Coyote Blog

Over at Climate Skeptic, I administer a 20-second Rorchach test on a sea ice chart.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I dissect the UK Met office's forecast a year ago for 2007 that the mean global temperature anomaly would be .54C and that we were 60% certain to exceed the 1998 record of .52C.  These two points allow me to infer a normal distribution for their forecast, and I find that the actual temperature anomaly for 2007 was in the bottom 0.00003% of the Met office's implied range of outcomes.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I dissect climate models to show that the future warming in the models from CO2 alone is not much more than 0.5C.  All the catastrophe comes from positive feedbacks that modelers assume dominate the climate, an odd assumption for such a long-term stable system.  I summarize as follows:

• Climate sensitivity is the temperature increase we might expect with a doubling of CO2 to 560 ppm from a pre-industrial 280ppm
• Nearly every forecast you have ever seen assumes the
  effect of CO2 alone is about a 1C warming from this doubling.  Clearly,
  though, you have seen higher forecasts.  All of the "extra" warming in
  these forecasts come from positive feedback.  So a sensitivity of 3C
  would be made up of 1C from CO2 directly that is tripled by positive
  feedbacks.  A sensitivity of 6 or 8 still starts with the same 1C but
  has even higher feedbacks
• Most thoughtful climate scientists will admit that
  we don't know what these feedbacks are -- in so many words, modelers
  are essentially guessing.  Climate scientists don't even know the sign
  (positive or negative) much less the magnitude.  In most physical
  sciences, upon meeting such an unknown system that has been long-term
  stable, scientists will assume neutral to negative feedback.  Climate
  scientists are the exception -- almost all their models assume strong
  positive feedback.
• Climate scientists point to studies of ice cores and
  such that serve as proxies for climate hundreds of thousands of years
  ago to justify positive feedbacks.  But for the period of history we
  have the best data, ie the last 120 years, actual CO2 and measured
  temperature changes imply a sensitivity net of feedbacks closer to 1C,
  about what a reasonable person would assume from a stable process not
  dominated by positive feedbacks.

Apparently, a
video by Greg Craven called "How the World Ends" has been getting a
lot of attention, supposedly because it prevents an irrefutable argument for immediately taking massive action to fight global
warming.  A newspaper asked me for my response, and I thought I would share it
here as well.  You can find my response posted at Climate Skeptic today.

The Question, as asked (surprisingly) by a global warming believer:

One curious aspect of this result is that it
is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that
agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ
significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity. The cited range
in climate sensitivity from a wide collection of models is usually 1.5
to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2, where most global climate models
used for climate change studies vary by at least a factor of two in
equilibrium sensitivity.

The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2
to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global
temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Kerr
[2007] and S. E. Schwartz et al. (Quantifying climate change"“too rosy a
picture?, available at www.nature.com/reports/climatechange, 2007)
recently pointed out the importance of understanding the answer to this
question. Indeed, Kerr [2007] referred to the present work and the
current paper provides the "˜"˜widely circulated analysis'' referred to
by Kerr [2007]. This report investigates the most probable explanation
for such an agreement. It uses published results from a wide variety of
model simulations to understand this apparent paradox between model
climate responses for the 20th century, but diverse climate model
sensitivity.

Much more here at Climate Skeptic

Ending the Human Race to fight global warming

Taking the world back to the 19th century, very much in the same theme as this earlier post here on Coyote Blog.

The UN admits that their science has been corrupted by the desire to garner political and financial support.

I have also be reworking the site design because nearly everyone complained that the old color scheme was brutal on the eyes.

I am trying to keep most of my long climate posts off this site and over at Climate Skeptic.  However, I have cross-posted this one because it is a good example for laymen of just what crap gets put forward in the media today about global warming.  It demonstrates the gullibility of the media, the gross exaggerations that exist in nearly every climate catastrophe article, and, as an added bonus, demonstrates the scientific incompetence of the man who leads the UN, the organization that has taken onto itself the role of summarizing the state of climate science. 

Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss the problem of graft.  No, not bribery (though I do have a beef with the industry cabal that supposedly funds all skeptics for not coming through with my check).  In this case, I discuss temperature reconstructions that graft one data series onto another, and try to draw conclusions about the inflection point which, suspiciously, occurs exactly at the spot the two series are spliced.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I post my single best argument why you shouldn't be panicked about anthropogenic global warming.

Over at Climate Skeptic, we can see Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, argue that the only way to really abate CO2 is for all the world's countries to be just like India.  I kid you not.  And, in fact I agree with him that if we really wanted to eliminate CO2 emissions with current technology, exactly this kind of poverty promotion program would be required.  I just don't think it's necessary that we adopt such a goal. 

As a postscript, I take on Mr. Stern's temperature forecasts of 2.5-3 degree C rise by 2050 and show why they make absolutely no sense in light of the last 100 years of empirical data.

Email I received with subject line "Climate Skeptic"

"How stupid are you"

Outstanding.  I love scientific discourse.

"It's hot in the desert, so therefor warmer temperatures must cause drought."  That is the logical fallacy I address today over at Climate Skeptic, where we find evidence that, if anything, global warming is making things wetter rather than drier.

Several readers have asked for my comment.  This is what I posted over at Climate Skeptic:

This
morning I was all fired up to write something petty, like "Al Gore now
has made the same contributions to peace as have previous winners
Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger."  Later, I considered a long and
drawn out post on the inaccuracies of "An Inconvinient Truth", but I
really have already done that in long form here and in short form here.
In truth, the Peace prize process has for years been about a group of
leftish statists making a statement, and often it has been about
tweaking the US, rather than a dispassionate analysis of true
contributions to peace made with the benefit of some historic distance
(as is done with the scientific prizes).  Further, most folks I argue
with don't really care about the specific inacuracies in Gore's movie,
their response typically being something in the "fake but accurate"
line of reasoning.

So instead I will say what I told a reader by email a few hours
ago.  I tend to be optimistic about the world, and believe that we are
approaching a high water mark (so to speak) for the climate
catastrophists, where we will look back and see their influence peak
and start unwinding under the presure of science and the reality of the
enormous cost to abate CO2.  Gore's Peace prize, in the same year as
his Oscar and that global warming music festival no one can even
remember the name of 3 months later, feels to me like it may be that
high water mark.   The Peace Prize certainly was the high water mark
for Jimmy Carter's credibility, not to mention that of Henry Kissinger
and a myriad of others.  Think of it this way -- if the guys who made
the peace prize decisions were investors, and you knew what they were
investing in, you would sell short.  Seriously, just look at the
group.  Well, they just invested in Al Gore.

Update:  One thing many commenters have not pointed
out is that Al Gore is really manuevering the US and China and India
(and the rest of the developping world) into a position that, if he has
his way, conflict is going to occur over who gets to grow and develop,
and who does not.  CO2 catastrophism has the ablility to be the single
most destabalizing issue of the 21st century. This is peace?

Up until now, the retreat of Arctic ice to 30 year lows has been credited, without proof, to global warming.  This never made a lot of sense to me, since at the same time Antarctic sea ice was hitting an all-time high.  Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss a new NASA study that proposes that Arctic sea ice melting over the last decade has been due mainly to shifting wind patterns that basically push the ice into warmer waters where it melts faster.

Over at Climate Skeptic, some investigation by the folks at SPPI have shown that in her new children's climate propaganda book, Laurie David actually reversed the legend on a key chart showing the 600,000 year history of CO2 and temperature.  Recent analysis has shown, and most all scientists accept, that temperature increases actually preceded CO2 increases by 800 or more years in many of the past glacial cycles.  Since this did not fit her story, David reverses the chart legend, making CO2 precede temperature the way David wants it.  Going right to David's cited source, we find:

On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al.
(2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2.
However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:

"The
lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over
glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which
are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial
cycles."

(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310,
1313-1317)

More, including the graphs themselves, before and after tampering, at climate skeptic.

Over at Climate Skeptic, some investigation by the folks at SPPI have shown that in her new children's climate propaganda book, Laurie David actually reversed the legend on a key chart showing the 600,000 year history of CO2 and temperature.  Recent analysis has shown, and most all scientists accept, that temperature increases actually preceded CO2 increases by 800 or more years in many of the past glacial cycles.  Since this did not fit her story, David reverses the chart legend, making CO2 precede temperature the way David wants it.  Going right to David's cited source, we find:

On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al.
(2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2.
However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:

"The
lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over
glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which
are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial
cycles."

(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310,
1313-1317)

More, including the graphs themselves, before and after tampering, at climate skeptic.

From
Megan McArdle:

Matt may be right that I haven't harangued people about climate change
recently, so here goes: dude, if you're still a climate change skeptic, it's
time for a rethink. When the science correspondent for Reason magazine
comes over to the reality of anthropogenic global warming, it's safe to say that
the skeptics have lost the debate. Not only the vast majority of the scientific
community, but even most of the hard-core skeptics at conservative magazines,
have abandonned the hope that we are not warming up the climate.

There's still debate about the effects of the warming, and what we should do
about it. But there's not much question that it's happening.

Duh.  The vision of the skeptic community denying that the world is
warming at all is a straw man created by the climate catastrophists to avoid
arguing about the much more important point in her second paragraph.  What I
can't understand is McArdle's, and many intelligent people I meet, seeming
unintrest in the degree of man-made impact.

The chief debate really boils down to those of us who think that
climate sensitivity to CO2 is closer to 1C (ie the degrees the world will warm
with a doubling of CO2 concentrations from pre-industrial levels) and those who
think that the sensitivity is 3-5C or more.  The lower sensitivity implies a
warming over the next century of about a half degree C, or about what we saw in
the last century.  The higher numbers represesent an order of magnitude more
warming in the next century.  The lower numbers imply a sea level rise measured
in inches.  The higher numbers imply a rise of 1-2 feet  (No one really know
where Al Gore gets his 20 foot prediction in his movie).  The lower numbers we
might not even notice.  The higher numbers will certainly cause problems.

The other debate is whether the cost of CO2 abatement should even be
considered.  I have talked to many people who say the costs are irrelevant -
Gaia must come first.  But steps to make any kind of dent in CO2 production with
current technologies will have a staggering impact on the world economy.  For
example, there are a billion Asians poised to finally to enter the middle class
who we will likely consign back to poverty with an aggressive CO2 reduction
program.  With such staggering abatement costs, it matters how bad the
effects of man-made global warming will be. 

There are many reasons a 1.0 climate sensivity is far more defensible
than the higher sensitivities used by catastrophists.  My
argument a lower climate sensitivity and therefore a less aggresive posture on
CO2 is here.  Cross-posted at Climate Skeptic.

Update: Sure, we skeptics debate the degree of past warming, but it really can't be denied the earth is warmer than 100 years ago.  The problem catastrophists have with defending their higher climate sensitivities is that these sensitivities imply that we should have seen much more warming over the past 100 years, as much as 1.5C or more instead of about 0.6C.  These scientists have a tendency to try to restate historical numbers to back their future forecast accuracy.  We skeptics fight them on this, but it does not mean we are trying to deny warming at all, just make sure the science is good as to the magnitude.

One other thought - everyone should keep two words in mind vis a vis CO2 and its effect on temperature:  Diminishing Return.  Each new molecule of CO2 has less impact on temperature than the last one.  Only by positing a lot of weird, unlikely, and unstable positive feedbacks in the climate can scientists reach these higher sensitivity numbers (more here).  A good economist would laugh if they understood the assumptions that were being made in the catastrophic forecasts that are being used to influence government action.

Cars made by GM and fuel produce by Exxon may be responsible for a lot of CO2, but no one is creating as much global warming as James Hansen and NASA do just sitting at their computers.  An example, showing a cooling trend in New Zealand before their adjustments, but a strong warming trend after NASA is through with the data, is posted at Climate Skeptic.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss Anthony Watt's preliminary findings as to the quality of measurement in the surface temperature installations that are used to measure global warming.  If we call global warming "the signal", then the signal is currently thought to have been about 0.6C over the last century.  However, Watt has good reason to estimate that 85% of the US Historical Climate Network has installation biases that create errors from 1-5C,or about 2-8 times the signal.  And these are not random biases that cancel out, but tend to all bias the numbers higher, leading to systematic over-estimation of temperature increases.

Over at Climate Skeptic, I discuss Anthony Watt's preliminary findings as to the quality of measurement in the surface temperature installations that are used to measure global warming.  If we call global warming "the signal", then the signal is currently thought to have been about 0.6C over the last century.  However, Watt has good reason to estimate that 85% of the US Historical Climate Network has installation biases that create errors from 1-5C,or about 2-8 times the signal.  And these are not random biases that cancel out, but tend to all bias the numbers higher, leading to systematic over-estimation of temperature increases.

I am sure everyone has heard that Arctic sea ice is, as the National Geographic described it, at an "all-time low."  Of course those would expect the words "all-time" to mean just that will be disappointed to learn that they really mean "since 1979 when we started measuring it by satellite."

At Climate Skeptic, I write that it has come to my attention that the earth has two poles, and it's odd no one talks about the other one.  Maybe they forgot?  Well it turns out that Antarctic sea ice is at an all time high (using the term in the same way that National Geographic does). 

As an end note, I also discuss Glacier Bay, Alaska.  It turns out the glaciers there are retreating, but about 99% of the retreat occurred between 1793 and 1907. 

After NASA was forced to restate its US temperature data downward, James Hansen argued that the US doesn't matter.  After it was observed that long-term temperature measurement is flawed in South America and Africa, James Hansen agreed and argued that South America and Africa don't matter.  Since oceans cover 75% of the globe and we have no long-term temperature record for these oceans or for Antarctica, I ask the question at Climate Skeptic:  What does matter?

Good news this week:  James Hansen and NASA have now deigned to release for scrutiny their taxpayer-funded temperature aggregation and adjustment code.  I go in more detail and explain why this matters over at Climate Skeptic.

By the way, if you are wondering why I have calmed down a bit on climate of late here at Coyote Blog, it is because I have decided that my climate work really was diluting what I want to do here at Coyote Blog, and it really deserved its own home and audience.  I have begun archiving old posts over at Climate Skeptic, and I will do most of my new posting on climate there.  Those interested in the climate issues are encouraged to bookmark the new site and/or subscribe to its feed.

For a little while, I will still mirror the headlines over here at Coyote Blog (after all, the paint is still so wet over at Climate Skeptic that I don't think Google has found me yet -- a few blogrolls wouldn't hurt, hint, hint.)

Also, in the next few weeks I plan release my own video on issues with catastrophic anthropogenic (man-made) global warming theory.  The core of this video will be based on this skeptics summary post and my 60-second climate overview as well as my free 80-page skeptics primer, of course.

I was trying to think about what I wanted to do for my last post in my recent orgy of global warming writing.  My original attempt to outline the state of the climate skeptic's case ballooned into 80+ pages, so there may be many people who rationally just have no desire to tackle that much material.  So I decided for this last post to try to select the one argument I would use if I had only 60 seconds to make the climate skeptic's case. But how do you boil down 80 pages to a few simple statements?

I'm not that interested in the Sun or cosmic rays -- they are interesting topics, but its dumb to try to argue we overestimate our understanding of man's impact on climate only to counter with topics we understand even less.  One of the reasons I wrote the paper in the first place was because I thought recent skeptical documentaries spent too much time on this subject.  And I would not get into tree rings or ice cores or other historic proxy data, though there is a lot happening in these areas.  I wouldn't even delve into the hysterical treatment of skeptics by man-made climate advocates  -- these are ad hominem issues that are useful to understand in a more comprehensive view but don't make for strong stand-alone arguments.

Anyway, here goes, in a logic chain of 8 steps.

1. CO2 does indeed absorb reflected sunlight returning to space from earth, having a warming effect.  However, this effect is a diminishing return -- each successive increment of CO2 concentrations will have a much smaller effect on temperatures than the previous increment.  Eventually, CO2 becomes nearly saturated in its ability to absorb radiation.  The effect is much like painting a red room with white paint.  The first coat covers a lot of red but some still shows through.  Each additional coat will make the room progressively whiter, but each successive coat will have a less noticeable effects than the previous coat, until the room is just white and can't get any whiter.
2. In the 20th century, the UN IPCC claims Earth's surface temperatures have increased by about a 0.6 degree Celsius (though there are some good reasons to think that biases in the installation of temperature instruments have exaggerated this apparent increase).  To be simple (and generous), let's assume all this 0.6C increase is due to man-made greenhouse gasses.  Some may in fact have been due to natural effects, but some may also have been masked by man-made sulfate aerosols, so lets just call man-made warming to be 0.6C. 
3. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it is thought that man has increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 0.028% of the atmosphere to 0.038% of the atmosphere.  Since scientists often talk about the effect of a doubling of CO2, this historic rise in CO2 is 36% of a doubling.
4. Using simple math, we see that if temperatures have risen 0.6C due to 36% of a doubling, we might expect them to rise by 1.67C for a full doubling to 0.056% of the atmosphere.  But this assumes that the rise is linear -- and we already said (and no one denies) that it is in fact a diminishing return relationship.  Using a truer form of the curve, a 0.6C historic rise for 36% of a doubling implies a full doubling would raise temperatures by about 1.2C, or about 0.6C more than we have seen to date (see chart below).   This means that the magnitude of global warming in the next century might be about what we have seen (and apparently survived) since 1900.



5. Obviously, there is some kind of disconnect here.  The IPCC predicts temperature increases in the next century of 4-8 degrees C.  Big difference.  In fact, the IPCC predicts we will get a 0.5C rise in just 20 years, not 70-100.  Whereas we derived a climate sensitivity of 1.2 from empirical data, they arrive at numbers between 3 and 4 or even higher for sensitivity.  The chart below shows that to believe sensitivity is 3, we would have to have seen temperature rises due to man historically of 1.5C, which nobody believes. 

   

   So how do they get accelerating temperatures from what they admit to be a diminishing return relation between CO2 concentration and temperature? And for which there is no empirical evidence?  Answer:  Positive feedback.

6. Almost every process you can think of in nature operates by negative
   feedback.  Roll a ball, and eventually friction and wind resistance bring
   it to a stop.  Negative feedback is a ball in the bottom of a bowl; positive feedback is a ball perched precariously at the time of a mountain. Positive feedback
   breeds instability, and processes that operate by positive feedback are
   dangerous, and usually end up in extreme states -- these processes tend to
   "run away" like the ball rolling down the hill.  Nuclear fission, for example, is a positive feedback process.  We should be happy there are not more positive feedback
   processes on our planet.  Current man-made global warming theory, however, asserts that our climate is dominated by positive feedback.  The IPCC posits that a small increase in temperature from CO2 is multiplied 2,3,4 times or more by positive feedbacks like humidity and ice albedo.
7. There are three problems with these assumptions about positive feedback.  One, there is no empirical evidence at all that positive feedbacks in climate dominate negative feedbacks.   The 20th century temperature numbers we discussed above show no evidence of these feedbacks.  Two, the long-term temperature record demonstrates that positive feedbacks can't dominate, because past increases in temperature and CO2 have not run away.  And three, characterizations of stable natural processes as being dominated by positive feedback should offend the intuition and common sense of any scientist.
8. An expected 21st century increase of 0.5 or even 1 degree C does not justify the massive imposed government interventions that will be costly both in dollars and lost freedoms.  In particular, the developing world will be far better off hotter by a degree and richer than it would be cooler and poorer.  This is particularly true since sources like an Inconvenient Truth wildly exaggerate the negative effects of global warming.  There is no evidence tornadoes or hurricanes or disease or extinction are increasing as the world warms, and man-made warming advocates generally ignore any potential positive effects of warming.  As to rising sea levels, the IPCC predicts only a foot and a half of sea level rise even with 4 or more degrees of warming.  Sea level rise from a half to one degree of warming would be measured at most in inches.

OK, so that was more than 60 seconds.  But it is a lot less than 80 pages.  There is a lot of complexity behind every one of these statements.  If you are intrigued, or at least before you accuse me of missing something critical, see my longer paper on global warming skepticism first, where all these issues and much more (yes, including tree rings and cosmic rays) are discussed in more depth.