Climate Forecasting Basics for Britain's Seven Alarmist Scientists and for UK Politicians.

1.INTRODUCTION
There are seven prominent establishment scientists who have played an important role in promoting the  flawed scientific basis for Britains truly irrational and economically disastrous climate and energy policies.Their views on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming have been trumpeted by the  Ecoleft press,the BBC  and Britains chattering classes and  largely unthinkingly,  adopted by Blair ,Cameron ,Clegg,  Miliband and a large majority of MPs as the basis for policy without any serious independent self consideration of their likely validity.
The seven are  Sir John Houghton,Sir Bob Watson, Sir David King, Sir John Beddington,Sir Robert May,Lord Rees and Sir Paul Nurse. Their titles indicate that they have been good reliable chaps and  played the British Political Establishment's Honours game with some skill.It is increasingly clear, as the earth obstinately refuses to warm up,that they have got it all wrong .They and the Politicians need to start again from square one and rethink the whole thing.Here are some helpful suggestions.

2 GETTING STARTED - DON'T DISCOUNT THE OBVIOUS UNTIL YOU HAVE TO.
 If you want to know what future temperatures might be you might reasonably start not by building a detailed climate model  but by looking at the current range of temperatures and what factors seem to cause them to change. You might observe  the following amazing facts
a) Night is colder than day.
b) Winter is colder than summer.
c) It is cooler in the shade than in the sun
d) Temperatures vary more wildly in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days - humidity might be an important factor.
e)Since you likely have a few A levels- and even a degree or two in something or other you might well have heard of the Ice Ages and their relationships to the Earths orbit around the sun and the tilt and wobbles of the Earth's Axis ie the Milankovitch cycles.Surely you must conclude that these are the major climate drivers on the scale of thousands of years.
f)You might also consider whether the current climate is unusually hot or cold.Some slight knowledge of history might bring to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age. Even perhaps the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggests a warmer world in earlier times  than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.
g)Having heard of Greenhouse Gasses  you might note however that CO2 is about 400ppm of the Atmosphere and think ,reasonably ,that it is very unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.
Conclusion - a person of reasonable common sense and  intelligence  might well  conclude that given these simple observations the main temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine,the amount of cloud cover,the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday and that the present day was not outside the range of  climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to GHGs.These  common sense conclusions embrace much more of the truth than  the  Seven Alarmists ever managed to grasp or to  admit, while  Britains leading politicical leaders are apparently incapable of using what little common sense they might possibly  possess in this particular.area.

3. AVOID THE IPCC - AL GORE CO2 TRAP
The IPCC, led for several years by John Houghton and Bob Watson, is a political organisation.Its mission was not to investigate the causes of climate change but to estimate the effects of anthropogenic climate change.It simply assumed climate change was anthropogenic and in fact defined  "climate change "as being anthropogenic for its purposes. By 2011 this definition was no longer tenable because the Earth was not warming as forecast..The IPCC 2011 SREX report says
"Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”
.Note -  uncertainty in the “sign” means they think the earth may even cool over this interval - but they still shy away from using the dreaded c word .
The IPCC's neat solution to this "minor" problem was simply to change the definition of what they meant by climate change and to concentrate, in the upcoming AR5 report ,on scaring the public and politicians with extremes because the actual temperature trend had turned against their projections and could no longer credibly be used for this purpose.
The SREX Report says:
“several of the definitions used in this Special Report differ in breadth or focus from those used in the AR4 and other IPCC reports.]
Climate Change: A change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use.2[INSERT FOOTNOTE 2: This definition differs from that in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where climate change is defined as: “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods"
In order to make the anthropogenic climate change  a factor important enough to justify their  own existence and to drive government CO2 policies  the IPCC and its  modellers and the Seven Alarmists had to perform the following  mental gymnastics to produce or support a climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 of about 3 degrees.
a) Make the cause follow the effect . ie, even though CO2 changes follow temperature changes ,they simply assume illogically that CO2 change is the main driver.
b) The main GHG - Water vapour - also follows temperature independently of CO2 yet the effect of water vapour was added on to the CO2 effect as a CO2 feedback for purposes of calculating CO2 sensitivity.
c) Ignore the very serious questions concerning the relaibility of the ice core CO2 data which was used to produce the CO2 hockey stick (Fig 1) and to relate CO2 to temperature. (Fig2) From Fig 2 for example one might well conclude that if CO2 was driving temperature it is an Ice House not a Greenhouse gas on Millenial scales.

Fig1 (Beck 2006)

Fig2

Conclusion - The temperature projections of any models based on these irrational and questionable assumptions have no place in serious dicussion.All the innumerable doom-laden papers on impacts in the IPCC reports and elsewhere (eg Stern report) which use these projections as a basis  are a complete and serious waste of time and money.Until you know within well defined limits what the natural variability actually is it is not possible to estimate the sensitivity of global temperatures  to anthropogenic CO2 with any useful accuracy as far as policy is concerned.
Unfortunately for the Jeremaids of the Seven Pillars of Unwisdom they have gambled their scientifc reputations and positions on these  illogical propositions and are so far out on the limbs of the tree of knowledge that they will find it hard to climb back before their respective boughs break.

4. HOW TO PROCEED RATIONALLY - LOOK FOR PATTERNS AND PERIODICITIES IN THE TEMPERATURE RECORD
The IPCC,academic and governmental climate science  industry obviously needed to do more than simply inform the governments of  the common sense conclusions of section 2 in order to keep the grant money flowing and professional opportunities expanding.Certainly the scope ,mechanics, and drivers  of climate change are topics of very considerable legitimate scientific interest in their own right but funding would be limited unless catastrophe was forecast.
The IPCC "team" realised correctly that in order to predict the future they needed a good record of past temperatures certainly over at least last 2000 years or so and as much  further back as proxy data would  allow.Also in order to scare the public and drive policy it was necessary to show that current warm temperatures were out of the range of previous measurements.  First  they had to do away with Lamb's (and the real world's) Medieval Warming Period which appeared in the first IPCC report. In 1998 and 99 Mann  produced the infamous" Hockey Stick" so beloved and exploited by Al Gore. The Seven Alarmists implicitly or explicitly still appear conceptually locked in to the original Mannian graph although he himself has moved on considerably..A large amount of extremely valuable work has been done in gathering proxy temperature data in the last 15 years. Here are links to some of the most relevant papers.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MannBradleyHughes1998.pdf
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann_99.html
note Espers comments on the above at
http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Esper_et_al_Science02.pdf
and see how Mann's hockey stick has changed in later publications
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.full
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf
an important paper by Berggren et al relating solar activity to climate is
http://www.eawag.ch/forschung/surf/publikationen/2009/2009_berggren.pdf
and another showing clearly the correlation of the various climate minima over the last 1000 years to cosmic ray intensities -( note especially Fig 3C ,D below ) is: Steinhilber et al - 9400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf
for Holocene climate variability in general there is much food for thought in Mayewski et al :
http://yly-mac.gps.caltech.edu/AGU/AGU_2008/Zz_Others/Li_agu08/Mayewski2004.pdf
Of particular interest with regard to the cause of the late 20th century temperature increase is Wang et al:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/9581/2012/acp-12-9581-2012.pdf
for an immense compendium of articles and data including a summary of projections for the future see:
www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming

Having some passing acquantance with the above literature I would suggest that the currently most useful compilation for thinking about the record of the last 2000 years is.
Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012
http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf


Fig.3

The point of most interest  in Fig 3 is  the present temperature peak  and the MWP  peak at 1000 AD which correlate approximately with the solar millenial cycle seen in Fig2. The various minima of the Little Ice age and the Dalton minimumof the early 19th century also show up well.
The general principal is to perfom spectral and wavelet analysis on the the temperature and any possibly useful driver associated time series to find any quasicyclic patterns which can be cross correlated. (possibly with appropriate time lags)
For a general review of this approach see several Scafetta papers eg
 http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/scafetta-JSTP2.pdf

For decadal scale variations a 60 year cycle ,which seems to correlate temperatures and the PDO, is well established  see the post" Global Cooling -Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions" at
 http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.

Furthermore it is clear that the cosmic ray intensity time series is the best proxy for "solar activity "and
that this correlates meaningfully with temperature with perhaps a 10- 12 year lag.
see Fig 3 CD from Steinhilber http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf

 Fig4

It is not a great stretch of  the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about  2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year  cycles.On that basis the conclusions of the post referred to above were as follows.
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17

2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast
cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive
cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario

For a dicussion of the effects of cooling on future weather patterns see the 30 year Climate Forecast 2 Year update at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/07/30-year-climate-forecast-2-year-update.html

How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say  65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty drops.

This is where the Seven Alarmists scientific judgement was lacking - they embraced the CO2 meme with irrational exuberance and gave poor old Blair ,Cameron Clegg and Miliband the feeling that CO2 disaster was certainly coming and so embarked on their quixotic pursuit of windmills,solar panels  biomass, fossil power plant closings,GHG targets and the whole quite mad dogs breakfast that constitutes British climate and energy policy.
I do hope that some of the Seven might even yet review their positions along the lines outlined above and at least say publicly that any coming warming is much less certain than they once thought and that the government might usefully abandon their wasteful subsidies of renewables and  forget GHG emission limits and thus reduce the price of energy to British industy and ordinary people.

Open Request for Simple Predictions from James Hansen and Kevin Trenberth

Over the last several years  it has become increasingly clear that the earth is not warming according to the IPCC model predictions (projections ) . Both Hansen and Trenberth recognise the problem.Hansen suggests that Chinese  pollution is counter balancing the expected surface warming and that this surface warming pause might continue for several decades to come.By contrast Trenberth suggests that the missing heat has gone mainly into the oceans and that the warming pause could  last for 15 - 50 years.  In addition Trenberth in a presentation at : 

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw31_proceedings/S6_05_Kevin_Trenberth_NCAR.ppt


proposes  a strong natural negative feedback which has not been included in the IPCC- Met Office models and which independently of all the other evidence would necessarily substantially reduce model warming predictions.
By contrast there are a growing number of predictions of  Global Cooling based on declining solar activity. See  eg most recently  Steinhilber and Beer http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgra.50210/abstract
 In an earlier post   " Global Cooling Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions " on my Blog at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com   also at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/02/global-cooling-methods-and-testable-decadal-predictions/

 several predictions for future cooling were made - summarised as follows.
1. Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17

2. Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3. Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4. Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035   - 0.15
5. Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100   - 0.5
6. General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7. By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8. The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9.Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

Most western governments have developed economically costly climate and energy policies based on the premise  that CO2  sensitivity is about 3 degrees, and that CAGW can be avoided  by engineering  anthropogenic CO2 emissions to keep the temperature increase no more than 2 degrees.These policies make no sense if CO2 is not the main climate driver and if, in fact, the earth is entering an extended cooling spell because of declining solar activity.
As two of the main advocates of the CAGW paradigm and in view of their recent statements on the possible extended time span of the warming pause it would clarify the situation for policy makers and everyone else  if they could see their way clear to putting forward in its  most simple form their current predictions along the lines of points 1-9 above or most importantly,  and at least, items 4 and 5 - their most likely values for the Hadsst3 moving average (5 year) in 2035 and 2100.
The other points might merit a one or two word comment eg "absolutely not" or "possibly"
Drs Hansen and Trenberth  your  response to this request  would be most welcome . Thanks in advance Norman Page.

Global Cooling - Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions

1. Methods and Premises

My approach to climate science is based on Baconian empirical principles as presented in a series of earlier posts on this site (http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com)  notably:

6/18/10 Thirty Year Climate Forecast
7/19/12 30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year Update
10/30/12. Hurricane Sandy-Extreme Events and Global Cooling
11/18/12 Global Cooling Climate and Weather Forecasting
1/22/13 Global Cooling Timing and Amount
2/18/13 Its the Sun Stupid - the Minor Significance of CO2

From the data and papers linked to on these earlier posts I have drawn on a few basic premises on which the new forecasts rely.

1 .The IPCC climate models on which the entire CO2 phobia depends ignore basic common sense and show poor scientific judgement and so were, and are, so badly structured as to be inherently useless for temperature prediction. Climate sensitivity to doubling CO2 is probably  1 degree or less. The GH analogy conceptually misleads both the climate scientists and the general public. A much better analogy for the atmosphere is an holey insulating blanket with holes of varying size at differnt times according to the size and number of Tropcal Cyclone convection cells. These holes provide a substantial variable negative feedback to warming which is not included in the climate models. see Trenberth
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw31_proceedings/S6_05_Kevin_Trenberth_NCAR.ppt

2.The best way of distinguishing the main climate trends and drivers is by power spectrum and wavelet analysis of any time series which might be pertinent and correlation of these power spectra to distinguish forcings and feed backs.
3.A small number of time series are useful proxies for and can usefully and economically represent the trends in and the drivers of a large proportion of the past  global climate variabilty  and point the way to the likely future.It is not necessary to know the precise mechanisms and time series interactions which produce these time series observations in order to use them for successful prediction.
4.The present analysis which looks ahead to 2042 and 2106 is based on a few simple ideas and empirical observations..
 a) There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up 8+% .Global Temperatures have been declining since 2003-4 The period from 2003- 2005 represents a peak in both the 60 year PDO cycle and in a millennial solar cycle.
 b) Because of the thermal inertia of the oceans and the more extreme regional high frequency variability of the land data the Global SST data are the most useful representation of the overall global climate trend.
c)Not withstanding b) above  and indeed because of the greater variability  of the NH temperatures  the currently most useful representation of temperature trends over the last millennial solar cycle for practical and conceptual purposes  ie  hockey stick or non hockey stick is
 Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 fig5 at:
  http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf    see Fig1 below.  -  describe it how you will

d) It is not unreasonable to suggest that temperature trends  from 2000 - 3000 AD  could  well repeat the pattern of trends from 1000- 2000. AD
e)The temperature trends in the first +/- 100 years after the peak are likely to be the reverse of the trends in the +/- 100 years before the  peak and the Hadsst3 data set  Figs 2 and 3 is a generally accepted representation of the latter trend.
f)The main climate driver is the sun . Incoming solar radiation  is modulated by the Milankovitch orbital cycles and by variations in  solar "activity" manifested by changes in GCR flux at the earth,by changes in EUV radiation, changes in the frequency  and energy  of CMEs and  Proton events ,changes in solar wind speed  and changes in TSI.Incredibly ,only the small TSI change is considered in the IPCC models-.The change in albedo caused by the GCR- cloud iris effect and the change in atmospheric chemistry  caused by UV  variations are probably more important than TSI itself.
g)A lunar influence is also evident in the temperature power spectrum.
h )The Neutron count can act as a useful proxy for solar "activity"  particularly as the instrumental data can be projected  back via  the  10Be flux for millions of years..


2.Analysis and Forecast.

This post provides a  revised version of  the post on 1/22/13  "Global Cooling Timing and Amount (NH)" In this earlier post future temperature changes were estimated with reference to Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 fig5


FIG 1

Here I make the same assumption that the current temperature peak is an approximate repeat of the +/- 1000 AD solar cycle related temperature peak (Fig1 )  .The simplest  assumption for trends following the peak is that the downslope  to about 2650 AD  may well look like the downslope from 1000 to1650.Naturally predictions beyond the 30 years which coincides with a PDO declining temperature trend would be increasingly more speculative.
Using the HADSST  3 data as a go-by  (figs 2 and 3) produces the following estimates .


Fig 2

Hadsst 3(blue) and 2 (red)  Feb 2013 from  http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_February_2013.pdf

The rising trend peaks out at 2003-5  Fig2..A rise occurred from 1975 - 2003-5. We might therefore look for  a similar cooling from 2005 to 2035  The average peak temperature has  an Hadsst 3 anomaly of  about  +0.38 . The rise from 1975 was from about -0.15 to +0.38 = +0.53 . and thus we might look for a similar decline in global SSTs temperatures to - 0.15 by 2035. This would coincide well with the current 30 year cooling phase of the PDO. More speculatively we might similarly estimate a recovery to + 0.1  by  about 2060 followed by  further Global cooling to - 0.5 by 2100 - equivalent to the 1910 temperature.
 See the Hadley chart  Fig3 below from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadSST3.pdf

Fig 3

Of course these numbers relate to the general trend- during the downtrend we would expect higher frequency variabilty in temperature highs and lows  to the same extent as seen in Fig 2. but both would generally decline  until 2035.

These forecasts and trends are generally consistent with the broad trends   in the Oulu neutron count since 1964  Fig4  which I suggest may well be considerd as a  key Solar Activity Proxy  --  SAP.  It seems  that there is a +/-  12 year lag between the SAP and the temperature. see  Fig3 in Usoskin et al
 http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf

The decline in the count minima from solar cycles 20-22  ie from 1969 - 1991 corresponds roughly to the temperature rise from the early 1980s to  the 2003-5 temperature peak . It also matches well with the increase in the count of hours of sunshine during the same period dicussed by Wang et al
 http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/9581/2012/acp-12-9581-2012.pdf
which may well represent an open phase of the iris effect.

The relatively higher counts at the cycle 23 and especially the cycle 24 neutron minima troughs (solar cycle SSN peaks) suggest a continuing downtrend in temperatures to  at least 2024.
There was a secular change in the related Ap index in 2004-5 which could presage a sharp temperature drop in about 2016-17 and the Oulu data show an increase in the neutron count also in  2004- 5  which  might indicate the same thing and which is alredy built in to the system.

Fig 4  

            It is possible that the record 20th century peak in the 2009 count might indicate a real cold snap in 2021-22.

3. Summary

 1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
 2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
 3 Built in cooling trend until  at least 2024
 4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035  - 0.15
 5 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100  - 0.5
 6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
 7 By 2650  earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
 8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial  - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast 
     cooling and help maintain crop yields . 
 9 Warning !!  There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder  
     Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive
     cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
    

 

Post in response to Economist Article- A Sensitive Matter

There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up 8+%. The earth entered a cooling trend in about 2003 which is likely to last 30 years and maybe for hundreds of years beyond that.The IPCC climate models on which the entire CO2 phobia depends were and are so badly structured as to be inherently useless for temperature prediction. Successive science advisors to the UK Government lacked the scientific judgement to point out the obvious flaws in the IPCC models and Britain's politicians lacked the common sense to realise that this AGW emperor had no clothes and embarked on an ecomomically suicidal climate and energy policy.


The current divergence betwen the IPCC fantasies and reality is no surprise to realists in the blogosphere.It is now clear that the climate sensitivity is 1 degree or even less and that the real danger to world food production will come from falling rather than rising temperatures.For the data and papers on which the assertions above are based see these posts on my blog

http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com

which when read in order provide a convenient and coherent story showing that a Global Cooling trend is underway which may cause serious economic dislocation in the decades immediately ahead.



6/18/10 Thirty Year Climate Forecast

7/19/12 30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year Update

10/30/12. Hurricane Sandy-Extreme Events and Global Cooling

11/18/12 Global Cooling Climate and Weather Forecasting

1/22/13 Global Cooling Timing and Amount

2/18/13 Its the Sun Stupid - the Minor Significance of CO2



in addition I would suggest that the modellers and the establishment scientists recalculate their climate sensitivity to CO2 in light of the Trenberth presentation at
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw31_proceedings/S6_05_Kevin_Trenberth_NCAR.ppt

This paper shows a strong natural negative feedback which has not been included in the IPCC- Met Office models and which independently of all the other evidence would necessarily substantially reduce model warming predictions

Here is a link to the Economist Article http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions/comments?sort=3

Its the Sun stupid - The minor significance of CO2

1 The IPCC's Core Problem

The IPCC  - Al Gore based  Anthropogenic Global Warming scare has driven global  Governments' Climate and Energy Policies since the turn of the century. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted on uneconomic renewable energy  and CO2 emission control schemes based on the notions  that it is both necessary and possible to control global temperatures by reducing CO2 emissions. All this vast investment is based on the simple idea that as stated in the IPCC AR4 report
"we conclude that the global mean equilibrium warming for doubling CO2, or ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’, is likely to lie in the range 2°C to 4.5°C, with a most likely value of about 3°C. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is very likely larger than 1.5°C."
These values  can only be reached by adopting two completely unfounded and indeed illogical assumptions and procedures
1. CO2 is simply assumed to be the main climate forcing .This is clearly illogical  because at all time scales CO2 changes follow temperature changes.
2.  Positive feedback  from the other GHGs - notably water vapour and methane is then added on to the effects of CO2 and attributed to it. Obviously, in nature,  the increase in  CO2 and  Humidity  are  both caused by rising temperatures. It is also impossible to have a net positive feedback because systems with total positive feed back are not stable and simply run away to disaster. We woudn't be here to tell the tale if it were true.

From its inception the IPCCs remit was to measure Anthropogenic  Climate Change and indeed Climate Change was defined as Anthropogenic until the 2011 SREX report when the definition was changed.The climate science community simply designed their models to satisfy the political  requirements of their funding agencies. - Publications ,acadmic positions,peer approval , institutional advancement and grants were unlikely to be forthcoming unless appropriate forecasts of catastrophic warming were dutifully produced. The climate models have egregious structural errors and ,what is worse, in their estimates of  uncertainty the IPCC reports for Policymakers simply ignored this structural uncertainty and gave policy makers and the general public a totally false impression of the likely accuracy  of their temperature forecasts.It is this aspect of the AGW meme which is especially unconsionable.

The inadequacy, not to say inanity, of the climate models can be seen by simple inspection of the following Figure 2-20  from the AR4 WG1 report.

Fig1

The only natural forcing is TSI and everything else is anthropogenic. For example under natural should come such things as eg Milankovitch Orbital Cycles,Lunar related tidal effects on ocean currents,Earths geomagnetic field strength and all the Solar Activity data time series - eg Solar  Magnetic Sield strength, TSI ,SSNs ,GCRs ,( effect on aerosols,clouds and albedo) CHs, MCEs, EUV variations, and associated ozone variations and Forbush events. Unless the range and causes of natural variation are known within reasonably narrow limits it is simply not possible to calculate the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate.
The results of this gross error of scientific judgement is seen in the growing discrepancy between global temperature trends and the model projections. The  NOAA  SSTs show that with CO2 up 8% there has been no net warming since 1997, that ,the warming trend peaked in 2003 and that there has been a cooling trend since that time.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

The gap between projections and observations  is seen  below


                                      Fig 2 ( From Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim (Oslo) )




2, The Real Climate Drivers.

Earths climate is the result of resonances between various quasicyclic processes of varying wavelengths. The long wave Milankovich eccentricity,obliquity and precessional cycles are modulated by solar "activity" cycles with millenial centennial and decadal time scales .These in turn interact with lunar cycles and endogenous earth changes in Geomagnetic Field strength ,volcanic activity and at really long time scales plate tectonic movements of the land masses.The combination of all these drivers is mediated through the great oceanic current and atmospheric pressure systems to produce the earths climate and weather.
To help forecast decadal  and annual changes we can look at eg the ENSO  PDO, AMO NAO indices and based on past patterns make reasonable forecasts for varying future periods. Currently the PDO suggests we may expect 20 - 30 years of cooling in the immediate future.Similarly for multidecadal,centenial and millennial predictions we need to know where we are relative to the appropriate solar cycles.The best proxies for solar "activity"are currently ,the Ap index, and the GCR produced neutron count .The solar indices are particularly important  for their past history these can be retrieved from the 10 Be data,
In a previous post on   htpp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com   on  1/22/13 - Global Cooling - Timing and Amount(NH) I have made suggestions of possible future cooling based on a repetion of the solar millenial cycle. Here I point out for the modellers the value of using the Ap index as a proxy measure of solar activity. Compare the Northern Hemisphere HADSST3 Temperature anomaly since 1910 with the AP index since 1900 . Because of the thermal inertia and slow change in the enthalpy of the oceans there is a 10 - 12 year delay between the driver proxy  and the temperature.

                                                                                         Fig 3 - From Hadley Center

                                                       Fig 4  From  http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png

There are some good correlations .The 1900 and 1965 Ap lows correspond to the NH  temperature minima at 1910 and 1975 respectively . The 1992 Ap peak ( Solar Cycle 22)  corresponds to the 2003 temperature high and trend roll over- and as shown in the previous post referred to above might well represent  the roll over of the millenial solar cycle which brought the Medieval and Roman warming peaks. The NH is used because it is more sensitive to forcing changes and its greater variability makes correlation more obvious.
As a simple conceptual model the Ap index can be thought of as simple proxy for hours of sunshine especially when mentally integrated over a 10 -12 year period.  See Wang et al
 http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/9581/2012/acp-12-9581-2012.pdf

As far as the future is concerned the Solar Cycle  23/24 Ap minimum in end 2009 is as low as the 1900 minimum and would suggest both a secular change in solar activity in about 2006 and a coming temperature minimum at about 2019/20. This change is also documented for TSI by  Adbussamatov  2012 http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754

                                                                                             Fig 5.

As a final example for this post  the following figure from Steinhilber et al http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf

shows the close correlation of successive Little Ice Age Minima with cosmic Ray intensity.

                                                                                                    Fig 6

CONCLUSION :    IT IS NOW CLEAR THAT THE Ap/GCR/10BE DATA ARE THE BEST PROXY MEASURES OF

THE EARTHS TEMPERATURE DRIVER OVER MILLENIAL CENTENNIAL AND DECADAL TIME SCALES.

THE BEST WAY OF FORECASTING THE FUTURE IS TO PREDICT FUTURE SOLAR CYCLES AT THESE WAVELENGTHS KEEPING IN MIND THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD STRENGTH AND OBLIQUITY TRENDS OVER LONGER TIME PERIODS.

3. The Response of the  Modellers ,IPCC and Political Alarmists.

 

The modelling community and the IPCC have both recognised that they have a problem. For example both Hansen and Trenberth have been looking for the missing heat and generating epicycle type theories to preserve their models.Hansen thinks it might have something to do with aerosols and Trenberth first wanted to hide it down the deep ocean black hole. Death Train Hansen is a lost cause as far as objective science is concerned but Trenberth has always been a more objective and judicious scientist and has recently made excellent  progress in discovering a real negative feedback in the system. see

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw31_proceedings/S6_05_Kevin_Trenberth_NCAR.ppt

 

He says

 

This is an encouraging start and its inclusion would improve models significantly. Clearly it would reduce very substantially the currently IPCC calculated temperature sensitivity to CO2 . He now also needs to add into the models the iris effect of the GCR modulation  of the global incoming radiation flux via clouds ,possibly related natural aerosols, and resulting  albedo changes on global temperatures.When this is done the sensitivity to doubling  CO2 will be 1 degree or less similar to  separate calculations by Lindzen, Spencer and Bjornbom
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-paper-confirms-findings-of-lindzen.html

The IPCC 's response to the lack of warming is seen in the SREX  2011 report. they say

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

In other words they realised  that they could no longer scaremonger on the basis of the trend and so in that report and in the forthcoming AR5 they have chosen to concentrate on "extreme" events to promote their scaremongering anti CO2 policy agenda  while keeping unchanged their climate sensitivity calculations.The core alarmists  Hansen, Mann, McKibben and Romm and their MSM ,Celebrity and Political  acolytes including Obama are simply following the IPCC script with their ever more hysterical predictions of future extreme disasters as the current earth obstinately refuses to warm up.
The AR5 Summary for Policymakers is currently in draft form.Obviously Trenberth and his associated modellers cannot restructure the models in time to change the science section but perhaps they could at least insist that the final report makes proper allowance for the structural uncertainty in the model outcomes .

CONCLUSION 
 TRENBERTH'S LATEST WORK IMPLIES THAT WHEN IT IS INCORPORATED INTO THE CLIMATE MODELS THE ENTIRE CAGW  SCARE WILL COLLAPSE.
The only effect of increasing CO2 will be to ameliorate slightly the coming cold  temperature trend and to help world food production by its fertilizing effect on crops.

 

 

 

Global Cooling - Timing and Amount.(NH)

1 Wisdom ( Paraphrased)  From The Master.  ( http://www.sirbacon.org/links/4idols.htm )

"In the Novum Organum (the new instrumentality for the acquisition of knowledge) Francis Bacon classified the intellectual fallacies of his time under four headings which he called idols. The fourth of these were described as :

Idols of the Theater are those which are due to sophistry and false learning. These idols are built up in the field of theology, philosophy, and science, and because they are defended by learned groups are accepted without question by the masses. When false philosophies have been cultivated and have attained a wide sphere of dominion in the world of the intellect they are no longer questioned. False superstructures are raised on false foundations, and in the end systems barren of merit parade their grandeur on the stage of the world."

Climate science has been particularly prone to this fourth type of idol- although it is not the only branch of science so affected. Cosmology may well have fallen into the same error - but that is a whole other subject.

2.Very Unreliable Climate Forecasts - Modelling.

The entire IPCC - Al Gore CAGW paradigm relies on the forecast of dangerous 21st century warming based on the projections (not, modellers are careful to say,predictions) of climate models. The outcome of models is not empirical data .The science is in the inputs i.e our knowledge ( often guesses and assumptions ) of the initial conditions and the physical processes at work on the initial state of the system as we can best establish it.
 Science section  IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections.It concludes:

"Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed"
What could be clearer. The IPCC  in 2007 said that we dont even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- ie we don't know what future temperatures will be and we can't calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the "plausible" models to be tested anyway.
This quoted statement was ignored by the editors who produced the Summary for Policymakers. Here predictions of disaster were illegitimately given “with high confidence.” in complete contradiction to several sections of the WG1 science section where uncertainties and error bars were discussed. Almost all the worlds politicians, media and eco-activist organisations   uncritically  accepted and used these predictions as infallible guides to the futrure and acted on these delusions of certainty.

A glance at this Figure 2-20 From AR4 WGI shows immediately that the IPCC  models are structurally obviously highly  implausible. The only natural forcing is TSI  and everything else is anthropogenic. For example under natural should come such things as eg Milankovitch orbital cycles,Lunar related tidal effects on ocean currents  and all the Solar activity  data time series - eg Solar and Earth magnetic field strength, TSI ,SSNs ,GCRs ,( effect on aerosols,clouds and albedo) CHs, MCEs, EUV variations,  and associated ozone variations and Forbush events. Unless  the range and causes of natural variation are known within reasonably narrow limits it is simply not possible to calculate the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate.





Has the situation improved in the upcoming AR5 report? Apparently not . AR5 Chapter 9 which asesses the capabilities of the climate models concludes;
"Although future climate projections cannot be directly evaluated,climate models are based on verifiable physical principles and are able to reproduce many important aspects of past response to external forcing. In this way, they provide a scientifically sound preview of the climate to come."
Based on the words in bold the last sentence is logically absurd.In fact after a further five years of modelling the uncertainty of the 2100 temperature prediction is  larger for AR5 than  for AR4 and the AR4 predictions themselves are clearly failing as shown in Fig 1 on a previous post on this site -  Global Cooling Climate and Weather forecasting. See it also at
 http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/19/cooling-in-the-near-future/#more-74502

The structural and scenario uncertainties  of the models are so large that all the efforts spent on modelling represent a sad waste of human,computing  and financial resources. In addition the modellers have been very remiss in allowing the IPCC Summaries for Policymakers to get away with enormously under-reporting the structural uncertainty of their predictions (projections) and thereby scaring  policy makers into adopting, and the public in many countries into accepting policies and taking actions to control emissions which are likely to prove to have been  entirely unnecessary and enormously economically harmful to the worlds population.

3. Less Unreliable Climate Forecasts-  the Baconian empirical inductive approach.

In the last 200  years enormous amounts of data have been collected on global temperatures both from instuments and in the last 35 years in particular from various temperature proxies. A similarly impressive  data base now exists on measurements of  proxies of the various possible climate drivers - both exogenous and endogenous to the earth,. Considerable effort has been put into the statistical anaylsis of all these data in order to distinguish cause from effect  and identify trends and periodicities in both sets of data and correlate one with the other with  a view to forecasting future trends.
In order to make an informed judgement it is sine qua non   for the seriously interested non scientist  - eg politicians especially Presidents and Prime Ministers, ,media editors and TV producers  or professional NGO environmentalists  to have some familiarity  with  both the general priniples involved and also with  the actual data as opposed to the opinions of some percieved authority  either individual - eg Al Gore  or institutional - the IPCC.

As to the principles, the main problem lies in distinguishing signal from noise in the various time series and correlating the signals.I recommend Nate Silvers new book. "The Signal and the Noise - why so many predictions fail but some don't"  Penguin NY. 2012  -  see especially chapter 12 on -  A Climate of Healthy Skepticism.
As an aside -  it is worth noting that the transformation of the estimated size of the USA's accessible energy resources and the regeneration of its econmy which will surely follow unless the greens and politicians get in the way ,has as its source the truly astounding  improvement in the signal to noise ratio in the interpretation of seismic data by the oil industry.
Some of the main statistical analytical techniques  and  proxy time series  of temperature and climate drivers used in climate research are clearly  explained in the 2nd edition of William James Burroughs   - "Weather Cycles -Real or Imaginary? "  Cambridge University Press 2003.
 As for the data - seriously interested parties should take the time necessary to become familiar with the general trends in both the instrumental and proxy time series of temperature ,forcings and feedbacks.
Links to some key data sources were provided in the earlier post referred to above.Look also at the three Bogard contributions at  http://www.therightclimatestuff.com/StudiesReports.html
Central  to any forecast of future cooling is some knowledge of the most important reconstructions of past temperatures.
Serious partipants in the climate debate should at least read the conclusions of and look at the figures in some key papers to get a general sense of what the data base shows.
Here are links to some of the most relevant papers.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MannBradleyHughes1998.pdf
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann_99.html
 note Espers comments on the above at
http://eas8001.eas.gatech.edu/papers/Esper_et_al_Science02.pdf
and see how Mann's hockey stick has changed in later publications
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.full
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf
an important paper by Berggren et al relating solar activity to climate is
http://www.eawag.ch/forschung/surf/publikationen/2009/2009_berggren.pdf
and another showing clearly the correlation of the various climate minima over the last 1000 years to cosmic ray intensities -( note especially Fig 3C ,D below  ) is: Steinhilber et al - 9400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf
for Holocene climate variability in general there is much food for thought in Mayewski et al :
http://yly-mac.gps.caltech.edu/AGU/AGU_2008/Zz_Others/Li_agu08/Mayewski2004.pdf
Of particular interest with regard to the cause of the late 20th century temperature increase is Wang et al:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/12/9581/2012/acp-12-9581-2012.pdf
for an immense compendium of articles and data including a summary of projections for the future see:
www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming



However the empirical approach too has its dangers. Bacon says

"But the Empirical school of philosophy gives birth to dogmas more deformed and monstrous than the Sophistical or Rational school. For it has its foundations not in the light of common notions, (which though it be a faint and superficial light, is yet in a manner universal, and has reference to many things,) but in the narrowness and darkness of a few experiments. To those therefore who are daily busied with these experiments, and have infected their imagination with them, such a philosophy seems probable and all but certain; to all men else incredible and vain."

Hansen and Mann have clearly fallen into this trap. Indeed , Mann acknowledges as much in the Silvers book . He says that  in order to be heard , in his policy proselytizing presentations  he plays down  the extent of the uncertainties which he finds in his professional researches .

4. Global Cooling Forecast- Timing and Amount in the NH.

Having indicated earlier  the difficulties and follies  of forecasting of all sorts.I will now jump in and take a run at the next 600 years for the Northern Hemisphere based on a considered look at a fair cross section of the scientific literature.
The conclusions and or assumptions on which this forecast is  based are as follows.

a) The earth will continue to cool from the Holocene climate optimum from  between 4-7500 years ago due to orbital insolation changes.However this cooling woudn't contribute more than about 0.05 degrees /100 years.
b) CO2 sensitivity is low. ( 1 degree or less ) CO2 rises follow temperature rises and the sensitivity equation is logarithmic.Feedbacks to CO2 increases cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn't be here to discuss it. In the last 16 years there has been no net warming with CO2 up nearly 9%.
c) We are a few years into a negative phase of the PDO - we can expect another 20 - 25 years of cooling - say  a total of +/-  0.2 degrees by about 2035.
d) Solar "activity" is the main climate driver on millenial,centennial and decadal time scales.The cosmic ray intensity is a good proxy for solar activity in general and eg clearly correlates with climate minima in Fig3 in Steinhilber et al

e) The real controlling factor  for the immediate future  is where the present  day stands relative to the approximate 1000 year solar cycle peak
f) Having looked at numerous reconstructions I suggest that that of  Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012 is the most likely to be closest to reality. : http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf   

Discussion.
The key working hypothesis  is that the solar cycle from 1000- 2000 may  repeat and we may see a pattern of temperatures from 2000 - 3000 which is similar to that from 1000 - 2000. Fig.5 from the Christiansen paper is shown above.The solid lines are the 50 year moving averages and the dashed red lines are the upper and lower quantiles.
Inspection of  Figure 5   - both the moving average and the annual data suggests the following.

1) The millennial peak is sharp  - perhaps 18 years +/-. We have now had 16 years since 1997 with no net warming - and so might expect a sharp drop in a year or two - 2014/16 -with a net cooling by 2035 of about 0.35.Within that time frame however there could well be some exceptional  years with NH temperatures +/- 0.25 degrees colder than that.
2) The cooling gradient might be  fairly steep down to the Oort minimum equivalent which would occur about 2100. (about 1100 on Fig 5) with a total cooling in 2100 from the present estimated at  about 1.2 +/-
3) From 2100 on through the Wolf and Sporer minima equivalents with intervening highs to the Maunder Minimum equivalent which could occur from about 2600 - 2700 a further net cooling of  about 0.7 degrees could occur for a total drop of 1.9 +/- degrees
4)The time frame for the significant cooling  in  2014 - 16  is strengthened by recent developments already seen in solar activity. With a time lag of about 12 years between the solar driver proxy and climate -see:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005ESASP.560...19U  we should see the effects of the sharp drop in the Ap Index which took place in 2004/5 in 2016-17. This estimate is quite independent from the estimate made from Fig5.


Conclusions1) It seems reasonably probable  - say 60-40 that the NH will cool by about .35 degrees by 2035.
2) We should  be able to check the accuracy of this forecast by 2018 -20.
3)The forecast of a 1.2 degree drop by 2100 is little more than a mildly interesting suggestion at this time.
4)The idea of a Maunder Minimum equivalent at 2600 - 2700 is highly speculative.
5)Contrary to the  forecasts  made here, the Livingston and Penn solar data are suggesting a possible Maunder type Minimum in the near future.Given our ignorance of  solar physics this is entirely possible. In this  case a much more rapid cooling would occur with very serious consequences to the global food supply and the world economy.
6) Global cooling will take place concurrently with that of the NH but because of the great extent of the southern oceans the global cooling will be significantly less - maybe +/- 50 % and there will also be considerable regional variability. in both hemispheres.
7) There is no reason to expect damaging global warming.Cooling is  more likely .To prepare for it, all ethanol and biofuel subsidies and mandates should be abolished.Renewable energy and electric car subsidies are economically wasteful and accomplish nothing.There is no reason to control CO2 emissions, indeed some extra CO2, while having little effect on temperature, might aid farm productivity .   25% of the increased crop yields in the 20th century was due to the CO2 increase.

Global Temperature 2100 -Question and Answer

These posts are from  http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=display&thread=95&page=57

Re: Global warming temperature predictions


« Reply #841 Yesterday at 12:04pm »

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Jan 5, 2013, 9:51pm, norpag wrote:Y'all might like to check out my post GlobalCooling- Climate and Weather Forecasting at

http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/....nd-weather.htlm or at

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/19/cooling-in-the-near-future/#more-74502


Norpag, I enjoyed those posts. Have you made a forecast of global temperatures through the end of this century?

Link to Post - Back to Top Logged

Re: Global warming temperature predictions


« Reply #842 Yesterday at 7:51pm »

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duwane - I dont think we know enough to say anything really useful yet about the end of the century.Looking at the last 15 years SSTs, the PDO. the Livingston and Penn data and the high Neutron count at the last minimum I would say,something like - its more likely than not ( 60 - 40) that the NH might be .5 - 1 degree cooler by 2035.) Beyond that it depends on exactly where we now are relative to the approximate 1000 year solar cycle and also the extent of any further decline in solar magnetic field strength .
In my eyes the simplest clue will be the Neutron count at the next minimum due about 2020.
We might have some idea of where that's headed by 2018 after that there will be enough data to have a meaningful idea of 2100. In all this the level of anthropogenic GHG is more or less irrelevant for forecasting purposes because until we know the scale and causes of natural variability much better than we now do , we can't even make any useful estimate of climate sensitivity to CO2 other than to say it must be quite low otherwise we wouldn't be here to discuss it at all.