May 2008
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
USA Today reports today that China has become the world's top industrial source of carbon dioxide. But you'd think the newspaper had dragged over their crime reporter to do the write-up, considering the headline: "China Now No. 1 CO2 Offender." More:
China has overtaken the USA to become the world's No. 1 industrial source of carbon dioxide, the most important global-warming pollutant, according to a scientific study to be published today….
Unless China sharply cuts its emissions, "the situation is pretty bleak," says Richard Carson of the University of California, co-author of a study in today's Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. "There's a lot less time to do something than people previously thought."
Clearly this perpetrator needs to be found, read his rights, and then have the book thrown at him. He's become addicted.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
According to one of the authors of that Nature paper, the cooling is not only consistent with global warming — it confirms it:
The authors stressed that the pause in warming represented only a temporary blunting of the centuries of rising temperatures that scientists have projected if carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases continue accumulating in the atmosphere.
“We’re learning that internal climate variability is important and can mask the effects of human-induced global change,” said the paper’s lead author, Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. “In the end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections.”
And if you want to know where to turn when you reach the fork in the road, the answer is "yes!" They all lead to catastrophe.
Isn't it curious. Isn't the self-correcting nature of science wonderful to
behold?
Not long ago anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and
disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the
world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused
of seeing what they wanted to see in the data.
Then if they had the affrontery to point out that that even the UK's Met Office agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental 'activist' dammed my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic whilst at the same time implying I was lying).
Ten years is too short a period to tell what is going on, they said, conveniently forgetting, if they ever knew, that the IPCC itself was established after less than ten years of global warming data. It seems that ten years is enough to be significant if the data says the right thing!
Then some righteous journalists rushed to get the 'truth' out about the flat line because, as they said, 'sceptics' were already using it to ask questions.
Strange then, that over the past few weeks we have seen from many sources people tryin to explain this 'year-on-year' statistical variability by tangible physical effects although so far such are straining to explain the data.
The impeccable flat line in global average temperatures since 2001 we were told earlier this year by the Met Office will continue throughout 2008 because of the cooling effect of La Nina. Now we are told in a Nature paper that the cooling effect of the Atlantic will extend this flat line, and possibly even point it downwards between now and 2015. They say the Pacific will stay unchanged though as we saw on CCNet yesterday there are other scientists who say that the Pacific will get colder over the same period.
So much for those TV commentators who several years ago pontificated that the 'science is settled.'
Also curious is that over the next decade man-made global warming will be
cancelled out by natural cycles. It's nice that Mother Nature (not the
journal) is helping us this way but it does beg the question as to whether
the man-made effect was all that significant if it can be nullified this
way. What else could this unsettled science find to cool us down? Then there
are speculations about the effect of the downturn in solar activity.
In Medieval times if a hypothesis, such as the heliocentric idea, disagreed
with the consensus, then it was interpreted as being a convenient
mathematical trick taken only to 'preserve the appearances' and not an
indication of physical reality.
Who today, I wonder, will history judge as preserving the appearances?
Avril Doyle of Ireland, who based on my past interaction with her I would describe as otherwise a generally sound Member of the European Parliament, offered another in a series of what Americans continue to miss–flagrant admissions and warning flags against doing a particularly reckless thing to ourselves.
As reported in Greenwire (subscription required), she referred to the notion of a trade war against countries reluctant to adopt the spectacularly "successful" EU Emissions Trading Scheme, a form of which all three candidates for president here endorse:
“‘[The trade war option is] very much Plan B,’ said Doyle. ‘We don’t even want to discuss it. … It's just on the top shelf there so the rest of the world knows we’re not going to destroy our economies without them coming on board and helping us.”
Now, we know their Kyotophilia has made them all millionaires from selling windmills to each other. So why in the world would Ms. Doyle say such a thing?
Oh well. Let's do it, too. A folly completely unburdened by any promise of impacting our cooling climate, to be sure. But, as Cyrano might say, "what a gesture!"
As I understand it the solar effect on climate has been discounted by the climate modellers because the variation in total solar irradiance between the peak and the trough of a single eleven year (approximately) solar cycle seems far too small to make any difference to global temperature.
There are a number of problems with their assumption as follows:-
The concept of total solar irradiance is purely a convenient construct. We do not know all the different mechanisms by which the sun can have an influence on global temperature either directly or indirectly. The use of the word "total" is therefore misleading. Even the concept of irradiance is vague and maybe incomplete.
The fact is that in the real observed world over centuries cooler weather has been seen to occur at a similar time to longer less active solar cycles and warmer weather similarly occurs with shorter more active solar cycles. If total solar irradiance does not seem to account for it that is no reason to ignore the phenomenon yet the modellers and the IPCC do so. I assume that the reason they ignore it is because, being unaware of the cause of the observed phenomenon, they have no numbers representing it to feed into the models. Their model output should therefore be qualified by an admission that at least one substantial observable real world phenomenon has been wholly omitted. Unfortunately for them that would render the models useless for policy making purposes.
The IPCC and the modellers do recently seem to have come to accept the influence of the EL NINO/ LA NINA cycle as a warming/cooling process. However they currently regard it as a purely redistributive mechanism rather than one which could actually be part of a driving mechanism. They would be in error if variations in solar energy input to the Earth operated a switch between the predominance over time of either EL NINO or LA NINA.
The variation between peaks and troughs in the solar cycle may be very small but if continued over long periods the effects could soon accumulate. If, say, the difference is only 1% then if a reduction or increase in incoming solar energy continues for many years, perhaps over several solar cycles, then it is the cumulative effect that should be considered and that could well be substantial over a number of decades.
There could also be other unknown mechanisms driven by solar changes that exaggerate the effect of small variations in total solar irradiance. A current possibility being investigated is a suggested link between cosmic ray flux and cloudiness. The flux varies depending on the energy from the sun and may drive cloudiness changes.
It is possible that over the millennia the earth has become a very accurate "thermometer" in terms of its reaction to solar heat or other forms of solar energy input. The entirety of the global heat budget may be very sensitive to solar changes. Over millions of years the earth has arrived at a temperature balanced between incoming solar energy and outgoing radiation of energy to space. The balance could well be much finer than we have so far realised. There are certainly no available figures that describe the sensitivity of the global temperature to variations in solar input and without knowing that level of sensitivity as a first step I fail to see how we can know anything useful about the sensitivity of the Earth to other influences.
For a while now I've been asking climate scientists to tell me what could be observed in the real world that would be inconsistent with forecasts (predictions, projections, etc.) of climate models, such as those that are used by the IPCC. I've long suspected that the answer is "nothing" and the public silence from those in the outspoken climate science community would seem to back this up. Now a paper in Nature today (PDF) suggests that the world may cool over the next 20 years few decades, and this would not be inconsistent with predictions of longer-term global warming.
I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.
This means that from a practical standpoint climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global climate policy. I am sure that some model somewhere has foretold how the next 20 years will evolve (and please ask me in 20 years which one!). And if none get it right, it won't mean that any were actually wrong. If there is no future over the next few decades that models rule out, then anything is possible. And of course, no one needed a model to know that.
Don't get me wrong, models are great tools for probing our understanding and exploring various assumptions about how nature works. But scientists think they know with certainty that carbon dioxide leads to bad outcomes for the planet, so future modeling will only refine that fact. I am focused on the predictive value of the models, which appears to be nil. So models have plenty of scientific value left in them, but tools to use in planning or policy? Forget about it.
Those who might object to my assertion that models are of no practical use beyond political promotion, can start by returning to my original question: What can be observed in the climate over the next few decade that would be inconsistent with climate model projections? If you have no answer for this question then I'll stick with my views.
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