2003

Evidence Confirms Existence of Naturally-Occurring, Large-Scale Climate Change

A new study reviewing over 240 climate studies shows that the 20^th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather over the last 1000 years as has been argued by some scientists. Michael Mann and his collaborators, for example, have published studies using proxy data to reconstruct past global temperatures suggesting that the Medieval Warm Period never existed and that the Little Ice Age was not a global phenomenon. They also argued that the 20^th century was the warmest in the last 1000 years. Their research and the resulting “hockey stick” graph showing significant and anomalous 20^th century warming were featured prominently in the IPCCs Third Assessment Report.

The new study, conducted by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Craig and Sherwood Idso with the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and David Legates with the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware, sets out to answer three questions.

1) “Is there an objectively discernible climatic anomaly occurring during the Little Ice Age, defined as 1300-1900 A.D.?”

2) “Is there an objectively discernible climatic anomaly occurring during the Medieval Warm Period, defined as 800-1300 A.D.?”

3) “Is there an objectively discernible climatic anomaly occurring within the 20^th century that may validly be considered the most extreme (i.e., the warmest) period in the record?”

To answer these questions, the researchers reviewed the extensive scientific literature on the available climate proxy data. “Many true research advances in reconstructing ancient climates have occurred over the past two decades,” said Soon, “so we felt it was time to pull together a large sample of recent studies from the last 5-10 years and look for patterns of variability and change.”

The researchers analyzed numerous climate indicators including: borehole data; cultural data; glacier advances or retreats; geomorphology; isotopic analyses from lake sediments or ice cores, tree or peat celluloses (carbohydrates), corals, stalagmite or biological fossils; net ice accumulation rates, including dust or chemical counts; lake fossils and sediments; river sediments; melt layers in ice cores; phenological (recurring natural phenomena in relation to climate) and paleontological fossils; pollen; seafloor sediments; luminescent analysis; tree ring growth, including either ring width or maximum late-wood density; and shifting tree line positions plus tree stumps in lakes, marshes and streams.

What they found from analyzing many more proxy records than did Mann flatly contradicts his conclusions. “Climate proxy research does yield an aggregate and broad perspective on questions regarding the reality of the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warm Period and the 20^th century surface thermometer global warming. The picture emerges from many localities that both the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period are widespread…. [and] are worthy of their respective labels. Furthermore, thermometer warming of the 20^th century across the world seems neither unusual nor unprecedented within the more extended view of the last 1000 years. Overall, the 20^th century does not contain the warmest or most extreme anomaly of the past millennium in most of the proxy records” (Energy and Environment, March 2003).

Urban Heat in Houston

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is a well known phenomenon that causes an upward bias in the temperature records used to determine whether the earth is warming up. Because concrete, asphalt and steel retain heat better than natural landscapes, cities are warmer than their surrounding areas. As cities grow this temperature bias grows also, making it difficult to determine whether global temperatures are increasing due to greenhouse gases or urbanization. Attempts have been made to account for these biases, but there is simply no way to know whether the methods used are adequate.

New research appearing in the March issue of Remote Sensing of Environment, suggests that the UHI can have a large influence on temperatures. David Streutker with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, used satellite remote sensing to determine the effect of urban growth on temperatures in Houston, Texas. Data was collected from two discrete time periods, March 1985 to February 1987 and July 1999 to June 2001. Eighty-two relatively cloud free images were obtained from the first period and 125 were obtained for the second period.

What Streutker found upon analyzing the data is that the temperature from rural areas around Houston experienced no change in temperature. But for the Houston metropolitan area, “Over the course of 12 years, between 1987 and 1999, the mean nighttime surface temperature heat island of Houston increased 0.82 0.10 [degrees C] in magnitude.” This is a rather striking increase, especially when compared to the general belief that global temperatures have only risen about 0.6 degrees C over the last 100 years. Streutker also noted that, “The growth in UHI, both in magnitude and spatial extent, scales roughly with the increase in population, at approximately 30 percent.” World population has increased 280 percent over the last century.

Irrigation Blamed for Warming San Joaquin Valley

A new study funded by the National Science Foundation suggests that the warming experienced in the San Joaquin Valley in California is due to increasing amounts of irrigated land rather than carbon dioxide emissions. One of the researchers, John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that increases in humidity from irrigation may be the culprit in rising temperatures.

“One of the big issues right now is human-induced climate change from carbon dioxide,” said Christy. “Temperatures in the valley are used to assess climate change, and the typical view has been that if there is warming, it must be due to carbon dioxide, therefore we must reduce the use of fossil fuels. Actually, it appears temperature in the valley could be due to a different human factor, and that is irrigation.”

Night-time temperatures in the valley have risen by about 4 degrees over the past 70 years, according to Christy. The study area contains two million irrigated acres and the resulting increases in humidity may be preventing nighttime air from cooling off. “The evidence shows that if this were a large scale climate change caused by carbon dioxide, it would affect the valley, the foothills and the mountains. But we have not seen these changes in the higher elevations,” said Christy.

Environmentalists questioned the usefulness of the research. Bernadette Del Chiaro, a spokeswoman for Environment California worried that this might derail efforts to suppress energy usage. “There may be multiple factors causing climate change,” said Del Chiaro. “But regardless, there is still the larger problem, which is our dependence on fossil fuels.”

When the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Third Assessment Report (TAR) in 2001, many were surprised that its projections for temperature increases had risen substantially. The IPCCs 1996 Second Assessment Report (SAR) predicted that the earths temperature could increase by as much as 0.9 to 3.5 degrees Celsius. The TAR, however predicted a rise of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C. In a paper published in the Journal of Climate (October 15, 2002), Thomas Wigley with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Sarah Raper with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, ask the question, “Why are the more recent projections so much larger?”

The authors attempt to quantify how much of the change in projections was due to the new emissions scenarios presented in the IPCCs Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, and how much was due to differences in the science used in the climate models. To determine this, the authors plugged the emissions scenarios responsible for the high and low ends of the temperature projections into the models used for the TAR, what Wigley and Raper call the “TAR science.”

For the TARs high end, coal-intensive scenario, the “CO2 concentrations are remarkably similar” to those used for the high-end scenario in the SAR. The biggest differences between the two high-end scenarios are the assumptions about sulfate aerosol concentrations, which are thought to offset warming. “The large aerosol forcing differences arise because the SRES scenarios account for likely policy responses to sulfur pollution…. This leads to substantially lower SO2 emissions than for the [SAR scenarios].” There are also some differences in methane forcing and tropospheric ozone forcing. This exercise revealed a difference in forcing from changes in the TAR greenhouse gas cycle from 0.5 Watts per meter squared (W/m2) at the low end to 2 W/m2 at the high end.

The differences in science between the two reports refer to changes in the way the models handle complex climate processes. So it is not so much a change in science as a change in modeling. To determine how these changes affect the projections, Wigley and Raper compare the low and high-end scenarios using SAR science and TAR science. What they found was that “the effects on concentration projections for any give emission scenario are relatively small.”

In fact, there was actually a reduction in CO2 forcing combined with increased warming. This was due primarily to two thingsa change in a parameter that defines the relationship between CO2 concentrations and forcing and a change in how the thermohaline circulation (THC) was modeled. A slowdown in the THC, for example, would offset some of the projected warming due to higher greenhouse gas concentrations. In the TAR, the THC will not slow down as much as assumed in the SAR.

The result of these exercises reveals that very little of the change in temperature projections is due to changes in scientific understanding or better modeling, but due almost entirely to different emissions scenarios. “At the low warming limit, TAR science inflates the 1990-2100 warming for the [low-end SAR scenario] by around 34 percent,” says Wigley and Raper. “At the high end, TAR science inflates the 1990-2100 warming for the [high-end SAR scenario] by around 4 percent.” The rest of the high-end alarmist projection comes from changes in the worst-case storyline, which has little basis in reality. A full 79 percent of the change at the high-end projection came from the changed assumptions about sulfate aerosols alone, about which we know very little.

The history of science and politics explains a lot about the manifold distortions, exaggerations, and outright hokum that regularly appear in some of our major journals on the subject of global warming.

Specifically, Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (first published in 1967 and reprinted about a zillion times) demonstrates that scientists have a herd mentality in which almost everyone believes in some reigning “paradigm” (in this case, disastrous global warming). Careers are spent proving that paradigm and discounting anything that disagrees with prevailing theory. That’s “science.”

As for “politics,” the two intersect, writes James Buchanan, when researchers find they can sell their ideas to policymakers for mutual gain: If a little distortion is required, so be it. That’s a powerful prism through which we must view so-called “facts”: a throng of scientists acting in concert with the political process.

Prism in hand, we can’t say we were surprised when the science community’s weekly lobbying newsletter, Science magazine, couldn’t stop gushing about recent research purportedly demonstrating that climate models of gloom and doom are right after all and the satellite temperature records reporting precious little warming were wrong.

Don’t misunderstand: Science does also report on scientific research. But anyone who thinks it isn’t lobbying hasn’t read the news or editorial sections and just about anything else in it that isn’t hard science. And any idea that Science is fair and balanced on the subject of global warming can be thrown into the trash along with previous issues.

At least that’s all we can take from their most recent handling of a new take on satellite-measured global temperature data. On May 1, Sciencexpress (a web page where the magazine posts “selected” paperschosen for their “timeliness and importance”before they actually appear in print) featured research led by Lawrence Livermore’s Ben Santer showing that climate models were in better agreement with a newly produced, and as yet unpublished, version of the satellite-measured temperature history that includes a warming trend about three times that of the oft-peer reviewed satellite-temperature history constructed by John Christy and Roy Spencer.

Although the paper itself does not come right out and say it, a between-the-lines read suggests that because the new satellite dataset is in closer agreement with model results, it is likely the more accurate reflection of the actual state of the lower atmosphere. And just in case you didn’t get that message from the paper itself, the accompanying Science press release makes it clear: “A stubborn argument against global warming may be discredited by a reanalysis of the raw data central to its claims.”

Santer used a climate model to discriminate between two versions of the satellite datathe one published by Christy that shows very little warming, and a modified, unpublished version by Frank Wentz that shows much more heating. That was certainly a novel approach because it wasn’t science. In science, we don’t bend data to fit models and then pronounce those models correct. Rather, we bend models to accommodate datathat is, reality.

If Science had any intent to be fair and balanced, it would have noted that John Christy and colleagues published a paper at the exact same time that checked the satellite data the old-fashioned (i.e., scientific) way. He and Roy Spencer compared their record with a totally independent measurement of lower-atmosphere temperature, taken from daily weather balloons, and found the two to be in strong agreement.

Weather balloons are launched twice daily from sites around the world; as they ascend through the atmosphere, they radio back observations of temperature, humidity, and pressure that are used to initialize models of daily weather forecasts. Balloon observations can be compiled into a record of lower-atmospheric temperatures that can then be compared with the satellite measurements.

It is important to realize that the way the weather-balloon data are collected is completely different from how we obtain satellite observations, and thus represents an independent measurement of the same quantity (atmospheric temperature). Of course, as is the case with any measurement, there are complications that must be considered when compiling the raw data.

For that reason, there are several different research groups that have released their own versions of the weather-balloon temperature history. To protect against any accusation of picking only the particular data set that best matches their satellite observations, Christy and Spencer compared the temperature trend during the past 24 years derived from their observations with the trend during the same period as calculated from four different manifestations of the global weather-balloon history.

Figure 1 shows what they found. The trend in their satellite record is 0.06C per decade. The trends from the various weather-balloon records range from 0.02C per decade to 0.05C per decade. In each case, the trend in the satellite record was slightly greater than that in the weather-balloon records, and the match with the two weather-balloon records with the most complete coverage of the globe was within 0.02C. That close correspondence is remarkable: Remember, these are independent observations.

 

Figure 1. A comparison of trends in satellite-measured temperatures (two columns on left) and weather balloonmeasured temperatures (four columns on right, including one equal to zero).

How does the Wentz and Schabel data set compare with the weather balloons? In a word, poorly. So poorly, in fact, that Santer and colleagues, instead of performing such a comparison themselves (as Christy and Spencer did), obviously anticipated the results and instead simply resorted to taking a swipe at the veracity of the weather-balloon data, saying that “As with [satellite] data, however, there is evidence that the choice of the ‘adjustment pathway’ for radiosonde data markedly influences the size and even the sign of the estimated global-scale trend.” The need to crash the satellite data is as obvious. As Tom Wigley stated in the press release from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric research concerning the Santer paper: “The real issue is the trend in the satellite data from 1979 onward. If the original analysis of the satellite data were right, then something must be missing in the models.”

Obviously, the global warming community as a whole cannot take such a possibility lightly. Still, it is behaving in a much more predictable fashion than the climateprecisely, in fact, as Kuhn’s and Buchanan would predict. Faced with mounting evidence, it resorts to increasingly bizarre excuses as to why the models are still right, even to the point of disparaging actual real-world observations when necessary.

The question remains, and since they didn’t ask it, we will: Which do you believe, models or reality?

We’ll take reality every time.

References

Christy, J.R., et al., 2003. Error estimates of version 5.0 of MSUAMSU bulk atmospheric temperatures. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 20, 613629.

Santer, B.D., et al., 2003. Influence of satellite data uncertainties on the detection of externally forced climate change, Sciencexpress,1 May.

One February 27, Christopher Essex, a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, and Ross McKitrick, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph, gave a Cooler Heads Coalition congressional staff and media briefing on their new book, Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.

Essex, who studies the underlying mathematics, physics and computation of complex dynamical processes, raised some very fundamental scientific issues with regard to the science of global warming. Take, for instance, the “average global temperature,” which is a mainstay of the debate. Such a thing doesnt exist, according to Essex. You cant add up temperature and take its average like you can with physical quantities such as energy, length, and so on.

“Thermodynamic variables are categorized as extensive or intensive,” said Essex. “Extensive variables occur in amounts. Intensive variables [such as temperature] refer to conditions of a system, defined continuously throughout its extent.” For example, one could add the temperature of a cup of ice water to the temperature of a cup of hot coffee, but what does that number mean? It doesnt mean anything because there is no such thing as total temperature. Dividing that number by two to get the average doesnt mean anything either. Yet that is exactly what occurs when the average global temperature is computed.

Essex also pointed out that the internal energy of a system can change without changing the temperature and the temperature can change while the internal energy of the system remains the same. “This disconnect happens routinely in the natural world around us all the time,” said Essex. “Ultimately this has to be so because temperature and energy belong to two fundamentally different classes of thermodynamic variables.”

Global warming enthusiasts want us to believe that average temperature can tell us something about what is going on in the climate, but it is just a number with no physical content. To add insult to injury, Essex explained that there are literally an infinite number of averaging rules that could be used, some of which will show “warming” and others that will show “cooling,” but the “physics doesnt say which one to use.”

Essex also explained that the earths so-called greenhouse effect does not work like a greenhouse. “Incoming solar radiation adds energy to the Earths surface,” he said. To restore radiative balance the energy must be transported back to space in roughly the same amounts that it arrived in. The energy is transported via two processes infrared radiation (heat transfer) and fluid dynamics (turbulence).

A real greenhouse works by preventing fluid motions, such as the wind, by enclosing an area with plastic or glass. To restore balance, infrared radiation must increase, thereby causing the temperature to rise. Predicting the resulting temperature increase is a relatively straightforward process.

But the “greenhouse effect” works differently. Greenhouse gases slow down outgoing infrared radiation, which causes the fluid dynamics to adjust. But it cannot be predicted what will happen because the equations which govern fluid dynamics cannot be solved! Scientists cannot even predict the flow of water through a pipe, let alone the vastly more complex fluid dynamics of the climate system. “No one can compute from first principles what the climate will do,” said Essex. “It may warm, or cool, or nothing at all!” Saying that the greenhouse effect works the same way as a greenhouse, which is a solvable problem, creates certainty where none exists, said Essex.

Surely scientists are aware of the issues that Essex brings up (and several other equally devastating points that arent discussed here). If so, then how have we come to a place where the media and politicians repeatedly state that there is a scientific consensus that the planet is warming up, it is caused by man, and the effects will be catastrophic? McKitrick offered a very convincing explanation. He discussed several relevant groups, but well focus on politicians and what McKitrick calls “Official Science.”

Politicians need big issues around which they can form winning coalitions. Global warming is a good issue because, “It is so complex and baffling the public still has little clue what its really about. Its global, so you get to have your meetings in exotic locations. Policy initiatives could sound like heroic measures to save the planet, but on the other hand the solutions are potentially very costly. So you need a high degree of scientific support if you are going to move on it. Theres a premium on certainty.”

This is where Official Science comes in. Official Science is made up of staffs of scientific bureaucracies, editors of prominent magazines, directors of international panels, and so on. These members of Official Science arent appointed by scientists to speak on their behalf, but are appointed by governments. They have the impossible job of striking “a compromise between the need for certainty in policymaking and the aversion to claims of certainty in regular science.” What happens is that science ends up serving a political agenda rather than a scientific one. “If things were as they should be, leaders would want a treaty because they observe that scientists are in agreement. What happens instead is that Official Science orchestrates agreement because leaders want to make a treaty.” The presentation will soon be available at www.cei.org. Taken By Storm may be ordered at www.amazon.ca.

Etc.

On March 13, Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq was interviewed on MTV about his thoughts regarding war with Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. During the interview he stated that, “On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues, they simply must be multilateral. Theres no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way. I regret it. To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. Im more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.” Presumably, the risks of war, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorist acts such as 9/11, pale in comparison to the threat of global warming.