Settled science: warming effect of CO2 cut by 65%

13 October, 2010 by

We know all there is to know

Once again, here we have an example of settled science, where no new discoveries about the climate are ever made these days and everything was set in stone ages ago. No, wait…

The warming effect of evil [harmless] carbon dioxide has been significantly overstated, and it is almost impossible to determine the “climate sensitivity”:

[…] the report is clear – CO2 does not account for even a majority of the warming seen over the past century. If other species [of atmospheric substance] accounted for 65% of historical warming that leaves only 35% for carbon dioxide. This, strangely enough, is in line with calculations based strictly on known atmospheric physics, calculations not biased by the IPCC’s hypothetical and bastardized “feedbacks.”

Of course, the real reason for the feedbacks was to allow almost all global warming to be attributed to CO2. This, in turn, would open the door for radical social and economic policies, allowing them to be enacted in the name of saving the world from global warming. The plain truth is that even climate scientists know that the IPCC case was a political witch’s brew concocted by UN bureaucrats, NGOs, grant money hungry scientists and fringe activists.

Now, after three decades of sturm und drang over climate policy, the truth has emerged – scientists have no idea of how Earth’s climate will change in the future because they don’t know why it changed in the past. Furthermore, it will take decades of additional study to gain a useful understand climate change. To do this, climate scientists will need further funding. Too bad the climate science community squandered any public trust it may have had by trying to frighten people with a lie. [my emphasis]

Read it here.

In other news:

  • Jo Nova eviscerates Robyn Williams, the ABC’s non-science journalist, who has forgotten what proper science is, doesn’t have a single sceptical brain cell in his head, but is pretty good on alarmism, pseudo-science, mudslinging and propaganda.
  • The government’s unofficial alarmist in chief, Will Steffen, who also doesn’t have a single sceptical brain cell, tells a conference in Hobart that sea levels are rising “at the top end of estimates”. Not sure how 3mm per year works out to be 1m by 2100. But hey, it’s just detail, and it sure makes a good story.
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But the science is settled, isn't it?

7 October, 2010 by

"Poorly studied"

Our ignorant, spin-laden Australian government, via its climate mouthpiece Greg Combet, continues to push the line, “the science on climate is settled”, because they don’t wish to engage with the possibility that it isn’t. They have all their eggs in the IPCC basket, despite the fact that most of those eggs are cracked, rotten and leaking through the bottom, and they aren’t interested in anything else. They simply want to move on, pander to their redistributive instincts and impose an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax which, even if the science were settled, wouldn’t make an iota of difference to the climate, but would “spread the wealth around”, as someone once said.

So it’s ironic when a story breaks that shows so clearly that the science is not settled. Something as fundamental as the effect of the sun on climate during solar cycles is still uncertain, let alone complex feedbacks, clouds, precipitation etc, etc. As the New Scientist (gasp) reports:

IF NEW satellite data can be trusted, changes in solar activity warmed the Earth when they should have cooled it.

Joanna Haigh of Imperial College London studied satellite measurements of solar radiation between 2004 and 2007, when overall solar activity was in decline. The sun puts out less energy when its activity is low, but different types of radiation vary to different degrees. Until now, this had been poorly studied. [“Poorly studied”, notice. Because, thanks to massive government and big green investment, all the research has been directed towards finding the tenuous link between anthropogenic CO2 and climate instead.]

Haigh’s measurements showed that visible radiation increased between 2004 and 2007, when it was expected to decrease, and ultraviolet radiation dropped four times as much as predicted.

Haigh then plugged her data into an atmospheric model to calculate how the patterns affected energy filtering through the atmosphere. Previous studies have shown that Earth is normally cooler during solar minima.Yet the model suggested that more solar energy reached the planet’s surface during the period, warming it by about 0.05 °C (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09426).

The effect is slight, but it could call into question our understanding of the sun’s subtle effects on climate.

But don’t forget, this is New Scientist, so…

Or could it? Stefan Brönnimann of the University of Bern in Switzerland says Haigh’s study shows the importance of looking at radiation changes in detail but cautions that her the results could be a one-off. He points out that the sun’s most recent cycle is known to have been atypical.

Whatever. But to continue to repeat ad nauseam that the science is settled is nonsensical. Take note, Julia and Greg.

Read it here.

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Shock: climate in ancient past "same as today"

11 August, 2010 by

See the correlation? No, neither can I. (image from WUWT)

… except with between 5 and 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere. What? How could that possibly be? We all know (thanks to government spin and media bias) that CO2 is the main driver of climate (© IPCC) and that powerful positive feedbacks would conspire together to spiral the earth’s climate over thousands of tipping points from which recovery is impossible, right?

An international team of scientists including Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz of the Geology Department of the University of Leicester, and led by Dr. Thijs Vandenbroucke, formerly of Leicester and now at the University of Lille 1 (France), has reconstructed the Earth’s climate belts of the late Ordovician Period, between 460 and 445 million years ago.

The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA – and show that these ancient climate belts were surprisingly like those of the present.

The researchers state: “The world of the ancient past had been thought by scientists to differ from ours in many respects, including having carbon dioxide levels much higher – over twenty times as high – than those of the present. However, it is very hard to deduce carbon dioxide levels with any accuracy from such ancient rocks, and it was known that there was a paradox, for the late Ordovician was known to include a brief, intense glaciation – something difficult to envisage in a world with high levels of greenhouse gases.” (source)

Well, it’s certainly difficult to envisage if you’ve been brainwashed with the CO2 meme.

(h/t Climate Depot, WUWT)

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Amazing "scale of the universe" animation

13 June, 2010 by

Politicians think they can control anything, including the climate. Perhaps they should all be forced to spend a few minutes playing with this animation to get a sense of perspective. Enjoy. (h/t Smokey)

Click here to view.

Zoom from quantum foam to universal scales

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CSIRO has "breached trust"

30 May, 2010 by

Can't be trusted any more?

So says Terry McCrann, in an article comparing the cheerleading of the CSIRO for climate alarmism with the cheerleading of the Treasury for the resources super profits tax:

In March, [CSIRO] joined with the Bureau of Meteorology to produce a “snapshot of the state of the climate to update Australians about how their climate has changed and what it means”. Although the pamphlet had a neutral title, “State of the Climate”, it was clearly designed to bring the great weight of the apparent credibility of these two organisations to bear against, and hopefully crush, those pesky climate change sceptics.

But as one of the peskier of them, Tom Quirk — our version of Canada’s even peskier Stephen McIntyre — discovered, there was a very curious omission in one of the CSIRO graphs. It showed the rise and rise of concentrations in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and its fellow greenhouse gas methane. It was an almost perfect replica of the infamous (Michael) Mann Hockey Stick. After being virtually stable for 900 years, concentrations of both CO2 and methane went almost vertical through the 20th century. But as the eagle-eyed Quirk noticed and wrote about on Quadrant Online, methane was plotted only up to 1990, while the plots for CO2 continued to 2000.Why so, when the CSIRO measures methane concentrations and has data up to last year?

Did the answer lie in the inconvenient truth that methane concentrations have plateaued since the mid-1990s? Yet here is the CSIRO, the organisation dedicated to scientific truth, pretending — even stating — that they’re still going up, Climategate style. This is bad enough, but just as with Treasury, real policies are built on this sort of “analysis”. The first version of the so-called carbon pollution reduction scheme included farming to address the methane question. But as Quirk has shown in a peer-reviewed paper, atmospheric methane is driven by a combination of volcanos, El Ninos and pipeline (mostly dodgy old Soviet) leakage.

A second curious, and even dodgier, thing happened after Quirk’s Quadrant report. CSIRO “updated” its main graph to include the more recent methane data. No admission was made and the graph’s scale made it all but invisible and did not show the plateauing. Further, the CSIRO published a more detailed second graph showing what has happened in the past 30 years, as opposed to the first graph’s 1000 years. But only for CO2, despite the fact that it had exactly the same data for methane.

In short, the CSIRO is a fully signed-up member of the climate change club. It wanted to project the horror story of continually rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. So it simply disappeared inconvenient evidence to the contrary, in the process announcing it cannot be trusted ever again to deliver objective scientific evidence.

CSIRO, The Bureau of Meteorology, the UK Royal Society, the American National Academy of Sciences and hundreds of other organisations have all nailed their colours to the climate change mast, abandoning objective scientific enquiry in favour of environmental advocacy. As the Royal Society has discovered, it only works for so long, before credibility starts to disappear. As he concludes:

In short and in sum, our two pre-eminent centres of knowledge and public policy analysis across the social and hard sciences spectrum are now literally unbelievable. It is not an attractive or an appropriate state of affairs.

Read it here.

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"Triple crown" of global cooling

20 May, 2010 by

In a decade or two?

Rather than pointless efforts to stop the almost non-existent problem of CO2 caused warming, we should probably be preparing for the opposite, since many scientists are pointing towards a future sharp decline in global temperature caused by the unfortunate coincidence of three factors:

  • the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) flipping into its cold phase;
  • very low solar activity; and
  • volcanic eruptions in the pipeline (Eyjafjallajokull’s very, very big brother, Katla, may be on the verge of a big eruption if history is to be believed)

As Roy Spencer argues in his book, The Great Global Warming Blunder, the PDO may have significant effects on cloud cover, which may in themselves be sufficient to explain virtually all of the late 20th century warming, without any discernible effect from anthropogenic CO2. Add this to the fact that the sun is in the deepest slumber since the Dalton Minimum, and Icelandic volcanoes are kicking off and you have a recipe for significant global cooling.

All conjecture of course, but probably far more likely than the dire predictions of the IPCC’s incomplete and flawed climate models. So time to get your thermals out…

Read it here. (h/t Climate Realists)

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Will Alexander: RIP climate change

20 May, 2010 by

South African UN scientist Will Alexander writes the death notice for “global warming” hysteria in his final memo:

CLIMATE CHANGE

may it

REST IN PEACE

1. Provably false assumption that human activities can influence global climate for which there is no scientifically believable evidence.

2. Provably false assumption that the increases in global temperatures are the cause of climatic changes. Multiyear variations in global climate are driven by variations in the receipt and poleward redistribution of solar energy via the atmospheric and oceanic processes, not temperature variations. This is high school physics.

3. Complete lack of numeracy skills and logical deductions by the climate change adherents.

4. Deliberate manipulation of climate change science to suit political objectives.

In memoriam

Read it here (PDF) h/t Climate Realists

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"Expect global cooling for 2 – 3 decades": Easterbrook

17 May, 2010 by

Pacific Decadal Oscillation

You certainly woudn’t know about it from the mainstream media, but there is currently an International Climate Change Conference taking place in Chicago. But because it is full of climate realists, and you’re unlikely to get any decent armageddon stories, the MSM don’t even bother to show up, except to hurl ad hominems about Big Oil, yawn. At the conference, Geologist Don Easterbrook presented a paper that has warned of global cooling for a considerable period, Climate Depot reports. Many, including Easterbrook, believe that climate changes are far more closely linked to changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) than to microscopic increases in a harmless trace gas:

The Pacific Ocean has two modes, a warm mode and cool mode, and regularly switches back and forth between modes in a 25-30 year repeating cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). When the PDO is in its warm mode, the climate warms and when it is in its cool mode the climate cools. Glacier fluctuations are driven by climatic changes, which are driven by ocean surface temperatures (PDO).

During the cool PDO mode, ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are cool. This was typical of the global cooling from 1945 to 1977. During the warm PDO, ocean surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are warm. This was typical of the global warming from 1977 to 1998. The abrupt shift of the Pacific from the cool mode to the warm mode in a single year (1977) and the beginning of the last warm cycle has been termed the “Great Pacific Climate shift.” There is a direct correlation between PDO mode and global temperature

The ocean surface temperature in the eastern Pacific off the coast of North America was warm in 1997. In 1999, the PDO switched from its warm mode to its cool mode and has since remained cool as shown by satellite imagery. Adding the PDO record for the past decade to the PDO for the century provides an interesting pattern. The PDO 1915–1945 warm mode, the 1945-1977 cool mode, the 1977-1998 warn mode, and the switch from warm to cool mode in 1999 all match corresponding global climate changes and strongly suggest:

1. The PDO has a regular cyclic pattern with alternating warm and cool modes every 25-30 years

2. The PDO has accurately matched each global climate change over the past century and may be used as a predictive tool.

3. Since the switch of the PDO from warm to cool in 1999, global temperatures have not exceeded the 1998 high.

4. Each time the PDO has changed from one mode to another, it has stayed in that mode for 25-30 years; thus, since the switch of the PDO from warm to cool in 1999 has been entrenched, it will undoubtedly stay in its cool mode for another several decades.

5. With the PDO in cool mode for another several decades, we can expect another several decades of cooling. (source)

Even IPCC scientists acknowledge the effect of ocean oscillations on climate (when they’re not within hearing distance of Raj Pachauri, that is): see here.

Interestingly enough, this is also one of the points highlighted in Roy Spencer’s latest book, The Great Global Warming Blunder, in which he presents evidence for cloud cover responses to changes in the PDO, which result in warming and cooling of the climate. More on this in a future post.

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Claims that New Zealand temperature record fudged

16 May, 2010 by

Warming exaggerated?

Surface temperature records are highly susceptible to adjustment. There are all kinds of valid reasons why the “raw” thermometer data may need adjustment, such as the relocation of a station, or urbanisation, but it’s curious, isn’t it, that in many of the data sets the corrections almost always increase any warming trend. This is highly suspect, given that urban warming, for example, is more likely to artificially increase temperatures, requiring a downward adjustment.

An article in Quadrant Online claims that whilst New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has been plugging a 20th century temperature rise of 0.92˚C, the raw data shows nothing of the sort. ACM reported on this back in November of last year (see here) and here are the graphs of adjusted vs. raw data:

Raw temperature data

After adjustments

Barry Brill, chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, takes up the story:

The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C +/- 0.5°C for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.

The NSS [NIWA Seven Station series] is the outcome of a subjective data series produced by a single Government scientist, whose work has never been peer-reviewed or subjected to proper quality checking. It was smuggled into the official archive without any formal process. It is undocumented and sans metadata, and it could not be defended in any court of law. Yet the full line-up of NIWA climate scientists has gone to extraordinary lengths to support this falsified warming and to fiercely attack its critics.

For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website.

Internationally, the NSS 0.92°C trend is a foundation stone for the Australia-New Zealand Chapter in the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessment Reports. In 1994, it was submitted to HadleyCRUT, so as to influence the vast expanses of the South Pacific in the calculation of globally-averaged temperatures.

…

Over the entire series, a total of 515 years were adjusted. Of these, no less than 467 years contributed to an upward-sloping trend line. So, by year, 90% of the NIWA corrections leaned in the same direction.The ratio of 9 out of 10 adjustments being ‘helpful to the hypothesis’ could surely not have occurred in the absence of bias.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. NIWA has already made up its mind on climate change, and clearly, the debate is over in their view:

Already decided the answer?

The link then takes you to a page which parrots the IPCC line. But whenever this kind of news breaks, one has to wonder why, if the evidence for “global warming” is so strong, and the science so settled, why the need to exaggerate?

Read it here.

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Observation shows climate sensitivity low

8 May, 2010 by

Roy Spencer

Note that this result is obtained from actual observations of the climate system not flaky computer models. Roy Spencer explains:

Arguably the single most important scientific issue – and unresolved question – in the global warming debate is climate sensitivity. Will increasing carbon dioxide cause warming that is so small that it can be safely ignored (low climate sensitivity)? Or will it cause a global warming Armageddon (high climate sensitivity)?

The answer depends upon the net radiative feedback: the rate at which the Earth loses extra radiant energy with warming. Climate sensitivity is mostly determined by changes in clouds and water vapor in response to the small, direct warming influence from (for instance) increasing carbon dioxide concentrations.

…

A net feedback of 6 operating on the warming caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 late in this century would correspond to only about 0.5 deg. C of warming. This is well below the 3.0 deg. C best estimate of the IPCC, and even below the lower limit of 1.5 deg. C of warming that the IPCC claims to be 90% certain of.

How Does this Compare to the IPCC Climate Models?

In comparison, we find that none of the 17 IPCC climate models (those that have sufficient data to do the same calculations) exhibit this level of negative feedback when similar statistics are computed from output of either their 20th Century simulations, or their increasing-CO2 simulations. Those model-based values range from around 2 to a little over 4.

These results suggest that the sensitivity of the real climate system is less than that exhibited by ANY of the IPCC climate models. This will end up being a serious problem for global warming predictions. You see, while modelers claim that the models do a reasonably good job of reproducing the average behavior of the climate system, it isn’t the average behavior we are interested in. It is how the average behavior will CHANGE.

And the above results show that not one of the IPCC climate models behaves like the real climate system does when it comes to feedbacks during interannual climate variations…and feedbacks are what determine how serious manmade global warming will be.

Read it here. (h/t WUWT)

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