Thursday 19 December 2013

Climate Science is not settled - it's really a Risk Assessment.


I'm a believer that, in order to dismiss something out-of-hand, you need to have proved the opposite.  In this case, the possibility that the weather system will react in such a way that it doesn't lead to catastrophe hasn't been disproved.  After all, it has kept temps between liveable bounds as the sun has increased it's strength.  So the very understandable worry concerning the highest concentration of CO2 that's been in the atmos since the 1st humans left the Savannah ~ xxxx years ago, becomes a risk assessment.

Quick summary:-
  • CO2 could be the cause - but not necessarily...circumstantial evidence

  • CAGW...It is well known that most of that warming is NOT due to the direct warming effect of the CO2 by itself, which is relatively weak. It is instead due to indirect effects (positive feedbacks) that amplify the small amount of direct warming from the CO2. The most important warmth-amplifying feedbacks in climate models are clouds and water vapor.....
    - thus CO2 warming is tripled


I shall end with some statements often heard:-
  • "Never has the world warmed so much so fast"
  • When people perceive that scientists agree on catastrophic climate change, they’re more likely to support the need to prevent it
  • 97% scientific consensus  - a large number of sceptics (particularly the atmospheric researchers) agree that the additional co2 will cause some warming with a question of 'how much?' and 'will it be permanent?'.






the effect of atmospheric molecular collision processes on radiation transfer is not taken into account. Since the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is only 360 parts per million, almost all the collisions which carbon dioxide molecules experience are with oxygen or nitrogen. We know from studies of vibrational- translational energy transfer (vibrational relaxation) studies which go back some fifty years, that under atmospheric conditions most of the spectrally-excited molecular vibrations of carbon dioxide will be quenched and the excess energy transferred to translational energy for oxygen and nitrogen. 

***http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/18/the-fatal-lure-of-assumed-linearity/

"sensitivity"? every doubling of CO2 = n deg C of warming? - fn of T, ppm? Lag in the system....dependency on other factors...coupling...any stress factors?

CAGW ..assumes that this kind of natural cloud variability does not exist, and that the Earth stays in a perpetual state of radiative balance that has only been recently disrupted by mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions.



http://american_almanac.tripod.com/globwarm.htm
Robert E. Stevenson, Ph.D.
subjects related to climate scale variations in the oceans and marine atmosphere, in both time and space. These were

  1. (1) Large-Scale Ocean Circulation, 
  2. (2) Decadal and Interdecadal Variations in the Oceans, 
  3. (3) Carbon Dioxide in the Ocean, 
  4. (4) Air-Sea-Ice Interactions and High Latitude Ocean Processes, and 
  5. (5) Ocean-Atmosphere Coupling and the Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere. 



But all it would take is a small change in global average (or Northern Hemispheric average) cloudiness to cause global warming. Unfortunately, our global observations of cloudiness have not been complete or accurate enough to document such a change…until recently.
Such a cloud change would cause the climate system to go through natural fluctuations in average temperature for extended periods of time.
 the warming in the 1920s and 1930s led to media reports of decreasing sea ice cover, Arctic and Greenland temperatures just as warm as today, and the opening up of the Northwest Passage in 1939 and 1940.

While the PDO is primarily a geographic rearrangement in atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns in the North Pacific, it is well known that such regional changes can also influence weather patterns over much larger areas, for instance North America or the entire Northern Hemisphere (which is, by the way, the region over which the vast majority of global warming has occurred).


 Spencer and Braswell (2008) showed theoretically that daily random variations in cloudiness can actually cause substantial decadal time-scale variability on ocean temperatures. This is not a new finding, as it was also demonstrated over 30 years ago (Hasselman, 1976) and is related to the fact that the ocean, due to its large heat capacity, retains a ‘memory’ of past changes in the Earth’s radiative budget for a very long time.
So, what if those chaotic variations in cloud cover occurred on time scales longer than days… yearly, or 30 years (like with the PDO), or 100 years? Might such internally-generated climate change even explain events like the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age?
Spencer, R.W., and W.D. Braswell (2008), Potential biases in cloud feedback diagnosis: A simple model demonstration, J. Climate, November 1.
I used a very simple energy balance climate model, previously suggested to us by Isaac Held and Piers Forster, to investigate the possibility that the PDO could have caused some of the climate change over the last century. In this model I ran many thousands of combinations of assumed: (1) ocean depth (through which heat is mixed on multi-decadal to centennial time scales), (2) climate sensitivity, and (3) cloud cover variations directly proportional to the PDO index values.
In effect, I asked the model to show me what combinations of those model parameters yielded a temperature history approximately like that seen during 1900-2000. And here’s an average of all of the simulations that came close to the observed temperature record:

Fig. 4. A simple energy balance model driven by cloud changes associated with the PDO can explain most of the major features of global-average temperature fluctuations during the 20th Century. The best model fits had assumed ocean mixing depths around 800 meters, and feedback parameters of around 3 Watts per square meter per degree C.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/research-articles/global-warming-as-a-natural-response/
http://climateaudit.org/2007/12/30/spencer-on-cloud-feedback/#comment-129379
"...But it also means that the radiative forcing caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 is not sufficient to cause PAST warming, either. So, this then leaves a critical unanswered question: What has caused the warming seen over the last 100 years or so?
Here I present new evidence that most of the warming could be the result of a natural cycle in cloud cover forced by a well-known mode of natural climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). While the PDO is primarily a geographic rearrangement in atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns in the North Pacific, it is well known that such regional changes can also influence weather patterns over much larger areas, for instance North America or the entire Northern Hemisphere (which is, by the way, the region over which the vast majority of global warming has occurred).
The IPCC has simply ASSUMED that these natural fluctuations in weather patterns do not cause climate change. But all it would take is a small change in global average (or Northern Hemispheric average) cloudiness to cause global warming. Unfortunately, our global observations of cloudiness have not been complete or accurate enough to document such a change…until recently."
December 27, 2008 (last modified December 29, 2008)

To demonstrate this physical interpretation, I modified the simple climate model of Spencer and Braswell (2008) to include an atmosphere, an ocean mixed layer, and a deeper ocean layer which slowly exchanges heat with the mixed layer. (These modifications were added one by one, as necessary, to explain characteristics of the satellite data which could not be expalined without those modifications.) The model was driven by radiative and non-radiative forcings that varied randomly in time, having a time scale of days to weeks. The radiative forcing only directly affects the ocean mixed layer, as might be expected with variations in low cloud cover causing varying amounts of absorbed sunlight by the ocean.

Others have noted that the warming in the 1920s and 1930s led to media reports of decreasing sea ice cover, Arctic and Greenland temperatures just as warm as today, and the opening up of the Northwest Passage in 1939 and 1940.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/
"The goal of Skeptical Science is to explain what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming."

Wednesday 13 November 2013

I've worked out what's wrong with the Global Warming "science".  They think the long-term climate is linearly deterministic (due to Sun's output, Earth's tilt, volcanos etc) even though weather is chaotic.  So they've been using 10 year averages for the historic data.  And saying that the Roman-Warm-Period, Mediaeval Warm Period, and Little Ice Age (from 1500) are local warmings in Europe /Northern Hemisphere only - which gets over the fact that no-one even thinks they understand why they happened.  Unfortunately for them, historic documents, Antarctic ice-cores and global earth-cores show they were global.  Which is a pity for the 'century-long deterministic' believers because they don't know why they happened, and it stops their "never has the earth warmed so much, so fast..." type of statement.  The Arctic is not yet warm enough for the Vikings to cross to the other side of Canada which Archaeology tells us they did.   Also, there's reputed to be a map of the Antarctic coastline from 1300s.  I may find time to research that a bit.

And another thing, carbon-dioxide is band-width-saturated, with the warming prophesied being dependent upon feedback loops which they know perfectly well they don't fully understand.

Monday 22 July 2013

Global Warming Empirical Evidence appears missing


I can’t remember what made me look into the Global Warming evidence a few years ago. 

It may have been the increasingly strident voices dismissing any issues raised about the IPCC’s position – a very unscientific attitude which makes sceptical me think they have something to hide.

Or it could have been hearing on the radio that the historic ice-core evidence didn’t show any carbon-dioxide increase prior to a warming event. In fact, 600 years later seems to be the norm.

Or maybe just curiosity when I was at a loose end.

My first foray quickly found wattsupwiththat.com where Anthony Watts was logging the health of weather stations – mainly in North America. He’d raised various physical issues (like lack of maintenance) and pointed out that human activity (e.g. a town’s suburb being built in what used to be a bare prairie) raised localised temperatures. These are now known as “Urban Heat Islands”.  For example, an Antarctic station 30 years ago just had a few huts which were habited only during the Antarctic summer.  Now they have many huts, a tarmac landing strip, and are inhabited all year round – hence creating an “urban heat island” around the original weather station.  So of course it will show warming – and needs to be normalised i.e. reduced to ensure you’re comparing like with like.

Then, when tidying my bookshelves, I came across the 1975 “Ice-ball Earth” theory that we were heading for a global freeze. This didn’t happen. So I investigated the other weather scare I know about – the Antarctic ‘Ozone Hole’ of the 80s.  Nowadays, NASA has loaded data from their weather satellites which permanently monitor the changes in the Ozone Layer. To me, it appeared that the ‘Hole’ was within normal variability. 

This has led me to investigate what evidence the IPCC have, and to be pedantic in distinguishing observational evidence from theory. So, when anyone says the Earth’s Global Mean Temperature is still increasing, I ask (a) how they have calculated it and (b) how they’ve subsequently tested it.  For (a), my impression is that the temperature is calculated from the sun’s output (how is that measured, or is it assumed constant?) and a value for how much the earth is reflecting back to outer-space (how is this calculated, and  how are man’s changes accounted for?).  For (b), it seems they have been continually adjusting the models to match actual reading – but how, before satellites, can you have one reading of global temperature or is it an aggregate? Or even in the last 35 years, with made-to-order weather satellites?

{ There’s a free OU course and a Met Office website which give the basic theory.  See also this article, & How to Calculate Greenhouse Effect. (Data from NOAA (US) at www.climate4you.com.) For discussion of the sun's history see here.}
I assume that the carbon-dioxide evidence has been dismissed as ‘We’re coming out of the Little Ice Age 1500-1850, and CO2 is having an accelerating effect’ – rather than a causal effect.  But it’s not expressed clearly, if at all. And was that a global cooling, or just northern Europe & the Arctic? And why did the earth exit the mini-ice-age?
Then there’s the climatologists who believe the sun is the main driver of Earth’s temperature including:-
Piers Corbyn MSc (astrophysics), ARCS, FRAS, FRMetS  – derives unusually accurate weather predictions from sunspot activity
Tim Ball – Climatology Ph.D, formerly University of Winnipeg Explanation of Sun's effect

Prof Don J. Easterbrook, Western Washington University correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase see here

Nicola Scaffetta  suggests that natural cycles driven by the orbits of planets around the sun affect changes luminosity, sunspots and electromagnetism, which are then amplified on Earth’s climate. http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/pdf/EARTH_1890.pdf

Dr. Jean-Louis Pinault... in the coming decades ... predicts: "...firstly allowing to account for long-term climate variability, and secondly to reproduce with high accuracy global warming observed during the second half of the 20th century, then the stagnation of the average temperature of the planet, precursor of the beginning of a slow cooling that will continue for several centuries." Dr. Pinault is suggestting a mechanism whereby small solar constant variations have an amplified effect on Earth's surface temperature with the present ocean masses

Or was the temperature increase caused by CFSs as a report from University of Waterloo, Canada claims? In which case, we’ve already cracked it!
At the moment, there’s news stories about an irreversible “tipping point” derived from computer models which predict continual global warming year-on-year. Along with reports of no warming for 101 or 152 years.  While I understand, and can quite happily quote “granularity co-incidence” as a reason for ignoring individual bits of data; they should have sufficient data for many different time-slots that can be checked e.g. 1940 to 1970 was cooling also. None of this gives me any confidence in what they’re saying.

Add to this, that the Global Warming theory was postulated in early 80s, prior to knowledge and understanding of El Nino, the north-south ocean currents, etc.  There is just so much that isn’t understood about the wind and the rain and the clouds,…

So maybe, just maybe, climatologists made a global, international fuss too soon; and Bjorn Lomberg was right in 2001 (The Skeptical Environmentalist) that there are more important things we should be spending our money on.  In his case, feeding starving people.  For me, it’s stopping the degradation of nature and removing the carbon-taxes which British folk can’t afford. 

Above all else, the IPCC lobby is getting ever more strident.  Disappearing Polar Bears are used as an icon despite their numbers increasing since hunting was banned. (Using false examples is another non-scientific action.)  Folk with proper scientific scepticism are being called “deniers” which associates them with holocaust-deniers.

How very different they are to the nuclear physicists looking for the Boson particle – “If we can’t find it, that’ll be a really exciting result” they say, thinking of the prospect of ditching very many years of work.  They’re real scientists.

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For further interesting information & news see below:-


Judith Curry (Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) hosts Climate Etc. which provides a forum for climate researchers, academics and technical experts from other fields, citizen scientists, and the interested public to engage in a discussion on topics related to climate science and the science-policy interface.

Nigel Lawson set up the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009 as an all-party and non-party think tank and a registered educational charity which, while open-minded on the contested science of global warming, is deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.

Other reputable anthropogenic climate change sceptics:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
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FOOTNOTES re ‘WARMING PAUSE’
1 The paper Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 [PDF] by a team led by Robert Kaufmann at the Department of Geography at Boston University – Temperature has not significantly increased because Global Warming has been couteracted by Chinese sulphur emissions cooling the atmosphere and the sun radiating less heat.  Climatologists Judith Curry and David Whitehouse at the GWPF are unimpressed.