Coyote Blog

The journal Nature has finally caught up to the fact that ocean cycles may influence global surface temperature trends.  Climate alarmists refused to acknowledge this when temperatures were rising and the cycles were in their warm phase, but now are grasping at these cycles for an explanation of the 15+ year hiatus in warming as a way to avoid abandoning high climate sensitivity assumptions  (ie the sensitivity of global temperatures to CO2 concentrations, which IMO are exaggerated by implausible assumptions of positive feedback).

Here is the chart from Nature:

I cannot find my first use of this chart, but here is a version I was using over 5 years ago.  I know I was using it long before that

It will be interesting to see if they find a way to blame cycles for cooling in the last 10-15 years but not for the warming in the 80's and 90's.

Next step -- alarmists have the same epiphany about the sun, and blame non-warming on a low solar cycle without simultaneously giving previous high solar cycles any credit for warming.  For Nature's benefit, here is another chart they might use (from the same 2008 blog post).  The number 50 below is selected arbitrarily, but does a good job of highlighting solar activity in the second half of the 20th century vs. the first half.

Climate alarmists have mastered the trick of portraying opposition to their theories as not just being wrong, but being anti-science.  For years many scientists who have not looked into climate science at all have reflexively signed petitions supporting the alarmists, in the belief they were supporting science against anti-science. (By the way, time and again when these physicists and Earth scientists have actually later looked at the quality of climate science work, they have been astounded at the really poor quality garbage they were implicitly supporting -- I know, I am in that camp myself).

It looks like Paul Krugman, the most politicized economist ever(TM), is trying to bring the same style argumentation to economics.  If you don't agree with him, you are not just wrong, you are anti-science.  He is Galileo, and you are the ill-informed mystic.

So let me summarize: we had a scientific revolution in economics, one that dramatically increased our comprehension of the world and also gave us crucial practical guidance about what to do in the face of depressions. The broad outlines of the theory devised during that revolution have held up extremely well in the face of experience, while those rejecting the theory because it doesn’t correspond to their notion of common sense have been wrong every step of the way.

Yet a large part of both the political establishment and the economics establishment rejects the whole thing out of hand, because they don’t like the conclusions.

Galileo wept.

There are two other similarities between economics and climate that support this kind of blind (but unwarranted) certainty:

1. There are few if any opportunities for controlled experiments to truly test cause and effect
2. There are near infinite numbers of moving parts and variables, such that one can almost always find an analysis that shows your favored variable correlated to something good or bad -- as long, of course, as you are willing to pretend that a zillion other variables weren't changing at the same time which could have equally likely been part of the causation.

I won't repeat the analysis, you need to see it here.  Here is the chart in question:

My argument is that the smoothing and relatively low sampling intervals in the early data very likely mask variations similar to what we are seeing in the last 100 years -- ie they greatly exaggerate the smoothness of history and create a false impression that recent temperature changes are unprecedented (also the grey range bands are self-evidently garbage, but that is another story).

Drum's response was that "it was published in Science."  Apparently, this sort of appeal to authority is what passes for data analysis in the climate world.

Well, maybe I did not explain the issue well.  So I found a political analysis that may help Kevin Drum see the problem.  This is from an actual blog post by Dave Manuel (this seems to be such a common data analysis fallacy that I found an example on the first page of my first Google search).  It is an analysis of average GDP growth by President.  I don't know this Dave Manuel guy and can't comment on the data quality, but let's assume the data is correct for a moment.  Quoting from his post:

Here are the individual performances of each president since 1948:

1948-1952 (Harry S. Truman, Democrat), +4.82%

1953-1960 (Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican), +3%

1961-1964 (John F. Kennedy / Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat), +4.65%

1965-1968 (Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat), +5.05%

1969-1972 (Richard Nixon, Republican), +3%

1973-1976 (Richard Nixon / Gerald Ford, Republican), +2.6%

1977-1980 (Jimmy Carter, Democrat), +3.25%

1981-1988 (Ronald Reagan, Republican), 3.4%

1989-1992 (George H. W. Bush, Republican), 2.17%

1993-2000 (Bill Clinton, Democrat), 3.88%

2001-2008 (George W. Bush, Republican), +2.09%

2009 (Barack Obama, Democrat), -2.6%

Let's put this data in a chart:

Look, a hockey stick , right?   Obama is the worst, right?

In fact there is a big problem with this analysis, even if the data is correct.  And I bet Kevin Drum can get it right away, even though it is the exact same problem as on his climate chart.

The problem is that a single year of Obama's is compared to four or eight years for other presidents.  These earlier presidents may well have had individual down economic years - in fact, Reagan's first year was almost certainly a down year for GDP.  But that kind of volatility is masked because the data points for the other presidents represent much more time, effectively smoothing variability.

Now, this chart has a difference in sampling frequency of 4-8x between the previous presidents and Obama.  This made a huge difference here, but it is a trivial difference compared to the 1 million times greater sampling frequency of modern temperature data vs. historical data obtained by looking at proxies (such as ice cores and tree rings).  And, unlike this chart, the method of sampling is very different across time with temperature - thermometers today are far more reliable and linear measurement devices than trees or ice.  In our GDP example, this problem roughly equates to trying to compare the GDP under Obama (with all the economic data we collate today) to, say, the economic growth rate under Henry the VIII.  Or perhaps under Ramses II.   If I showed that GDP growth in a single month under Obama was less than the average over 66 years under Ramses II, and tried to draw some conclusion from that, I think someone might challenge my analysis.  Unless of course it appears in Science, then it must be beyond question.

Kevin Drum can't believe the folks at the National Review are still calling global warming science a "myth".  As is usual for global warming supporters, he wraps himself in the mantle of science while implying that those who don't toe the line on the declared consensus are somehow anti-science.

Readers will know that as a lukewarmer, I have as little patience with outright CO2 warming deniers as I do with those declaring a catastrophe  (for my views read this and this).  But if you are going to simply be thunderstruck that some people don't trust climate scientists, then don't post a chart that is a great example of why people think that a lot of global warming science is garbage.  Here is Drum's chart:

The problem is that his chart is a splice of multiple data series with very different time resolutions.  The series up to about 1850 has data points taken at best every 50 years and likely at 100-200 year or more intervals.  It is smoothed so that temperature shifts less than 200 years or so in length won't show up and are smoothed out.

In contrast, the data series after 1850 has data sampled every day or even hour.  It has a sampling interval 6 orders of magnitude (over a million times) more frequent.  It by definition is smoothed on a time scale substantially shorter than the rest of the data.

In addition, these two data sets use entirely different measurement techniques.  The modern data comes from thermometers and satellites, measurement approaches that we understand fairly well.  The earlier data comes from some sort of proxy analysis (ice cores, tree rings, sediments, etc.)  While we know these proxies generally change with temperature, there are still a lot of questions as to their accuracy and, perhaps more importantly for us here, whether they vary linearly or have any sort of attenuation of the peaks.  For example, recent warming has not shown up as strongly in tree ring proxies, raising the question of whether they may also be missing rapid temperature changes or peaks in earlier data for which we don't have thermometers to back-check them (this is an oft-discussed problem called proxy divergence).

The problem is not the accuracy of the data for the last 100 years, though we could quibble this it is perhaps exaggerated by a few tenths of a degree.  The problem is with the historic data and using it as a valid comparison to recent data.  Even a 100 year increase of about a degree would, in the data series before 1850, be at most a single data point.  If the sampling is on 200 year intervals, there is a 50-50 chance a 100 year spike would be missed entirely in the historic data.  And even if it were in the data as a single data point, it would be smoothed out at this data scale.

Do you really think that there was never a 100-year period in those last 10,000 years where the temperatures varied by more than 0.1F, as implied by this chart?  This chart has a data set that is smoothed to signals no finer than about 200 years and compares it to recent data with no such filter.  It is like comparing the annualized GDP increase for the last quarter to the average annual GDP increase for the entire 19th century.   It is easy to demonstrate how silly this is.  If you cut the chart off at say 1950, before much anthropogenic effect will have occurred, it would still look like this, with an anomalous spike at the right (just a bit shorter).  If you believe this analysis, you have to believe that there is an unprecedented spike at the end even without anthropogenic effects.

There are several other issues with this chart that makes it laughably bad for someone to use in the context of arguing that he is the true defender of scientific integrity

• The grey range band is if anything an even bigger scientific absurdity than the main data line.  Are they really trying to argue that there were no years, or decades, or even whole centuries that never deviated from a 0.7F baseline anomaly by more than 0.3F for the entire 4000 year period from 7500 years ago to 3500 years ago?  I will bet just about anything that the error bars on this analysis should be more than 0.3F, much less the range of variability around the mean.  Any natural scientist worth his or her salt would laugh this out of the room.  It is absurd.  But here it is presented as climate science in the exact same article that the author expresses dismay that anyone would distrust climate science.
• A more minor point, but one that disguises the sampling frequency problem a bit, is that the last dark brown shaded area on the right that is labelled "the last 100 years" is actually at least 300 years wide.  Based on the scale, a hundred years should be about one dot on the x axis.  This means that 100 years is less than the width of the red line, and the last 60 years or the real anthropogenic period is less than half the width of the red line.  We are talking about a temperature change whose duration is half the width of the red line, which hopefully gives you some idea why I say the data sampling and smoothing processes would disguise any past periods similar to the most recent one.

Update:  Kevin Drum posted a defense of this chart on Twitter.  Here it is:  "It was published in Science."   Well folks, there is climate debate in a nutshell.   An 1000-word dissection of what appears to be wrong with a particular analysis retorted by a five-word appeal to authority.

Update #2:  I have explained the issue with a parallel flawed analysis from politics where Drum is more likely to see the flaws.

Though this is hilarious, I am pretty sure Thomas Lovejoy is serious when he writes

But the complete candor and transparency of the [IPCC] panel’s findings should be recognized and applauded. This is science sticking with the facts. It does not mean that global warming is not a problem; indeed it is a really big problem.

This is a howler.  Two quick examples.  First, every past IPCC report summary has had estimates for climate sensitivity, ie the amount of temperature increase they expect for a doubling of CO2 levels.  Coming into this IPCC report, emerging evidence from recent studies has been that the climate sensitivity is much lower than previous estimates.  So what did the "transparent" IPCC do?  They, for the first time, just left out the estimate rather than be forced to publish one that was lower than the last report.

The second example relates to the fact that temperatures have been flat over the last 15-17 years and as a result, every single climate model has overestimated temperatures.  By a lot. In a draft version, the IPCC created this chart (the red dots were added by Steve McIntyre after the chart was made as the new data came in).

This chart was consistent with a number of peer-reviewed studies that assessed the performance of climate models.  Well, this chart was a little too much "candor" for the transparent IPCC, so they replaced it with this chart in the final draft:

What a mess!  They have made the area we want to look at between 1990 and the present really tiny, and then they have somehow shifted the forecast envelopes down on several of the past reports so that suddenly current measurements are within the bands.   They also hide the bottom of the fourth assessment band (orange FAR) so you can't see that observations are out of the envelope of the last report.  No one so far can figure out how they got the numbers in this chart, and it does not match any peer-reviewed work.  Steve McIntyre is trying to figure it out.

OK, so now that we are on the subject of climate models, here is the second hilarious thing Lovejoy said:

Does the leveling-off of temperatures mean that the climate models used to track them are seriously flawed? Not really. It is important to remember that models are used so that we can understand where the Earth system is headed.

Does this make any sense at all?  Try it in a different context:  The Fed said the fact that their economic models failed to predict what actually happened over the last 15 years is irrelevant because the models are only used to see where the economy is headed.

The consistent theme of this report is declining certainty and declining chances of catastrophe, two facts that the IPCC works as hard as possible to obfuscate but which still come out pretty clearly as one reads the report.

Much of the climate debate turns on a single logical fallacy.  This fallacy is clearly on display in some comments by UK Prime Minister David Cameron:

It’s worth looking at what this report this week says – that [there is a] 95 per cent certainty that human activity is altering the climate. I think I said this almost 10 years ago: if someone came to you and said there is a 95 per cent chance that your house might burn down, even if you are in the 5 per cent that doesn’t agree with it, you still take out the insurance, just in case.”

"Human activity altering climate" is not the same thing as an environmental catastrophe (or one's house burning down).  The statement that he is 95% certain that human activity is altering climate is one that most skeptics (including myself) are 100% sure is true.  There is evidence that human activity has been altering the climate since the dawn of agriculture.  Man's changing land uses have been demonstrated to alter climate, and certainly man's incremental CO2 is raising temperatures somewhat.

The key question is -- by how much?  This is a totally different question, and, as I have written before, is largely dependent on climate theories unrelated to greenhouse gas theory, specifically that the Earth's climate system is dominated by large positive feedbacks.  (Roy Spenser has a good summary of the issue here.)

The catastrophe is so uncertain that for the first time, the IPCC left estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 out of its recently released summary for policy makers, mainly because it was not ready to (or did not want to) deal with a number of recent studies yielding sensitivity numbers well below catastrophic levels.  Further, the IPCC nearly entirely punted on the key question of how it can reconcile its past high sensitivity/ high feedback based temperature forecasts with past relative modest measured warming rates, including a 15+ year pause in warming which none of its models predicted.

The overall tone of the new IPCC report is one of declining certainty -- they are less confident of their sensitivity numbers and less confident of their models which have all been a total failure over the last 15 years. They have also backed off of other statements, for example saying they are far less confident that warming is leading to severe weather.

Most skeptics are sure mankind is affecting climate somewhat, but believe that this effect will not be catastrophic.  On both fronts, the IPCC is slowly catching up to us.

After over 15 years of no warming, which the IPCC still cannot explain, and with climate sensitivity numbers dropping so much in recent studies that the IPCC left climate sensitivity estimates out of their summary report rather than address the drop, the Weather Channel is running this headline on their site:

The IPCC does claim more confidence that warming over the past 60 years is partly or mostly due to man (I have not yet seen the exact wording they landed on), from 90% to 95%.  But this is odd given that the warming all came from 1978 to 1998 (see for yourself in temperature data about halfway through this post).  Temperatures are flat or cooling for the other 40 years of the period.  The IPCC cannot explain these 40 years of no warming in the context of high temperature sensitivities to CO2.  And, they can't explain why they can be 95% confident of what drove temperatures in the 20 year period of 1978-1998 but simultaneously have no clue what drove temperatures in the other years.

At some point I will read the thing and comment further.

In this post, I want to discuss my just-for-fun model of global temperatures I developed 6 years ago.  But more importantly, I am going to come back to some lessons about natural climate drivers and historic temperature trends that should have great relevance to the upcoming IPCC report.

In 2007, for my first climate video, I created an admittedly simplistic model of global temperatures.  I did not try to model any details within the climate system.  Instead, I attempted to tease out a very few (it ended up being three) trends from the historic temperature data and simply projected them forward.  Each of these trends has a logic grounded in physical processes, but the values I used were pure regression rather than any bottom up calculation from physics.  Here they are:

• A long term trend of 0.4C warming per century.  This can be thought of as a sort of base natural rate for the post-little ice age era.
• An additional linear trend beginning in 1945 of an additional 0.35C per century.  This represents combined effects of CO2 (whose effects should largely appear after mid-century) and higher solar activity in the second half of the 20th century  (Note that this is way, way below the mainstream estimates in the IPCC of the historic contribution of CO2, as it implies the maximum historic contribution is less than 0.2C)
• A cyclic trend that looks like a sine wave centered on zero (such that over time it adds nothing to the long term trend) with a period of about 63 years.  Think of this as representing the net effect of cyclical climate processes such as the PDO and AMO.

Put in graphical form, here are these three drivers (the left axis in both is degrees C, re-centered to match the centering of Hadley CRUT4 temperature anomalies).  The two linear trends (click on any image in this post to enlarge it)

And the cyclic trend:

These two charts are simply added and then can be compared to actual temperatures.  This is the way the comparison looked in 2007 when I first created this "model"

The historic match is no great feat.  The model was admittedly tuned to match history (yes, unlike the pros who all tune their models, I admit it).  The linear trends as well as the sine wave period and amplitude were adjusted to make the fit work.

However, it is instructive to note that a simple model of a linear trend plus sine wave matches history so well, particularly since it assumes such a small contribution from CO2 (yet matches history well) and since in prior IPCC reports, the IPCC and most modelers simply refused to include cyclic functions like AMO and PDO in their models.  You will note that the Coyote Climate Model was projecting a flattening, even a decrease in temperatures when everyone else in the climate community was projecting that blue temperature line heading up and to the right.

So, how are we doing?  I never really meant the model to have predictive power.  I built it just to make some points about the potential role of cyclic functions in the historic temperature trend.  But based on updated Hadley CRUT4 data through July, 2013, this is how we are doing:

Not too shabby.  Anyway, I do not insist on the model, but I do want to come back to a few points about temperature modeling and cyclic climate processes in light of the new IPCC report coming soon.

The decisions of climate modelers do not always make sense or seem consistent.  The best framework I can find for explaining their choices is to hypothesize that every choice is driven by trying to make the forecast future temperature increase as large as possible.  In past IPCC reports, modelers refused to acknowledge any natural or cyclic effects on global temperatures, and actually made statements that a) variations in the sun's output were too small to change temperatures in any measurable way and b) it was not necessary to include cyclic processes like the PDO and AMO in their climate models.

I do not know why these decisions were made, but they had the effect of maximizing the amount of past warming that could be attributed to CO2, thus maximizing potential climate sensitivity numbers and future warming forecasts.  The reason for this was that the IPCC based nearly the totality of their conclusions about past warming rates and CO2 from the period 1978-1998.  They may talk about "since 1950", but you can see from the chart above that all of the warming since 1950 actually happened in that narrow 20 year window.  During that 20-year window, though, solar activity, the PDO and the AMO were also all peaking or in their warm phases.  So if the IPCC were to acknowledge that any of those natural effects had any influence on temperatures, they would have to reduce the amount of warming scored to CO2 between 1978 and 1998 and thus their large future warming forecasts would have become even harder to justify.

Now, fast forward to today.  Global temperatures have been flat since about 1998, or for about 15 years or so.  This is difficult to explain for the IPCC, since about none of the 60+ models in their ensembles predicted this kind of pause in warming.  In fact, temperature trends over the last 15 years have fallen below the 95% confidence level of nearly every climate model used by the IPCC.  So scientists must either change their models (eek!) or else they must explain why they still are correct but missed the last 15 years of flat temperatures.

The IPCC is likely to take the latter course.  Rumor has it that they will attribute the warming pause to... ocean cycles and the sun (those things the IPCC said last time were irrelevant).  As you can see from my model above, this is entirely plausible.  My model has an underlying 0.75C per century trend after 1945, but even with this trend actual temperatures hit a 30-year flat spot after the year 2000.   So it is entirely possible for an underlying trend to be temporarily masked by cyclical factors.

BUT.  And this is a big but.  You can also see from my model that you can't assume that these factors caused the current "pause" in warming without also acknowledging that they contributed to the warming from 1978-1998, something the IPCC seems loath to do.  I do not know how the ICC is going to deal with this.  I hate to think the worst of people, but I do not think it is beyond them to say that these factors offset greenhouse warming for the last 15 years but did not increase warming the 20 years before that.

We shall see.  To be continued....

Update:  Seriously, on a relative basis, I am kicking ass

Last week I expressed my doubts that the storm in Colorado was really, as described breathlessly at the Weather Underground, a once in a thousand year storm (the logic of the article, and many others, being that one in a thousand is the same as "zero" and thus the storm could not have occurred naturally and therefore Global Warming).

Turns out it is not even close.  From the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University:

How much rain fell on Colorado this week? And where? Colorado residents can help the weather experts at Colorado State University answer these questions.

In response to the incredible recent rains and flooding in parts of the state, the Colorado Climate Center will be mapping rainfall totals and graphing hourly intensities for the entire state for the period beginning Sunday, Sept. 8 (as storms first developed over southern Colorado) through the end of the storm later this weekend

"As is typical of Colorado storms, some parts of the state were hard hit and others were untouched. Still, this storm is ranking in the top ten extreme flooding events since Colorado statehood," said Nolan Doesken, State Climatologist at CSU. "It isn't yet as extreme or widespread as the June 1965 floods or as dramatic as the 1935 floods but it ranks right up there among some of the worst.”

Among the worst, according to Climate Center data, occurred in May 1904, October 1911, June 1921, May 1935, September 1938, May 1955, June 1965, May 1969, October 1970, July 1976, July 1981, and, of course, the Spring Creek Flood of July 1997 that ravaged Fort Collins and the CSU campus.

."Every flood event in Colorado has its own unique characteristics," said Doesken. "But the topography of the Colorado Front Range makes this area particularly vulnerable when the necessary meteorological conditions come together as they did this week."

So it is perhaps a one in fifteen year flood.  Note that (by the math in my previous article linked above) a one in fifteen year flood covering an area half the size of Colorado should occur on overage over 60+ times a year around the world.  Our intuition about tail of the distribution event frequency is not very good, which is just another reason they make a poor proxy for drawing conclusions about trends in the mean of some phenomenon.

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change is the magic theory -- every bit of evidence proves it.   More rain, less rain, harder rain, drought, floods, more tornadoes, fewer tornadoes, hotter weather, colder weather, more hurricanes, fewer hurricane -- they all prove the theory.  It is the theory that it is impossible not to confirm.  Example

It will take climate scientists many months to complete studies into whether manmade global warming made the Boulder flood more likely to occur, but the amount by which this event has exceeded past events suggests that manmade warming may have played some role by making the event worse than it otherwise would have been...

An increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events is expected to take place even though annual precipitation amounts are projected to decrease in the Southwest. Colorado sits right along the dividing line between the areas where average annual precipitation is expected to increase, and the region that is expected to become drier as a result of climate change.

That may translate into more frequent, sharp swings between drought and flood, as has recently been the case. Last year, after all, was Colorado's second-driest on record, with the warmest spring and warmest summer on record, leading to an intense drought that is only just easing.

Generally one wants to point to a data trend to prove a theory, but look at that last paragraph.  Global warming is truly unique because it can be verified by there being no trend.

I hate to make this point for the five millionth time, but here goes:  It is virtually impossible (and takes far more data, by orders of magnitude, than we posses) to prove a shift in the mean of any phenomenon simply by highlighting occasional tail-of-the-distribution events.  The best way to prove a mean shift is to actually, you know, track the mean.  The problem is that the trend data lines for all these phenomenon -- droughts, wet weather, tornadoes, hurricanes -- show no trend, so the only tool supporters of the theory have at their disposal is to scream "global warming" as loud as they can every time there is a tail-of-the-distribution event.

Let's do some math:  They claim this flood was a one in one thousand year event.  That strikes me as false precision, because we have only been observing this phenomenon with any reliability for 100 years, but I will accept their figure for now.  Let's say this was indeed a one in 1000 year flood that it occurred over, say, half the area of Colorado (again a generous assumption, it was actually less that that).

Colorado is about 270,000 KM^2 so half would be 135,000 KM^2.  The land area of the world (we really should include oceans for this but we will give these folks every break) is about 150,000,000 km^2.  That means that half of Colorado is a bit less than 1/1000 of the world land area.

Our intuition tells us that a 1 in 1000 year storm is so rare that to have one means something weird or unusual or even unnatural must be going on.  But by the math above, since this storm covered 1/1000 of the land surface of the Earth, we should see one such storm on average every year somewhere in the world.  This is not some "biblical" unprecedented event - it is freaking expected, somewhere, every year.  Over the same area we should also see a 1 in 1000 year drought, a 1 in 1000 year temperature high, and a one in one thousand year temperature low -- every single damn year.  Good news if you are a newspaper and feed off of this stuff, but bad news for anyone trying to draw conclusions about the shifts in means and averages from such events.

This is a pretty amazing statement Justin Gillis in the New York Times.

This month, the world will get a new report from a United Nations panel about the science of climate change. Scientists will soon meet in Stockholm to put the finishing touches on the document, and behind the scenes, two big fights are brewing....

In the second case, we have mainstream science that says if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which is well on its way to happening, the long-term rise in the temperature of the earth will be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but more likely above 5 degrees. We have outlier science that says the rise could come in well below 3 degrees.

In this case, the drafters of the report lowered the bottom end in a range of temperatures for how much the earth could warm, treating the outlier science as credible.

The interesting part is that "mainstream science" is based mainly on theory and climate models that over the last 20 years have not made accurate predictions (overestimating warming significantly).  "Outlier science" is in a lot of cases based on actual observations of temperatures along with other variables like infrared radiation returning to space.  The author, through his nomenclature, is essentially disparaging observational data that is petulantly refusing to match up to model predictions.  But of course skeptics are anti-science.

I discuss in a bit more detail at my climate blog why I feel like climate blogging has become boring and repetitious.  To prove it, I predict in advance the stories that skeptics will run about the upcoming IPCC report.

I had a reader write to ask how I could be bored when there were still hilarious stories out there of climate alarmists trying to row through the Arctic and finding to their surprise it is full of ice.  But even this story repeats itself.  There have been such stories almost every year in the past five.

The other day I posted a graph from Roy Spencer comparing climate model predictions to actual measurements in the tropical mid-troposphere (the zone on Earth where climate models predict the most warming due to large assumed water vapor positive feedbacks).  The graph is a powerful indictment of the accuracy of climate models.

Spencer has an article (or perhaps a blog post) in the Financial Post with the same results, and includes a graph that does a pretty good job of simplifying the messy spaghetti graph in the original version.  Except for one problem.  Nowhere is it correctly labelled.  One would assume looking at it that it is a graph of global surface temperatures, which is what most folks are used to seeing in global warming articles. But in fact it is a graph of temperatures in the mid-troposphere, between 20 degrees North and 20 degrees South latitude.  He mentions that it is for tropical troposphere in the text of the article, but it is not labelled as such on the graph.  There is a very good reason for that narrow focus, but now the graph will end up on Google image search, and people will start crying "bullsh*t" because they will compare the numbers to global surface temperature data and it won't match.

I respect Spencer's work but he did not do a good job with this.

Dr. Roy Spencer has compared the output of 73 climate models to actual recent temperature measurements.  He has focused on temperatures in the mid-troposphere in the tropics -- this is not the same as global surface temperatures but is of course related.  The reason for this focus is 1) we have some good space-based data sources for temperatures in this region that don't suffer the same biases and limitations as surface thermometers and 2) This is the zone that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory says should be seeing the most warming, due to positive feedback effects of water vapor.  The lines are the model results for temperatures, the dots are the actuals.

As Spencer writes in an earlier post:

I continue to suspect that the main source of disagreement is that the models’ positive feedbacks are too strong…and possibly of even the wrong sign.

The lack of a tropical upper tropospheric hotspot in the observations is the main reason for the disconnect in the above plots, and as I have been pointing out this is probably rooted in differences in water vapor feedback. The models exhibit strongly positive water vapor feedback, which ends up causing a strong upper tropospheric warming response (the “hot spot”), while the observation’s lack of a hot spot would be consistent with little water vapor feedback.

The warming from manmade CO2 without positive feedbacks would be about 1.3C per doubling of CO2 concentrations, a fraction of the 3-10C predicted by these climate models.  If the climate, like most other long-term stable natural systems, is dominated by negative feedbacks, the sensitivity would be likely less than 1C.  Either way, the resulting predicted warming from manmade CO2 over the rest of this century would likely be less than 1 degree C.

More on declining estimates of climate sensitivity based on actual temperature observations rather than computer models here.

For a second time in a month the MySql database became corrupted.  I am not sure why, but it now looks like it may be a systematic problem I have to tackle rather than a one-off.

Here is what you may have missed today

Three Cheers For Goldwater Institute Fighting Pension Spiking

Taking the Fifth, Because No One Can Pledge Confidentiality any More

Update on Climate Temperature Sensitivity (Good News, the Numbers are Falling)

I have not had the time to write much about climate of late, but after several years of arguing over emails (an activity with which I quickly grew bored), the field is heating up again, as it were.

As I have said many times, the key missing science in the whole climate debate centers around climate sensitivity, or the expected temperature increase from a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere  (as reference, CO2 in the industrial age has increased from about 270 ppm to close to 400 ppm, or about half a doubling).

In my many speeches and this video (soon to be updated, if I can just find the time to finish it), I have argued that climate computer models have exaggerated climate sensitivity.  This Wikipedia page is a pretty good rehash of the alarmist position on climate sensitivity.  According to this standard alarmist position, here is the distribution of studies which represent the potential values for sensitivity - note that virtually none are below 2°C.

The problem is that these are all made with computer models.  They are not based on observational data.  Yes, all these models nominally backcast history reasonably correctly (look at that chart above and think about that statement for a minute, see if you can spot the problem).  But many an investor has been bankrupted by models that correctly backcast history.  The guys putting together tranches of mortgages for securities all had models.   What has been missing is any validation of these numbers with actual, you know, observations of nature.

Way back 6 or 7 years ago I began taking these numbers and projecting them backwards.  In other words, if climate sensitivity is really, say, at 4°C, then what should that imply about historical temperature increases since the pre-industrial age?  Let's do a back of the envelope with the 4°C example.  We are at just about half of a doubling of CO2 concentrations, but since sensitivity is a logarithmic curve, this implies we should have seen about 57% of the temperature increase that we would expect from a full doubling of CO2.  Applied to the 4°C sensitivity figure, this means that if sensitivity really is 4°C, we should have seen a 2.3°C global temperature increase over the last 150 years or so.  Which we certainly have not -- instead we have seen 0.8°C from all causes, only one of which is CO2.

So these high sensitivity models are over-predicting history.  Even a 2°C sensitivity over-predicts the amount of warming we have seen historically.  So how do they make the numbers fit?  The models are tuned and tweaked with a number of assumptions.  Time delays are one -- the oceans act as a huge flywheel on world temperatures and tend to add large lags to getting to the ultimate sensitivity figure.  But even this was not enough for high sensitivity models to back-cast accurately.  To make their models accurately predict history, their authors have had to ignore every other source of warming (which is why they have been so vociferous in downplaying the sun and ocean cycles, at least until they needed these to explain the lack of warming over the last decade).  Further, they have added man-made cooling factors, particularly from sulfate aerosols, that offset some of the man-made warming with man-made cooling.

Which brings us back to the problem I hinted at with the chart above and its distribution of sensitivities.  Did you spot the problem?  All these models claim to accurately back-cast history, but how can a model with a 2°C sensitivity and an 11°C sensitivity both accurately model the last 100 years?  One way they do it is by using a plug variable, and many models use aerosol cooling as the plug.  Why?   Well, unlike natural cooling factors, it is anthropogenic, so they can still claim catastrophe once we clean up the aerosols.  Also, for years the values of aerosol cooling were really uncertain, so ironically the lack of good science on them allowed scientists to assume a wide range of values.  Below is from a selection of climate models, and shows that the higher the climate sensitivity in the model, the higher the negative forcing (cooling) effect assumed from aerosols.  This has to be, or the models would not back-cast.

The reasons that these models had such high sensitivities is that they assumed the climate was dominated by net positive feedback, meaning there were processes in the climate system that would take small amounts of initial warming from CO2 and multiply them many times.  The generally accepted value for sensitivity without these feedbacks is 1.2°C or 1.3°C (via work by Michael Mann over a decade ago).  So all the rest of the warming, in fact the entire catastrophe that is predicted, comes not from CO2 but from this positive feedback that multiplies this modest 1.2°C many times.

I have argued, as have many other skeptics, that this assumption of net positive feedback is not based on good science, and in fact most long-term stable natural systems are dominated by negative feedback (note that you can certainly identify individual processes, like ice albedo, that are certainly a positive feedback, but we are talking about the net effect of all such processes combined).  Based on a skepticism about strong positive feedback, and the magnitude of past warming in relation to CO2 increases, I have always argued that the climate sensitivity is perhaps 1.2°C and maybe less, but that we should not expect more than a degree of warming from CO2 in the next century, hardly catastrophic.

One of the interesting things you might notice from the Wikipedia page is that they do not reference any sensitivity study more recent than 2007 (except for a literature review in 2008).  One reason might be that over the last 5 years there have been a series of studies that have begun to lower the expected value of the sensitivity number.   What many of these studies have in common is that they are based on actual observational data over the last 100 years, rather than computer models  (by the way, for those of you who like to fool with Wikipedia, don't bother on climate pages -- the editors of these pages will reverse any change attempting to bring balance to their articles in a matter of minutes).  These studies include a wide range of natural effects, such as ocean cycles, left out of the earlier models.  And, as real numbers have been put on aerosol concentrations and their effects, much lower values have been assigned to aerosol cooling, thus reducing the amount of warming that could be coming from CO2.

Recent studies based on observational approaches are coming up with much lower numbers.   ECS, or equilibrium climate sensitivity numbers (what we would expect in temperature increases if we waited hundreds or thousands of years for all time delays to be overcome) has been coming in between 1.6°C and 2.0°C.  Values for TCS, or transient climate sensitivity, or what we might expect to see in our lifetimes, has been coming in around 1.3°C per doubling of CO2 concentrations.

Matt Ridley has the layman's explanation

Yesterday saw the publication of a paper in a prestigious journal,Nature Geoscience, from a high-profile international team led by Oxford scientists. The contributors include 14 lead authors of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientific report; two are lead authors of the crucial chapter 10: professors Myles Allen and Gabriele Hegerl.

So this study is about as authoritative as you can get. It uses the most robust method, of analysing the Earth’s heat budget over the past hundred years or so, to estimate a “transient climate response” — the amount of warming that, with rising emissions, the world is likely to experience by the time carbon dioxide levels have doubled since pre-industrial times.

The most likely estimate is 1.3C. Even if we reach doubled carbon dioxide in just 50 years, we can expect the world to be about two-thirds of a degree warmer than it is now, maybe a bit more if other greenhouse gases increase too….

Judith Currey discusses these new findings

Discussion of Otto, one of the recent studies

Nic Lewis discusses several of these results

This is still tough work, likely with a lot of necessary improvement, because it is really hard to dis-aggregate multiple drivers in such a complex system.  There may, for example, be causative variables we don't even know about so by definition were not included in the study.  However, it is nice to see that folks are out there trying to solve the problem with real observations of Nature, and not via computer auto-eroticism.

Postscript:  Alarmists have certainly not quit the field.  The current emerging hypothesis to defend high sensitivities is to say that the heat is going directly into the deep oceans.  At some level this is sensible -- the vast majority of the heat carrying capacity (80-90%) of the Earth's surface is in the oceans, not in the atmosphere, and so they are the best place to measure warming.  Skeptics have said this for years.  But in the top 700 meters or so of the ocean, as measured by ARGO floats, ocean heating over the last 10 years (since these more advanced measuring devices were launched) has been only about 15% of what we might predict with high sensitivity models.  So when alarmists say today that the heat is going into the oceans, they say the deep oceans -- ie that the heat from global warming is not going into the air or the first 700 meters of ocean but directly into ocean layers beneath that.  Again, this is marginally possible by some funky dynamics, but just like the aerosol defense that has fallen apart of late, this defense of high sensitivity forecasts is completely unproven.  But the science is settled, of course.

If one needs any skill as a politician, it is the ability -- with a straight face -- to, with no evidence whatsoever or even against countervailing evidence, blame any tragedy that occurs on your own personal bete noir.  Thus the Gabriel Giffords shooting was due to un-civil discourse by Conservatives, Benghazi was due to a YouTube video, the Boston Bombings were a results of too lenient immigration policy, the Newtown killings were due to the excess influence of the NRA, and the Gosnell murders were due to the legality of abortion.

In this same vein I received this email from California State Senator Fran Pavley

The recent Ventura County wildfires were just the latest example of the huge costs of climate change to California, serving as a reminder of the need for continued action, Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) said Thursday. Presiding over a hearing of the Select Committee on Climate Change and AB 32 Implementation, Sen. Pavley noted that the unseasonably early wildfire in Ventura County two weeks ago generated $10 million in firefighting costs. The dangers of climate change are no longer an abstraction, Sen. Pavley said.

“We can’t afford extreme climate, and so California doing its fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is incredibly important,” Sen. Pavley said.

Wildfires are one of many costs of climate change, environmental officials and experts said at the hearing. California also faces flooding, heat waves and threats to its drinking water system.

Even before atmospheric levels of CO2 rose, the US had thousands, even tens of thousands of wildfires a year.  So against a backdrop which would expect many fires in California even absent climate change (natural or man-made), it would be heroic to attribute one single fire to the effect of mankind's  CO2 production.  But it is even more astounding given that wildfires in the US are actually down so far this year -- way down.  Here is the data source, and here are two charts the Real Science blog prepared from this data.

As I have read Mr. Ridley over the years, I have found him to have staked out a position on anthropogenic climate change very similar to mine  (we are both called "lukewarmers" because we accept that man's addition of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere warms the world incrementally but do not accept catastrophic positive-feedback driven catastrophic warming forecasts).

I generally find room to nitpick even those whom I largely agree with, but from my perspective, this piece by Ridley is dead on.   (thanks to a reader for the link)

For years, readers of this site know that I have argued that:

• CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, and since man is increasing its atmospheric concentration, there is likely some anthropogenic contribution to warming
• Most forecasts, including those of the IPCC, grossly exaggerate temperature sensitivity to CO2 by assuming absurd levels of net positive feedback in the climate system
• Past temperature changes are not consistent with high climate sensitivities

Recently, there have been a whole spate of studies based on actual observations rather than computer models that have been arriving at climate sensitivity numbers far below the IPCC number.   While the IPCC settled on 3C per doubling of CO2, it strongly implied that all the risk was to the upside, and many other prominent folks who typically get fawning attention in the media have proposed much higher numbers.

In fact, recent studies are coming in closer to 1.5C - 2C.  I actually still think these numbers will turn out to be high.  For several years now my money has been on a number from 0.8 to 1 C, sensitivity numbers that imply a small amount of negative feedback rather than positive feedback, a safer choice in my mind since most long-term stable natural systems are dominated by negative feedback.

Anyway, in an article that was as surprising as it is welcome, NY Times climate writer Andy Revkin has quite an article recently, finally acknowledging in the paper of record that maybe those skeptics who have argued for alower sensitivity number kind of sort of have a point.

“Worse than we thought” has been one of the most durable phrases lately among those pushing for urgent action to stem the buildup of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

But on one critically important metric — how hot the planet will get from a doubling of the pre-industrial concentration of greenhouse gases, a k a “climate sensitivity” — someclimate researchers with substantial publication records are shifting toward the lower end of the warming spectrum.

By the way, this is the only metric that matters.  All the other BS about "climate change" and "dirty weather" are meaningless without warming.  CO2 cannot change the climate  or raise sea levels or any of that other stuff by any mechanism we understand or that has even been postulated, except via warming.  Anyway, to continue:

There’s still plenty of global warming and centuries of coastal retreats in the pipeline, so this is hardly a “benign” situation, as some have cast it.

But while plenty of other climate scientists hold firm to the idea that the full range of possible outcomes, including a disruptively dangerous warming of more than 4.5 degrees C. (8 degrees F.), remain in play, it’s getting harder to see why the high-end projections are given much weight.

This is also not a “single-study syndrome” situation, where one outlier research paper is used to cast doubt on a bigger body of work — as Skeptical Science asserted over the weekend. That post focused on the as-yet-unpublished paper finding lower sensitivity that was inadvisedly promoted recently by the Research Council of Norway.

In fact, there is an accumulating body of reviewed, published researchshaving away the high end of the range of possible warming estimates from doubled carbon dioxide levels. Chief among climate scientists critical of the high-sensitivity holdouts is James Annan, an experienced climate modeler based in Japan who contributed to the 2007 science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By 2006, he was already diverging from his colleagues a bit.

The whole thing is good.  Of course, for Revkin, this is no excuse to slow down all the actions supposedly demanded by global warming, such as substantially raising the price and scarcity of hydrocarbons.  Which to me simply demonstrates that people who have been against hydrocarbons have always been against them as an almost aesthetic choice, and climate change and global warming were mere excuses to push the agenda.  After all, as there certainly are tradeoffs to limiting economic growth and energy use and raising the price of energy, how can a reduction in postulated harms from fossil fuels NOT change the balance point one chooses in managing their use?

PS-  I thought this was a great post mortem on Hurricane Sandy and the whole notion that this one data point proves the global warming trend:

In this case several factors not directly related to climate change converged to generate the event. On Sandy’s way north, it ran into a vast high-pressure system over Canada, which prevented it from continuing in that direction, as hurricanes normally do, and forced it to turn west. Then, because it traveled about 300 miles over open water before making landfall, it piled up an unusually large storm surge. An infrequent jet-stream reversal helped maintain and fuel the storm. As if all that weren’t bad enough, a full moon was occurring, so the moon, the earth, and the sun were in a straight line, increasing the moon’s and sun’s gravitational effects on the tides, thus lifting the high tide even higher. Add to this that the wind and water, though not quite at hurricane levels, struck an area rarely hit by storms of this magnitude so the structures were more vulnerable and a disaster occurred.

The last one is a key for me -- you have cities on the Atlantic Ocean that seemed to build and act as if they were immune from ocean storms.  From my perspective growing up on the gulf coast, where one practically expects any structure one builds on the coast to be swept away every thirty years or so, this is a big contributing factor no one really talks about.

She goes on to say that rising sea levels may have made the storm worse, but I demonstrated that it couldn't have added more than a few percentage points to the surge.

Dealing with facile arguments that are supposedly perfect refutations of the climate skeptics' position is a full-time job akin to cleaning the Augean Stables.  A few weeks ago Kevin Drum argued that global warming added 3 inches to Sandy's 14-foot storm surge, which he said was an argument that totally refuted skeptics and justified massive government restrictions on energy consumption (or whatever).

This week Slate (and Desmog blog) think they have the ultimate killer chart, on they call a "slam dunk" on skeptics.  Click through to my column this week at Forbes to see if they really do.

I have a new article up at Forbes on how crazy it is to extrapolate conclusions about the speed and direction of climate change from a single data point.

Positing a trend from a single database without any supporting historical information has become a common media practice in discussing climate.  As I wrote several months ago, the media did the same thing with the hot summer, arguing frequently that this recent hot dry summer proved a trend for extreme temperatures, drought, and forest fires.  In fact, none of these are the case — this summer was not unprecedented on any of these dimensions and no upward trend is detectable in long-term drought or fire data.   Despite a pretty clear history of warming over the last century, it is even hard to establish any trend in high temperature extremes  (in large part because much of the warming has been in warmer night-time lows rather than in daytime highs).  See here for the data.

As I said in that earlier article, when the media posits a trend, demand a trendline, not just a single data point.

To this end, I try to bring so actual trend data to the trend discussion.

A climate alarmist posts a "Bet" on a site called Truthmarket that she obviously believes is a dagger to the heart of climate skeptics.  Heck, she is putting up $5,000 of her own money on it.  The amazing part is that the proposition she is betting on is entirely beside the point.  She is betting on the truth of a statement that many skeptics would agree with.

This is how the climate debate has gone wrong.  Alarmists are trying to shift the debate from the key points they can't prove to facile points they can.  And the media lets them get away with it.

Read about it in my post this week at Forbes.com

Well, this has been a while in coming, but for a variety of reasons I am switching to Disqus comments on this site.  Essentially this means commenters will have to register, though I feel like the registration is pretty un-intrusive as Internet things go.  Active commenters in the blogosphere likely already have a Disqus account.   And there are some definite benefits in terms of comment ranking and such that I hope will offset any hassle.  I have been testing Disqus on Climate Skeptic, along with the security updates I have been slowly porting over here, and I am pretty happy with the result.

What this means is that for several days, comments will disappear here as Disqus imports them.   Though they they promise a day turnaround, on Climate Skeptic it took them nearly a week.  With all the comments on this site, it may take a while.  New comments will still work, but the old ones will go away, and then magically return a few days later.  Hopefully.

By the way, this is a mild illustration of what started the security lockdowns at the climate blog.  These are actually minor spikes compared to some in the past, and so far I have seen no similar patterns at any of the other blogs I run.  A number of folks active in the climate debate have been hacked of late.

I know I hammer this home constantly, but it is often worth a reminder.  The issue in the scientific debate over catastrophic man-made global warming theory is not whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, or even the approximate magnitude of warming from CO2 directly, but around feedbacks.   Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder, said it very well:

What most people don't realize, partly because the media never explains it, is that there is no dispute over whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and all else being equal would result in a warming of the climate. The fundamental dispute is about water in the atmosphere, either in the form of water vapour (a gas) or clouds (water in liquid form). It is generally accepted that a warmer climate will result in more water evaporating from the land and sea and therefore resulting in a higher level of water in the atmosphere, partly because the warmer the air is the more water it can hold. All of the models used by the IPCC assume that this increase in water vapour will result in a positive feedback in the order of 3-4 times the increase in temperature that would be caused by the increase in CO2 alone.

Many scientists do not agree with this, or do not agree that we know enough about the impact of increased water to predict the outcome. Some scientists believe increased water will have a negative feedback instead, due to increased cloud cover. It all depends on how much, and a t what altitudes, latitudes and times of day that water is in the form of a gas (vapour) or a liquid (clouds). So if  a certain increase in CO2 would theoretically cause a 1.0C increase in temperature, then if water caused a 3-4 times positive feedback the temperature would actually increase by 3-4C. This is why the warming predicted by the models is so large. Whereas if there was a negative feedback of 0.5 times then the temperature would only rise 0.5C.

My slightly lengthier discussions of this same issue are here and here.

I have written before of my believe that climate has become the first post-modern science.  This time, I will yield the floor to Garth Paltridge to make the same point:

But the real worry with climate research is that it is on the very edge of what is called postmodern science. This is a counterpart of the relativist world of postmodern art and design. It is a much more dangerous beast, whose results are valid only in the context of society’s beliefs and where the very existence of scientific truth can be denied. Postmodern science envisages a sort of political nirvana in which scientific theory and results can be consciously and legitimately manipulated to suit either the dictates of political correctness or the policies of the government of the day.

There is little doubt that some players in the climate game – not a lot, but enough to have severely damaged the reputation of climate scientists in general – have stepped across the boundary into postmodern science. The Climategate scandal of 2009, wherein thousands of emails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, showed that certain senior members of the research community were, and presumably still are, quite capable of deliberately selecting data in order to overstate the evidence for dangerous climate change. The emails showed as well that these senior members were quite happy to discuss ways and means of controlling the research journals so as to deny publication of any material that goes against the orthodox dogma. The ways and means included the sacking of recalcitrant editors.

Whatever the reason, it is indeed vastly more difficult to publish results in climate research journals if they run against the tide of politically correct opinion. Which is why most of the sceptic literature on the subject has been forced onto the web, and particularly onto web-logs devoted to the sceptic view of things. Which, in turn, is why the more fanatical of the believers in anthropogenic global warming insist that only peer-reviewed literature should be accepted as an indication of the real state of affairs. They argue that the sceptic web-logs should never be taken seriously by “real” scientists, and certainly should never be quoted. Which is a great pity. Some of the sceptics are extremely productive as far as critical analysis of climate science is concerned. Names like Judith Curry (chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta), Steve McIntyre (a Canadian geologist-statistician) and blogger Willis Eschenbach come to mind. These three in particular provide a balance and maturity in public discussion that puts many players in the global warming movement to shame, and as a consequence their outreach to the scientifically inclined general public is highly effective. Their output, together with that of other sceptics on the web, is fast becoming a practical and stringent substitute for peer review.

Update:  The IPCC does not seem to be on a path to building the credibility of climate science.  In their last report, the IPCC was rightly criticized for using "grey" literature as a source for their findings, against their own rules.  Grey literature encompasses about anything that is not published peer-reviewed literature, including, from the last report, sources that were essentially press releases from advocacy groups like the IPCC.  They even use a travel brochure as a source.

This time, to avoid this criticism, the IPCC is ... changing their rules to allow such grey literature citations.    I am pretty sure that this was NOT passed in order to get more material from Steve McIntyre's blog.  In related news, the IPCC also changed the makeup of its scientific panel, putting geographical and gender diversity over scientific qualifications as a criteria.  The quota for African climate scientists will, for example, be higher than that of North America.  See the whole story here.

Though this was all presented with pious words, my guess is that it was felt by the political leaders of the IPCC in the UN that the last report was not socialist or totalitarian enough and that more of such content was necessary.  We'll see.