But I do doubt the magnitude. And I don’t necessarily mean a particular sign of the (likely systematic) error.
Re: ensemble runs. If you had to test a 12-dimensional parameter space then modestly trying 3 values for each would require 3^12=531,441 runs. I wonder whether we accomplished 1% of that? A propos if in reality it is two dozen parameters, then 3^24 ~ 282 billion.
I’m curious whether GCMs still use bi-harmonic parameterization of lateral viscosity. If yes, is everybody happy about it?
6 février 2007 at 2:09 PM
Apropos of that, here’s an actual number. 100,000,000 tons of carbon per day.
Nature. 2006 Dec 7;444(7120):752-5.Click here to read Links
Comment in: Nature. 2006 Dec 7;444(7120):695-6.
Climate-driven trends in contemporary ocean productivity.
Behrenfeld MJ, O’Malley RT, Siegel DA, McClain CR, Sarmiento JL, Feldman GC, Milligan AJ, Falkowski PG, Letelier RM, Boss ES.
Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA. mjb@science.oregonstate.edu
Contributing roughly half of the biosphere’s net primary production (NPP), photosynthesis by oceanic phytoplankton is a vital link in the cycling of carbon between living and inorganic stocks. Each day, more than a hundred million tons of carbon in the form of CO2 are fixed into organic material by these ubiquitous, microscopic plants of the upper ocean, and each day a similar amount of organic carbon is transferred into marine ecosystems by sinking and grazing.
…
Here we describe global ocean NPP changes detected from space over the past decade. The period is dominated by an initial increase in NPP of 1,930 teragrams of carbon a year (Tg C yr(-1)), followed by a prolonged decrease averaging 190 Tg C yr(-1). These trends are driven by changes occurring in the expansive stratified low-latitude oceans and are tightly coupled to coincident climate variability.
This link between the physical environment and ocean biology functions through changes in upper-ocean temperature and stratification, which influence the availability of nutrients for phytoplankton growth.
The observed reductions in ocean productivity during the recent post-1999 warming period provide insight on how future climate change can alter marine food webs.
PMID: 17151666
6 février 2007 at 2:13 PM
These comments only reinforce my conclusion that the climate science debate is being dominated by left wing political advocates, who are using it to fight a proxy battle against their dreaded arc-enemy, big Oil.
Not that any of you would ever admit it.
Sad.
6 février 2007 at 2:32 PM
re: 77. Failure to understand the science (which is unequivocable), the scientific method, or the overwhelming consensus around the world by climate scientists, major climate science professional organizations, and even corporations such as “arc-enemy” BP Oil about global climate change is no excuse whatsoever to blame “political advocates”. Especially when it is the overwhelmingly “right-wing” political advocates who are desparately out to attack science. The science is there for you to read and learn and not have someone else tell you what to think or say.
Not that you would ever admit it.
Quite sad indeed.
6 février 2007 at 2:42 PM
Re: 70
Speaking of inferring things that don’t exist: it seems like you have nothing to report on your search of coal-power industry subsidies in the federal budget? And what was again your point about normal distributions?
Show that accurate predictions for 2100 would require a whole new set of parameters.
I do not have to show that. The burden of proof is not on me. If you had any background in science you’d understand it.
[Response: For a prediction to be a sound basis for policy, one does not require that it be inconceivable that the prediction be wrong. If that were the case, we would never be able to make use of foresight at all. The predictions of global warming show very likely future consequences, and are far more certain than most predictions upon which governments have routinely based decisions with massive consequences. Your argument hasn’t even gotten to the point of saying why, from a basis of physical plausibility, it is even conceivable that the forecasts are wrong in a major way, and so as far as I’m not concerned you’re not to be taken seriously. –raypierre]
6 février 2007 at 2:58 PM
> My understanding is that the Fraser Institute has prepared
> a summary of the IPCC 4AR itself….
> Comment by concerned of berkely
Where did you get this understanding? Why do you believe your source?
Are they saying the Fraser Institute somehow summarized a document that won’t be available for some months yet?
And where is Berkely?
[Response: Somewhere in Australia or the South Pacific based on an IP lookup. –mike]
6 février 2007 at 3:01 PM
Sashka, dragging your text verbatim into the search box for Google Scholar:
All articles … about 227 for
coal-power industry subsidies in the federal budget?
6 février 2007 at 3:12 PM
Re #82: Err, thanks for your comment Dan. However, perhaps you are aware that the body of the 4th Assessment Report has not been released, and won’t be until May, so it is NOT POSSIBLE for me to read that information directly and form my own view.
I therefore have no choice but to read the SPM and the Fraser Institute Independent SPM (I have read both) which both claim to be summarising for me the SAME body of science. I can’t help but notice that there are very different emphases in the two documents, and I am asking what I hope is a reasonable question for some guidance and explanation as to how two summaries summarising the SAME material can be so different.
[Response: Well, one summary is prepared by the authors of the main text (who presumably know what they concluded), and another summary is prepared by an agenda-driven organisation who are cherry-picking sections and statements to support their pre-determined conclusions. You guess which is which. - gavin]
6 février 2007 at 3:19 PM
To all appearances the Fraser Institute event entirely died on the vine in terms of media coverage (other than a few anticipatory mentions). Google turns up nothing, and a survey of the usual British outlets turns up nothing. Even the Torygraph (publishers of Monckton)seems to be on board with the IPCC, although their related editorial on Sunday was heavily tilted toward carbon capture. I was still a bit surprised by the scope of the blackout, probably because it was so very recently that such an outcome could not be hoped for. The FI luncheon must have been a sad affair indeed. Unfortunately the entire event was closed to the public, so there may not be any witnesses who are willing to say anything in public. Even though the upshot seems clear in terms of coverage, morbid curiosity compels me to ask if anyone has details on the event.
6 février 2007 at 3:20 PM
Re the American Enterprise Institute money offered to scientists to critique the IPCC, I just read their claim that it’s to address policy only, and not the science.
I also saw on TV an AEI spokesman speak against the huge spending on the Iraqi war (or was it the CEI).
Maybe these guys really are legitimately interested in economic issues, and if that’s so, then they should be interested in all the money-saving measures to fight global warming, and be against all the subsidies & tax-breaks to fossil fuels (but that might be pushing it too far, since they are funded by fossil fuels).
RE #26 & the false dilemma about which serious world problems to address: Here’s the solution: Take all that money we save from reducing our GHGs and send it to the poor of the world who are suffering from malaria, AIDS, and other problems. I’ll do it if others do it (I wonder how much Bjorn Lomborg & his ilk are contributing to these pressing problems; maybe they should reduce their GHGs, so they’ll have some money to send). However, I’d have to convince my husband; he sort of likes seeing the savings accumulate in the bank, esp now that we’re nearing retirement age.
6 février 2007 at 3:29 PM
Re “One of the strangest sections of the Fraser Institute report is the one in which the authors attempt to throw dirt on the general concept of radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is nothing more than an application of the principle of conservation of energy, looking at the way a greenhouse gas alters the energy balance of a planet.”
Is this “conservation of energy” you refer to the first law of thermodynamics? Or something else? And if so, that really is whacky that they would dismiss or misunderstand such basics.
6 février 2007 at 3:37 PM
Re: 83
Your argument hasn’t even gotten to the point of saying why, from a basis of physical plausibility, it is even conceivable that the forecasts are wrong in a major way, and so as far as I’m not concerned you’re not to be taken seriously.
From a basis of physical plausibility, for starters, the models are solving equations that cannot be derived from first principles. Bi-harmonic diffusion is a numerical trick invented by the modelers to insure that the energy cascade be more plausible. The application involves additional boundary conditions that cannot be justified.
Back to the original point that I was making, the models are trained on historical data to reproduce the same data. I didn’t say that the set of parameters must change but it might. For instance, how do you know that the same quality of fit cannot be achieved by a completely different parameters set? If it can, why should it necessarily produce the same forecast?
6 février 2007 at 3:42 PM
[[One does have a certain ability to tell, from the comparison to the past data, whether the model is getting the mechanism right.
I though we were discussing science here. Now, if I’m getting the message right, we are down to abilities that some people have. I’m afraid this is a shaky ground, Ray.]]
What he meant — obviously — is that a person, ANY person, can check against known data to see whether a parameter is realistic or not.
You’re losin’ it, Sasha.
6 février 2007 at 3:43 PM
[[These comments only reinforce my conclusion that the climate science debate is being dominated by left wing political advocates, who are using it to fight a proxy battle against their dreaded arc-enemy, big Oil.
Not that any of you would ever admit it.]]
Well, no. Admitting something that isn’t true is called ‘lying,’ and is considered a negative action.
I agree about the arc-enemies, though. I hide whenever a rainbow appears in the sky.
6 février 2007 at 3:46 PM
[[Speaking of inferring things that don’t exist: it seems like you have nothing to report on your search of coal-power industry subsidies in the federal budget?]]
You didn’t read the source I directed you to, did you?
[[ And what was again your point about normal distributions?]]
That estimates for climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 are probably normally distributed. If you google “normal distribution” you should pick up several little articles on it.
[[Show that accurate predictions for 2100 would require a whole new set of parameters.
I do not have to show that. The burden of proof is not on me. If you had any background in science you’d understand it.]]
Gosh, you don’t know how hard it is for folks like me with no background in science. Ignoring, that is, my degree in physics…
6 février 2007 at 3:53 PM
Hi guys
I need your help. I have been debating on another site about value of climate models in assisting us to understand what is happening with the climate. With Realclimate’s and Tamino’s support (thanks guys) I have been doing pretty well. But some smarty has asked me this question which is beyond my lay understanding (I suspect BS).
“Question: What is the mechanism that causes the transfer of energy from GHGs(which capture IR energy in certain bands) to non-GHGs(which are transparent to IR photons) in the atmosphere?
Sunlight striking the earth causes it to re-radiate energy mostly in the IR band. This energy is absorbed by GHGs’ molecular bonds causing vibrations in the bonds. Temperature is solely caused by translational energy, not internal energy of molecules. The absorbed IR in the GHG is then re-radiated at the same frequency and either escapes earth or is re-absorbed by another GHG molecule. How does it become translational energy that can be measured by a thermometer?”
I would appreciate any assistance on this matter.
Cheers Doug
6 février 2007 at 3:56 PM
Re: 90
What he meant — obviously — is that a person, ANY person, can check against known data to see whether a parameter is realistic or not.
ANY?! Including you, for example? Do me a favor then: please check whether 10^2 m^s/s is a realistic value for lateral diffusion? Is it more or less realistic than 2.10^2 m^s/s?
6 février 2007 at 4:11 PM
Re #84:
You ask where did I get my understanding that the Fraser Institute has prepared a summary of the IPCC 4AR itself?
The first paragraph of the FI ISPM states: “The Independent Summary for Policymakers is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of climate change science as laid out in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers. It carefully connects summary paragraphs to the chapters and sections of the IPCC report from which they are drawn, allowing readers to refer directly to what is in the IPCC Report.”
6 février 2007 at 4:32 PM
RE#90, #95
It’s true that you can train any model to reproduce any historical data trend, just as you can come up with an ‘curve-fitting’ equation for a set of points - and that curve may have no utility in prediction of what future data will look like.
However, it is extremely disingenuous to claim that climate model specialists aren’t perfectly well aware of this fact. If you actually look at the recent IPCC report, you find that it is indeed addressed:
Since IPCC’s first report in 1990, assessed projections have suggested global averaged temperature increases between about 0.15 and 0.3°C per decade for 1990 to 2005. This can now be compared with observed values of about 0.2°C per decade, strengthening confidence in near-term projections. {1.2, 3.2}
Thus, if you go back and look at the predictions from 1990, you find that they fit the observed trends - and that’s good evidence that the models are indeed performing well. The observed trends of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling also match decade-old model predictions.
It seems the main concern now is that the models are underestimating future changes, which has certainly proved to be the case for the ice sheet models.
This is why data collection in detail is so important - if oceanic remote sensor systems had been deployed on a widespread basis a decade ago, then the model predictions of changes in ocean circulation could have been compared to a comprehensive dataset, and the 2007 IPCC report might not include statements like:
There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in the meridional overturning circulation of the global ocean.
6 février 2007 at 4:35 PM
Re: 93
You didn’t read the source I directed you to, did you?
When? Where?
That estimates for climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 are probably normally distributed.
Really? How do you know that?
6 février 2007 at 4:37 PM
Sashka, how come everyone else should do tasks for you just because you do not get it? Why not present your own work here, that others can evaluate your scientific skills? Show some effort, that’s the way the science goes. Just raising questions for the sake of the questions themselves is annoying.
6 février 2007 at 4:40 PM
Re: 95
Sorry for the typo: the units are m^2/s, of course.
6 février 2007 at 4:41 PM
Re: #94
Moderators, anybody else, feel free to chime in with any corrections or improvements.
Collision. One of the principal ways for vibrationally and rotationally excited molecules to transfer energy to other molecules in a gas is through the exchange of energy during collisions.
Not so. It’s the fact that earth is at a temperature above absolute zero that causes it to radiate. Earth’s surface continues to radiate (mostly IR) energy even at night.
Not so. Temperature is the average energy per mode of the physical system. That includes all the modes; if you add energy to any of them (translational, rotational, vibrational, or even to the radiation field itself) you have raised the temperature. A vast array of energy transfer mechanisms will soon distribute the energy evenly among all the modes (as long as their energy levels are “within reach” of the available energy), raising the translational energy as well.
Not so, it can do other things as well. It can be transferred to other atmospheric molecules through collisions. It can also be re-radiated, and rather than being reabsorbed by other GHG molecules or escaping to space, it can be absorbed by earth itself, warming the surface.
6 février 2007 at 5:31 PM
> 84, 96
> You ask where did I get my understanding that the Fraser
> Institute has prepared a summary of the IPCC 4AR itself?
>
> The first paragraph of the FI ISPM states:.. draft report.
Okay, so you know you were wrong about that. Now, you’re probably aware that to obtain a copy of one of the drafts, people agreed not to distribute it or discuss it, but to submit comments to the working group.
Can you find out who claims to have broken that agreement, which of the old drafts they claim to be commenting on, and tell us why you trust them to be telling the truth?
The notion of nitpicking their comments — based on their own word on a text claimed to be someone’s old draft — against the summary of the actual document, seems pointless.
Where in Oceania is Berkley, by the way?
6 février 2007 at 5:44 PM
Sashka, homework help:
Neff, S (2005) Review of the Energy Policy Act 2005 Columbia University, 2nd August. Available
at: http://www.cemtpp.org/PDFs/EnergyBillHighlights.pdf
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&c2coff=1&scoring=r&q=%22coal-power%22+%2Bsubsidies+%22federal+budget%22&as_ylo=2002&btnG=Search
6 février 2007 at 5:58 PM
re #90, #97:
models are trained on historical data to reproduce the same data
This requires more specificity. Which models?
GCMs are not, in fact trained at all. They are manually tuned to observations. Some people, myself among them, are working toward the goal of more formal objective tuning. This was until recently infeasible in the case of CGCMs because of computational cost. Even if we succeed, there is only a plan to tune to statistics, not to trends.
If anyone were to train a system on a given result and then uses its reproduction of that result as a prediction or a validation, of course such a claim is invalid.
Waving in this general direction proves nothing. Do you have any specific instances in mind? (Such an instance can have nothing to do with GCMs because they have not been trained this way.)
From a basis of physical plausibility, for starters, the models are solving equations that cannot be derived from first principles. Bi-harmonic diffusion is a numerical trick invented by the modelers to insure that the energy cascade be more plausible. The application involves additional boundary conditions that cannot be justified.
It is of course the case that every numerical model is a bag of tricks. In some cases of numerical modeling there is a theory that more or less constrains the model error with respect to the formal theory. We don’t have that luxury in environmental sciences, and probably never will. You could even argue that we will never have a formal theory of much utility. The system is just too messy.
There is no formal mathematical justification of weather models any more than there is of climate models, yet we rely on weather models every day. The justification is only heuristic.
Can the models be “trusted”? That is a misframed question. The question of “trust” is manipulative, both in its emotional baggage and in its binary answer.
There are two questions that do make sense in this area. The first question is whether we should refrain from climate modeling at all. There seems to be little justification for that. The second question is, having built the models, how much weight we should put on their output in planning future actions. That replaces the yes/no question of “trust” with a more realistic question of weighing evidence.
If the model output were wholly out of line with theoretical and observational evidence, the amount of weight to put on them would be relatively small. Given that this is not the case, given that the models have even revealed errors in the observations on occasion (most notably in the middle atmosphere temperature trend), given that the last fifteen years were prognosed reasonably well, it seems that the weight of modeling evidence should be considered nontrivial.
What bothers me most is that those who have the least faith in the models are so often the same as those who advocate against vigorous greenhouse gas mitigation. This makes no sense without a claim that the models are explicitly biased.
If the predictions are unbiased, an underestimate of the sensitivity of the system is as likely as an overestimate. The cost weighting of the more sensitive system would drive decision-making in the direction of more vigorous policy. If you don’t believe the science, you have no useful constraints on how bad things could get.
Speaking of rigor, any claim that the models are intrinsically biased has always come form the vaguest, most handwaving and implausible arguments. As has been explained here regularly, there is no actual motivation in the climate science community to recommend more or less vigorous energy policy. Climate science will always be important and interesting. We don’t need to trump up a crisis to get funded. If anything the air of controversy harms our interests. The community has both socially and politically conservative roots. (The main customers of meteorology are military and agricultural, and the main customers of climatology are geologists and through them mineral interests.) The founders of the field would not have started a scare in the way that some people desperately want to believe. All of this sort of misses an important technical point. It’s never explained how one can embody one’s conscious or unconscious political bias in a system of primitive equations. I suggest you give it a try before glibly claiming that it is an easy trick.
There is at present no substantive quantitative argument, whether based on a claim of investigator bias or otherwise, that claims to explain why all the models (and all the corroborating evidence) should overstate the greenhouse gas sensitivity.
But, unless the models, and the rest of science, are biased toward high sensitivity because of systematic errors in math and physics, the less confidence in the science you have, the greater risk you face, and the more vigorous of a mitigation policy stance you should adopt on a risk/benefit basis. Claiming the models are “incorrect” is insufficient.
6 février 2007 at 6:24 PM
re: 86. To concerned of berkely:
My sincerest apologies. My comment (82) was in direct response to comment *81* and not to yours. I do not know why I typed “re: 77″. Typo.
6 février 2007 at 7:19 PM
RE#104,
Just to clarify, my comment #97 was addressed towards those climate contrarians who claim that model parameterizations that are used to address sub-grid scale phenomena (i.e. clouds, wind-sea surface interactions, etc.) are artificially adjusted to match historical datasets and thus have little future predictive ability - and the best response seems to be to go back and look at what the models were predicting some decades ago, and compare that to current observations - which is why having a comprehensive set of good observations is so important - which is why the low level of funding for satellite- and ocean-based sensors is such a travesty. (though the predictions seem to be on target so far)
It seems more likely that the models will underestimate rather then overestimate the climate sensitivity over the long run, due to things that are not included in them. Again, the IPCC report gives hints of this problem: (from pg 11)
Models used to date do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedback nor do they include the full effects of changes in ice sheet flow, because a basis in published literature is lacking. The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica at the rates observed for 1993-2003, but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future. For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios shown in Table SPM-2 would increase by 0.1 m to 0.2 m. Larger values cannot be excluded, but understanding of these effects is too limited to assess their likelihood or provide a best estimate or an upper bound for sea level rise.
However, consider the recent acceleration of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. For news reports on this issue, see
Why the news about warming is worse than we thought: feedback - Oceans, soil and trees will become worse at absorbing carbon dioxide as temperatures rise, Ian sample, Guardian Feb 3 2007
The growth rate in CO2 for 2006 was 2.6ppm/year; previous growth rates reported in the IPCC were 1.4 and 1.9 ppm/year.
Surge in carbon levels raises fears of runaway warming, David Adam, The Guardian, Jan 19, 2007
6 février 2007 at 7:56 PM
Re: 94 Not to flog a fully tenderized horse filet, but if temperature were purely a “translational” phenomenon, then every substance would have a the same specific heat–3/2*k–so clearly there’s mort to it thay you are seeing. One must also consider translational and rotational degrees of freedom, and these can and do exchange energy with translational degrees of freedom. Don’t believe me? Consider the inverse process–can a moving molecule excite a vibrational or rotational mode in another molecule. Clearly yes.
6 février 2007 at 8:01 PM
re 101
Thanks for that Tamino
Love your site and I am looking forward to your blog on GCRs
Cheers Doug
7 février 2007 at 12:38 AM <