THE SCIENCE
1.Modelling - How Not To Do Climate Science
"This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! .......... ... THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!….."
"This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! .......... ... THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!….."
This Monte Python quote (TOH Jimbo) accurately describes the current state of the CAGW paradigm based on the IPCC- Met Office climate models. It also describes the status of the modelling approach in general as a means of investigating climate change.
Fig 1 (From Spencer http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/06/climate-modeling-epic-fail-spencer-the-day-of-reckoning-has-arrived/ )
Fig 1 (From Spencer http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/06/climate-modeling-epic-fail-spencer-the-day-of-reckoning-has-arrived/ )
In Britain , the gulf between the Met Office expectations for the last several years and the actual string of cold and snowy winters and wet summers which has occurred has made the Met Office a laughing stock-
to the point of recently holding a meeting of 25 "experts" to try to figure out where they went wrong.
The answer is simple.Their climate models are incorrectly structured because they are based on three irrational and false assumptions. First that CO2 is the main climate driver ,second that in calculating climate sensitivity the GHE due to water vapour should be added to that of CO2 as a feed back effect and third that the GHE of water vapour is always positive.As to the last point the feedbacks cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn't be here to talk about it .
Further ,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.
Temperature drives both CO2 and water vapour independently,. The whole CAGW - GHG scare is based on the obvious fallacy of putting the effect before the cause.As a simple (not exact) analogy controlling CO2 levels to control temperature is like trying to lower the temperature of an electric hot plate under a boiling pan of water by capturing and sequestering the steam coming off the top.A corollory to this idea is that the whole idea of a simple climate sensitivity to CO2 is nonsense and the sensitivity equation has no physical meaning unless you already know what the natural controls on energy inputs are already ie the extent of the natural variability.
Furthermore the modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. There is no way of knowing whether the outputs after the parameterisation of the multiple inputs merely hide compensating errors in the system as a whole. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact. 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 itself that we don't 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 necessarily ignored by the editors (censors) who produced the AR4 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 which are now, six years later ,seen to be just that -delusions.
In summary the projections of the IPCC - Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them really have no useful place in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money.
2.How To Do Climate Science - Look for Recurring Patterns and Periodicities in the Temperature and Possible Climate Driver Record.
How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate?
When,about ten years ago ,I began to look into the CAGW - CO2 based scare, some simple observations presented themselves.
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 (enthalpy) might be an important factor.
e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovic cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages.
f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some knowledge of history brought to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and 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 suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.
g)I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.
I concluded ,as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence given these simple observations that the sun was the main climate driver . More specific 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. It seemed that the present day was likely not much or very little 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 anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.These conclusions based on about 15 minutes of anyone's time are much nearer the truth and certainly much more useful as a Guide to Policymakers than the output of the millions of man hours of time and effort that have been spent on IPCC - Met Office models.
The IPCC,academic and governmental climate science industry obviously needed to do more than simply inform the governments of the common sense conclusions seen above 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 estblishment modelling community and the ecoleft MSM implicitly or explicitly still appear conceptually locked in to the original Mannian graph although he himself has moved on to a limited extent...A large amount of extremely valuable work has been done in gathering proxy temperature data in the last 15 years. links to some of the most relevant papers are provided at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/01/global-cooling-timing-and-amountnh.html
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
In some cases simple inspection of the temperature data is sufficient to detect useful periodicities.
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
Fig2
Having some passing acquantance with the various temperature time series 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 a solar millenial cycle .The various minima of the Little Ice age and the Dalton minimumof the early 19th century also show up well.
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 the basis that the sequence from 1000- 2000 may be about to repeat - and also referring to the Oulu cosmic ray related neutron count time series the following climate forecasts may be made .
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 IPCC 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 and meaningful correlation 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 rapidly.
THE POLITICS
For the best exposition of the global politics behind the entire AGW scam I refer readers to Donna Laframboise's excellent book The Delinquent Teenager ...... especially pages 41 and 42.
I quote briefly:
"At an event celebrating the IPCC's 20th anniversary, its chairman gave a speech in which he publicly
acknowledged that the IPCC's primary purpose is not to help governments make wise climate change
decisions. Rather, in his words:
The UNFCCC is our main customer, if I could label them as such, and our interaction with them
enriches the relevance of our work...
UNFCCC stands for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This international
treaty was launched in 1992 at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. When the chairman of the IPCC
says his organization's main purpose is to assist a UN body that administers a political agreement
between nations - what he's really telling us is that there's no conceivable way the Climate Bible can be
between nations - what he's really telling us is that there's no conceivable way the Climate Bible can be
an objective scientific document.............This is a situation in which political operators (UN bureaucrats) pursuing a political goal (a greenhousegas treaty) have recruited scientists to help them achieve their objective"
Most establishment climate modelling scientists in the UK and USA either through scientific incompetence or because of the opportunity to obtain grants and career advancement (and public honours in the case of the UK) have acted as useful idiots to promote the political ends of the UNFCC.
The current state of the poltical climate wars is illuminated by comparing in broad outline the situations in the USA and the UK.
Most politician's primary goal is to gain power by gaining elective office and then stay in power by financially rewarding their corporate contributors or influential friends and interest groups who can deliver votes .This creates a congressional or parliamentary - scientific (when government funded )- military- industrial complex,- which creates for all intents and purposes a national- socialist state.The UN would like to establish a similar world governing bureaucracy.
By regulating greenhouse gas and thus contolling energy supply and demand governments can essentially take over all economic activity and indeed private property without having to go through a nationalisation process.If this seems far fetched one needs look no further than the provisions of the Waxman - Markey bill in the U.S.to see the extent of the power grab which its authors contemplated. Global Warming was used as a pretext to try to grab control of all economic activity in the country because congress would decide the price of all energy via the distribution of carbon credits to whomever contributes most to their campaign funds. Energy production would be diverted to so called "green " sources which are hopelessly uneconomic unless heavily subsidised.If this bill had passed all private real estate would essentially cease to exist because governemnt climate police would ,in the guise of government trained real estate appraisers, decide the appraisal value of all real estate and thus control the sales price of everyone's home. Any alterations or improvements would have to be approved by government inspectors.A vast bureaucracy would be created to run this virtual totalitarian police state run for the benefit of the congress and whichever corporations or special interests pay them the most.
Fortunately, because of the separation of powers in the US constitution this disaster was temporarily averted.
However aided by the worst Supreme Court decision in history which effectively transferred total control of the economy to the Executive branch via the EPA, the Obama administration is planning to achieve the Orwellian objectives of the Waxman Markey bill by the piecemeal regulation of GHG emissions using fear of global warming as a tool to carry the public with him.
Britain by contrast ,having replaced a powerful king by an equally all powerful prime minister and small cabal of ministers had no constitutional barriers to a power grab by the nomenclatura for the benefit of themselves and their corporate and land owning friends.The GHG scare promoted by the fellow travelling ecoleft press and especially by the BBC propaganda machine enabled successive governments to first, in 2008, pass ,with only four dissenting votes, a climate bill which by law established legal requirments for draconian CO2 emission limits.As I write this, the House of Lords is debating an energy bill ,already approved by the Commons ,by which the government would run the economy with detailed control of energy supply and demand via a Russian Communist style central planning sytem where energy sources and demand and prices are decreed by the Secretary of State and a supposedly all knowing government bureaucracy.The majority of Britains political leadership retains its impenetratable ignorance of the significance of the fact that there has been no warming since 1997 with CO2 up 8% and retains its unshakeable faith in the delusionary CAGW religion. During the debate the "fact" of CAGW was hardly questioned. The chief discussion was about how to attract investment in inherently uneconomic renewables such as windmills by rigging the market by subsidy and regulation.
When this literally lunatic bill is finally passed into law Britain will be firmly set on course for economic disaster.
In the U.S.A the battle is about to commence in earnest.In Britain the ongoing collapse of the CAGW delusion amongst the scientists made no difference to the discussion. I see no evidence that either Obama and his hand picked true believers in the CAGW religion or the Democratic Congressional leadership will be any more influenced by the changing science than their British counterparts.With the Supreme Court decision behind them can the EPA be stopped? We'll see.
