Global Warming Concensus Broken

[IntLibber]

And more -

sea-ice levels - look at the graphs either that I posted or that were in Talldaves article (that I reposted). The trend is clear and high recent variability does not break it. You are good enough engineer not to misuse single data points I know.

Ice extent is only part of the picture, particularly wrt Antarctica, you need to look at ice depth, something that is consistently ignored by the AGW cultists.

Satellite surveys of ice depth over the Antarctic consistently show year in and year out increases in ice depth. This increase in depth is obviously causing pressure increases on ice at lower levels, forcing ice movement velocities to increase (like sqeezing your toothpaste tube) and increased calving rates at the sea. Total ice mass remains on the upswing and average temperature in Antarctica has a 1 degree down trend since 1950.

[tomclarke]

Intlibber -

No-one is saying that antarctic ice is reducing. Area is increasing, but less than arctic ice is decreasing (trend is about 50% amplitude of arctic ice trend).

GCMs need to know ice extent & depth to model ice sheets, something they now do. So I can't see why you think they ignore ice depth! But ice sheet modelling is indeed not yet as good as it could (and should) be.

The big arctic refreeze was possible because the very thin "new" ice has less insulating snow & therefore froze more quickly than expected in the winter.

I have no idea whether total ice mass is increasing or decreasing. But why is this relevant? GW predicts global average temperature increase. Not that temperature increases in all regions. So whether there is more or less ice is complex. Note however that ther has been very substantial glacier melt over last 2o years. No idea whether this is significant compared with arctic/antarctic.

Best wishes, Tom

[MSimon]

It does not make good predictions about chaos = weather < several years averaged.

It hasn't made a good prediction about the last 10 years. According to the IPCC head neither has it predicted the cooling for the next 6 years that he expects.

Now a couple of bad years I can see. But 16 bad years? That is 1/6 the projection period. People begin to notice these things.

BTW in a chaotic system if your step by step predictions are wrong at the end of a million steps they can be very bad wrong if they jump out of the orbit of a strange attractor.

So a couple of bad years of predictions is damning.

Now the whole shooting match of GCMs doing predictions is based on the fact that they hope the errors average out - i.e. the system has negative feedback so errors anneal. While at the same time they are trying to prove that the system is unstable and thus errors do not anneal.

That is a fundamental contradiction.

The only way GCMs could possibly predict 100 years in advance is if the system had a lot of negative feedback. But the modelers tell us the feedback is positive.

There is another way to make better predictions: more sensors for better initial conditions, smaller time increments for the models and smaller grid size for the models.

So how can we know if the models converge with the time increments and grid sizes chosen? Change them and see if the difference is significant. So far I'm not aware of that having been done. Maybe the RC folks can give you a link.

The alternative is to see how the model predictions match reality. So far: no match over time scales of a decade. And in fact the head of the IPCC thinks the divergence will get worse.

[MSimon]

Note however that ther has been very substantial glacier melt over last 2o years.

So true. Except record snow falls in 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 may have already reversed that or at least reduced it considerably.

The only way to tell if the melt is significant is to compare it to what happened in the last warm PDO. Got a link?

[IntLibber]

Intlibber -

No-one is saying that antarctic ice is reducing. Area is increasing, but less than arctic ice is decreasing (trend is about 50% amplitude of arctic ice trend).

GCMs need to know ice extent & depth to model ice sheets, something they now do. So I can't see why you think they ignore ice depth! But ice sheet modelling is indeed not yet as good as it could (and should) be.

The big arctic refreeze was possible because the very thin "new" ice has less insulating snow & therefore froze more quickly than expected in the winter.

I have no idea whether total ice mass is increasing or decreasing. But why is this relevant? GW predicts global average temperature increase. Not that temperature increases in all regions. So whether there is more or less ice is complex. Note however that ther has been very substantial glacier melt over last 2o years. No idea whether this is significant compared with arctic/antarctic.

Best wishes, Tom

My personal opinion is that "global warming" is actually regional warming of the arctic (given temperate and equatorial regions have no warming and antarctica is cooling) partly due to decreased albedo from diesel soot deposition. prior to the big melt, a lot of arctic ice was rather dirty by summer time. Some of the melting in 2007 was due to subsea vulcanism in the arctic, some due to increased storm activity, which causes inordinate amount of ice breakup in late season. With clean ice, the refreezing is happening a lot more easily.

Most glaciers are melting, some are growing, nobody can explain why, except for the solar astronomers.

[IntLibber]

None of which invalidates the model's prediction of overall long-term (50 years time constant) rise due to CO2.

best wishes, Tom

Problem is if you went to the link I posted, you'd see were actually in a cooling AND CO2 rise is significantly below IPCC predictions as well.

You also did not respond to the expose about how kicking out so many rural weather stations from the system wound up inventing warming from 1990 onward.

[tomclarke]

I think validation of GCMs is complex and I will return to it armed with some evidence, not just hand-waving arguments.

However - you are confusing feedbacks.

GCM people say that climate responds to forcing factors with feedbacks, some of which are postitive, but the overall system is stable. Model it as an amplifier with gain G 1 < G < 10. This is not a contradiction.

And unless the chaotic noise takes the system away from its behaviour of last millenium then it remains pretty stable. True, the GCMs may not model some nasty positive feedback that lies just outside normal (last 1k years) temperature range. there is always that risk. But if you think that likely you should be worrying more not less about climate change.

The GCMs are validated with many runs against part climate data so they will have a fair handle on what the structure of the chaotic system looks like. (There is a project trying to explore the compelte state space - climateprediction I think).

Best wishes, Tom

PS - I find the GC view of feedback confusing too - what they mean by feedback is technically positive feedback withgain less than one, or equivalently an open loop system with gain > 1).

[tomclarke]

intlibber -

read here long analysis of objections to temperature record and how these have been tested and found wanting (though it is indeed a lousy data set)
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2 ... attack.php

PS - includes link to thorough review of urban heat island effect.

PPS - when I look at anti-AGW arguments I get noddy description of possible effect followed by argument from one example. (e.g. one weather station somewhere). Not enough when waht matters is statistical measures of the entire cohort.

PPPS - interesting discussion of Watts efforts

skeptics working on it

Anthony Watts at surfacestations.org has been looking at US surface stations. With a team of dedicated skeptics he's been collecting photos and data on weather stations that are likely biased by local conditions (biased upwards temps), on the premise that the US temp record fails to properly account for the UHI effect.
Watts and his team have collected a good number of sites they think are of good standard. At the time of this post [transferred from illconsidered blogspot - posted late February 2008], they're about a third of the way through the project.

They have plotted the US temperature profile using only the sites they think sound, and have compared with the profile as given by the US Climatology Network (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/newushcn.html), which is used by GISSTEMP and HADCRU.

So far, the results provide a very good fit.

http://yaleclimatemediaforum.org/featur ... surfacetem ...

That article links to climateaudit, a well-known skeptical site run by Stephen McIntyre, which has been working on the data from the 'good' weather stations as determined by Watts' team. In the thread doing the math on the preferred data stations, this is the post (below) where one of the skeptics, John V, compares the surfacestations.org data with USCHN.

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2124#comment-147569

Even the skeptics are getting the same result as the mainstream. If anyone is sincerely interested in this subject, the surfacestations/climateaudit project now spans three threads (the post above is from the second one, which is 300 posts long), and it will be interesting to see the results when they complete their project. [If the results have been updated, I would be interested to know]

As a side note, I consider the discussion going on in this climateaudit thread to be the very best example of the skeptical community putting their money where their mouthes are. It is a substantive, polite investigation, and while they have begun with their conclusion (not very scientific), they are genuine in their efforts. When so much skepticism (and advocacy, for that matter), is couched in ignorance and vitriol, this project champions the best of the skeptical community. Let it be a standard-setter for all sincere discussion on climate change.

And, the US temperature profile looks almost exactly the same when all the urban data is excluded, which is one thing that is done to test for UHI.

[tomclarke]

re CO2 rise not same as IPCC prediction.

Surely it depend which prediction you take since IPCC4 has a range of scenarios based on different CO2 emmissions. But anyway they are not economists and not trying to predict how will CO2 emmissions change.

If you are saying that there are crucial unknown carbon sinks which mitigate CO2 rise all I can say is that rise has been prtty dramatic so far!

The point is that CO2 is a forcing input to GCMs, not a prediction from them.

Tom

[MSimon]

re CO2 rise not same as IPCC prediction.

Surely it depend which prediction you take since IPCC4 has a range of scenarios based on different CO2 emmissions. But anyway they are not economists and not trying to predict how will CO2 emmissions change.

If you are saying that there are crucial unknown carbon sinks which mitigate CO2 rise all I can say is that rise has been prtty dramatic so far!

The point is that CO2 is a forcing input to GCMs, not a prediction from them.

Tom

There is a carbon sink/source that is quite effective that has 50X more CO2 than is found in the atmosphere. The oceans. As the oceans warm they give off CO2 as they cool they absorb it.

Ocean cooling is now of 6 years duration. The CO2 rate of rise is declining.

A long cooling spell could in fact cause the decline of CO2 in the atmosphere despite every thing man can currently do to try to increase it.

BTW you are correct. The PDO is in some of the latest models.

From:

http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/sto ... ?id=525590

Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, reluctantly admitted to Reuters in January that there has been no warming so far in the 21st Century.

You may have heard earlier this month that global warming is now likely to take a break for a decade or more. There will be no more warming until 2015, perhaps later.

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Of course, Mr. Keenlyside-- long a defender of the man-made global warming theory -- was quick to add that after 2015 (or perhaps 2020), warming would resume with a vengeance.

Climate alarmists the world over were quick to add that they had known all along there would be periods when the Earth's climate would cool even as the overall trend was toward dangerous climate change.

Sorry, but that is just so much backfill.

There may have been the odd global-warming scientist in the past decade who allowed that warming would pause periodically in its otherwise relentless upward march, but he or she was a rarity.

If anything, the opposite is true: Almost no climate scientist who backed the alarmism ever expected warming would take anything like a 10 or 15-year hiatus.

Last year, in its oft-quoted report on global warming, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a 0.3-degree C rise in temperature in the coming decade -- not a cooling or even just temperature stability.

[MSimon]

As it stands now, there are no independent climate assessments of the IPCC WG1 report funded and sanctioned by the NSF, NASA or the NRC.

http://climatesci.org/2009/01/13/protec ... ipcc-turf/

[MSimon]

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Did you get that Tom? Why did they wait so long? After all the PDO was known since 1997 or 1998.

IMO: When the PDO was in their favor there was no incentive. Why not attribute natural variation to CO2? You get headlines and bigger budgets.

Once the stagnation/cooling trend could not be ignored they needed to explain it.

Now the question is: have they revised their CO2 sensitivities to account for the new ocean circulation effects that raised temps from about 1980 to 2000? Obviously the climate sensitivity to CO2 will be lower than previously advertised. Maybe significantly lower.

We await further developments.

http://spaceweather.com/

No sun spots today.

[IntLibber]

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Did you get that Tom? Why did they wait so long? After all the PDO was known since 1997 or 1998.

IMO: When the PDO was in their favor there was no incentive. Why not attribute natural variation to CO2? You get headlines and bigger budgets.

Once the stagnation/cooling trend could not be ignored they needed to explain it.

Now the question is: have they revised their CO2 sensitivities to account for the new ocean circulation effects that raised temps from about 1980 to 2000? Obviously the climate sensitivity to CO2 will be lower than previously advertised. Maybe significantly lower.

We await further developments.

http://spaceweather.com/

No sun spots today.

They ignored it as long as they needed to, now they have a president in office who has drunk the AGW kool-aid and will not permit dissension.

FWIW a EU official recently admitted that whether or not AGW is provable, what is important is that Kyoto helps achieve industrial/economic levelling globally. Totally. Proving. My. Point.

[MSimon]

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Did you get that Tom? Why did they wait so long? After all the PDO was known since 1997 or 1998.

IMO: When the PDO was in their favor there was no incentive. Why not attribute natural variation to CO2? You get headlines and bigger budgets.

Once the stagnation/cooling trend could not be ignored they needed to explain it.

Now the question is: have they revised their CO2 sensitivities to account for the new ocean circulation effects that raised temps from about 1980 to 2000? Obviously the climate sensitivity to CO2 will be lower than previously advertised. Maybe significantly lower.

We await further developments.

http://spaceweather.com/

No sun spots today.

They ignored it as long as they needed to, now they have a president in office who has drunk the AGW kool-aid and will not permit dissension.

FWIW a EU official recently admitted that whether or not AGW is provable, what is important is that Kyoto helps achieve industrial/economic levelling globally. Totally. Proving. My. Point.

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, has said the same thing. It is a chance for India and China to catch up.

The funny thing is I'm not sure it will work. We are driving all the high capital and heavy industries out of the country and all we will be left with are brains. And brains are dangerous things.

[MSimon]

India loves the UN's climate change policies and so does India's representative at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri.

Why the love-in? The Indian government's new "National Action Plan on Climate Change," which Pachauri helped craft, plainly explains why: The UN formally establishes that global warming is a matter of secondary importance to India, allowing the world's largest democracy to pursue its own best interests.

As the National Action Plan unapologetically puts it, the UN's climate change convention "recognizes that 'economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country parties.' Thus, developing countries are not required to divert resources from development priorities by implementing projects involving incremental costs."

And India doesn't. Throughout its National Action Plan, India demonstrates that it will divert precious little of its scarce resources to solving the climate crisis. Where greenhouse gases will be curbed -- for example, by aggressively building hydro dams or modernizing industry -- the curbs will be a by-product of India's national security concerns or economic development plans.

The UN's climate change convention is even better than that -- it's a money-maker for India and a lever with which to obtain western technology. As the Action Plan makes clear, there's only one condition under which India need spend a rupee to help curb global warming "--(if) these incremental costs are borne by developed countries and the needed technologies are transferred."

http://co2sceptics.com/news.php?id=1607