Global Warming: Denial is a Thing

Roy Spencer is one of the small number of climate change deni skeptics who is also a climatologist. 
He is an Intelligent Design believer, and mistakenly provided data that seemed to show that global warming was not happening, only to discover later that the orbit of the satellite that was providing was decaying and invalidating the data.

In a recent post  Roy complains about the term "denier", and says that those who use the term are "Global Warming Nazis". 

I have responded in his comments section, and have copied my comment here, in case anything happens to my comment on Roy's blog. 


Roy,

As a retired psychiatrist, I would like to respond.

Denial is a real, common and well-recognised psychological defense mechanism that denies painful thoughts, truths, realities, facts, feelings and emotions, associated with aversion to dealing with same.

I regularly dealt with denial in my consultations.

It happens with alcoholics who refuse to accept that they are alcoholics. It happens with skeletal young women who refuse to accept that they have an eating disorder.

We all do denial to some extent, for instance, in forgetting dentists’ appointments.

Anyone who knows an individual who is in denial can see that they have a problem, except when some friends and acquaintances may be sucked in to the individual's belief system.

Every argument, fact or emotional pleading is countered by the individual in denial with “No, but what about x y and z?”

The condition can be resolved, but it needs enormous investment of supportive care, knowledge, wisdom and patience on the part of the community, mediated mainly by psychiatric services.

The critical factor in resolution of denial lies with the subject experiencing the unpleasant reality that is being denied. The alcoholic may need to experience loss of job and family before they join AA. The smoker may need to experience his heart attack before he gives up.

So denial in individual psychology is generally accepted among scientifically trained psychiatrists as a recognisable mental condition.

I leave it to you to decide whether the fossil fuel industry's pain in contemplating loss of profitability might possibly push them in the direction of denial.

Why is the Jet Stream changing?

http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=jetstream;sess=

The extraordinary series of storms that hit the UK in January and February 2014 was due to the position of the Northern Polar Jet Stream. It was stuck in a position too far south. The image above is for 20 Feb 2014, when things have eased up a bit. Over the past weeks there has been a dark streak of wind sitting in mid-Atlantic.

If you click on the link under the image, it takes you to the excellent netweather.tv site, where you can look at a lovely JS forecast every day.

The question is, why is the Jet Stream (JS) behaving like this?

As ever in the case of climate, there is more than one factor at work. Climate sceptics stumble every time on this point. They think that climate scientists think only in terms of greenhouse gases. This is emphatically not the case. They try to gather in as many factors that they know about. Then they try to quantify the effects in computer models, and improve the models until they approach ever closer to reproducing the observed reality.

Jet Stream work is exciting, in that it is beginning to cross the bridge between climate and weather. It is new work, and therefore the uncertainties are high.

There are two main lines of enquiry: the impact of Arctic Warming on the JS, and the effect of the weakening sun.

Arctic Warming.

In 2012, Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus published Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes. They suggested that the fact that the Arctic was warming faster than the rest of the atmosphere weakens the temperature gradient between mid latitude air and Arctic air. This causes the Jet Stream to become more wavy, pushing great loops further south, which also tend to get stuck in one position. This is a good explanations for many extreme weather events not just in 2014, but over the past few years, not least the dull wet summers we had in the UK 2011/2012.

Elisabeth Barnes (EB)  tested the hypothesis and claimed it was wrong, and that Jennifer Francis (JF) had misinterpreted some aspects of the data.

JF came back at EB, and claims that Barnes’ work actually backs up her theory, rather than refuting it. Her reasoning is on this page, and it seems convincing. EB was being overly critical.

Screen and Simmonds also failed to give JFs work a full confirmation. They concluded
" possible connections between Arctic amplification and planetary waves, and implications of these, are sensitive to how waves are conceptualized. The contrasting meridional (N-S) and zonal (E-W) amplitude trends have different and complex possible implications for mid-latitude weather, and we encourage further work".

In short, there is a normal interchange of scientific discussion about a new hypothesis.


Weakening Solar Activity

Another possible factor is that the Sun is entering a weaker, less active phase.

Here is a long term look back at sunspot numbers:

It suggests that the Sun is entering a cool patch.

Here is a plot of Solar activity since 1885 (red), with temperature (blue) just to show how poor the relation is between solar activity and global temperature.

However, Mike Lockwood of Reading, a solar scientist, finds that solar activity is falling very rapidly. Below is an image created on the excellent www.WoodforTrees.org site. It is from 1975 onwards, and shows sunspots in green, Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) in red (they are both indices of solar activity) and global temperature in blue. Clearly there is a pretty significant falling off in solar activity. This falling off probably accounts for part of the hiatus in global warming that we are experiencing. Deniers are predicting that it will usher in a new Ice Age, but the greenhouse forcing is stronger than the reduction in solar forcing, so it is unlikely that we will see Ice Fairs on the Thames again.

What Mike Lockwood finds is that in periods of low solar activity, the Jet Stream over Europe is more likely to get "blocked" - stuck in one place. "We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect. "

Conclusion

This is not a case of either-or, of either a cool sun and Arctic warming. Both hypotheses are under examination, and of course, in science, hypotheses are never "Proved", only "not-yet-disproved".

Global weather is certainly weird, that is a fact. There must be a cause or causes for this fact. Whatever the final outcome, global warming is a problem, one that is bound to affect our weather in the end. Sea level is rising, rainfall is intensifying, that is undeniable. If it is concluded that warming is a significant factor in Jet Stream aberrations, surely even mainstream politicians will see that it is time for us to stop messing about with atmospheric chemistry, and make the transition to a carbon free world economy.

Incontrovertible proof that Bad Things Are Not Happening

[click on the pic to see full size]

Extreme Weather: Can We See What It Is Yet?

It is not just us here in the UK having a hard time with the weather.

Let's make a list, summarised from the excellent EcoNews:
(this list is subject to updates)

1. UK: heaviest rainfall for 250 years, widespread flooding
2. France and Italy also affected by flooding
3. Western United States: worst drought in 500 years. Wildfires.
4. Akaska, record high temperatures, triggering avalanches
5. Australia: fourth hottest summer ever.
6. Brazil, Sao Paolo: heat, drought, water shortages
7. Bolivia: flooding and landslides
8. Indonesia: flooding
9. Mozambique: flooding
10. Romania: heavy snowfall.
11. Slovenia: ice
12. Swaziland: rains failed, people starving
13. Water shortages in Kosov@
14. Heavy rain and floods follow drought in Zimbabwe 
15. Japan gets heaviest snow in a century

Going a bit further back into 2013 :

• USA: Record freeze from Polar Vortex problems
• Haiyan, whose intensity was augmented by unusually warm deeper ocean water
  
  and so on.

We could go further back, but we need methodical attribution studies to make a scientifically credible case that connects climate and actual identifiable weather events. There may be other factors, notably the state of the oceans and the quietness of the Sun, but it is unreasonable to suppose that the ever-increasing levels of greenhouse gases are not involved.

On the other hand, as human beings, surely we can begin to join the dots, and see that a pattern is forming?

The connection between global warming and the current floods in the UK

How is the extreme stormy weather we have been getting in the UK related to global warming?

There is a mass of information out there, which I will now try to put it into a brief, comprehensible sequence.

First, sea levels are clearly, undoubtedly rising. Around the UK the change has been 15 cm since 1920 in Newlyn, Cornwall. This process will undoubtedly increase overtopping of sea defences.

Second, there is no doubt that rainfall patterns have changed in line with climate science predictions: warmer air can hold more water vapour, and rainfall is more intense.

Climate science predicts that increased flooding will happen everywhere in the UK, and this prediction is borne out by what we are now observing.

Studies show that the events we are looking at in Somerset are part of a trend.

1. It has been found that there are general trends of increased volume of rainfall and runoff in winter. 
2. Flood risk and vulnerability are increasing with increased frequency of occurrence of extreme events due to climate change &c. 
3. Over the past 100 years the intensity of UK precipitation has increased during winter, and to a lesser extend also during spring and autumn [Abstract]
4. Long term global records show an increase in extreme precipitation

Third, the Jet Stream position and shape is changing

Francis and Vavrus' work suggests that since warming of the Arctic is happening faster than the rest of the world, the temperature gradient between Arctic and the warmer more southerly zone is less, which means that the northern polar Jet Stream is forming meandering loops that get blocked in one position, which explains the extraordinary long series of storms that have hit us in the early part of 2014. It also explains some of the miserable summers we have had recently.

Note also that the recent extreme weather has not been restricted to the UK. There are eleven other major cases of extreme weather going on.

In more detail:

1. Warming causes the height of the troposphere to increase.
2. The trade winds are derived from air lifted up at the Equator that descends again at 30*N. 
3. Trade wind speeds have doubled over the past 20 years, compared to mean speeds over the previous 80. (This comes from the excellent paper by England et al. of the University of New South Wales). Here is a useful summary of the paper.
4. The stronger trade winds have swept warm surface water from the East to the West Pacific, where there is a pool of abnormally warm water, while in the East Pacific there is an upwelling of colder water. (Some of this warmer water is being pushed down, which accounts for a great deal of the hiatus in the increase of global surface warming, as well as the intensity of Typhoon Haiyan).
5. This warm patch of the Pacific feeds moist air into the Jet Stream, according to the Met Office document on the recent storms. 
6. The Pacific Jet stream has become distorted from its usual pattern (Met Office, fig 13). It swings north, then south over North America, bringing Arctic air with it, which caused the recent abnormally cold weather in the USA and Canada.
7. The Jet Stream is speeded up because two yearly oscillation of stratospheric wind around the poles (the QBO) is going in a westerly direction at present.  
8. Also the Polar Night Jet westerlies are twice as strong as usual.
9. Also the warming of the Arctic is thought to be causing the Jet Stream to meander further south (Vavrus hypothesis). The Met Office is still working on evidence for this effect.
10. Also the Atlantic is unusually warm, which adds moisture to the air.
11. Result -an intense, moist series of storms in the UK pushed in our direction by a powerful, too-far-south Jet Stream.

Needless to say, this is an extreme simplification of the science of a vast and highly complex system, but it does show how everything is interconnected on our planetary home, and how warming of the atmosphere can have unexpected effects. 

Every skuleboy kno that Chaos Theory means that the beating of a butterfly's wing on one side of the planet can cause a storm on the other. We have been doing more than flapping a couple of square inches of butterfly. In a couple of hundred years, we have been returning to the atmosphere carbon that was sucked out of it over the course of some sixty million years. 

Time we woke up to what we are doing.

Critique of the Press Complaints Commission Report on David Rose

The Press Complaints Commission's ruling on my complaint deserves a bit of critical analysis.

1) "When reporting scientific findings, publications must often present complex information to a general readership; this may involve an element of interpretation. The newspaper was permitted, under the terms of the Code, to publish such interpretation of scientific data, however strongly disputed".

So newspapers can "interpret" scientific data. This gives a lot of scope to the reporter.  We often hear the interpretation process on broadcasts, as when an expert gives a careful (but often long-winded) statement, and the interviewer says "So what you are saying is" followed by a shorter, more punchy, more black and white statement. This is how news works, with a provocative, adversarial slant in its manner of speaking.

Prof Myles Allen was "interpreted" by David Rose in the article. His account of the "interpretation" is here.

He wrote to the PCC to support my complaint, but did not make a formal complaint of his own, and so his objection was lost.

What we must learn from this is that when speaking to journalists, especially those with an agenda, is that we should insist that we are to see the final draft, and edit or remove bits about us if they are not accurate.

2) The PCC found that the phrase "plotted in retrospect" is not a misleading description of what happens in computer hindcasting. 

I argued in my original complaint:

The word "plotted" implies the action of actually entering data onto a graph, usually by hand. There is a clear implication here that the temperature prior to the present time were merely a representation of known past temperatures.

This is far from an accurate representation of computer model hind-casting, which is what DavidRose is referring to. In hind-casting, computer models are set running, and given information about the dates and intensity of climate "forcings" or inputs. In the most sophisticated models these inputs would be data on solar heating, volcanoes, the reflectivity of the planet, greenhouse gas levels, aerosol levels (e.g. smoke particles from industry), forested areas, grasslands and other relevant information. Given this information, the models will then calculate the effects and interactions of these inputs and the final output would be the net temperature for each year.

There is more, and my conclusion was ...that the phrase "plotted in retrospect" is inaccurate, misleading and a distortion of how models work.

I stand by that. 

3) Next, the Commission takes it upon itself to redefine what is meant by "world's average temperature" in order to exclude ocean temperatures. "It considered that the readers would have understood the figures to represent surface temperature, as experienced in their day-to-day lives". 

This smacks of what is one of the weakest of the contrarian talking points "It is cold outside, so global warming is not happening". Global warming is about the heat content of the globe as a whole - not about what people experience at any particular time and place. 

Ironically, having just make that breathtaking scientific judgment, the PCC confesses that it  "is not the correct body to test veracity of the scientific data relied upon by the columnist".

4) If this is all a bit abstruse, the next bit is not. "The Commission noted that, contrary to the complainant’s assertion, the article did not refer to Dr David Whitehouse as an “expert” in the field of climate change".

In the original article there is a box titled  "And here's what the experts NOW say". Dr David Whitehouse is the second expert, saying "Global warming should no longer be the main determinant of economic or energy policy". 

Try this thought experiment. In that context, would you expect Whitehouse to be an expert in ancient Indo-European languages? No, you would not. You would expect him to be expert in climatology and/or economics. 

The PCC has chosen in this judgment to ignore context, and has simply found in favour of their colleague.

5) The PCC judged that the Mail "was entitled to set out its editorial stance that historical concerns about global cooling are comparable to modern day fears about global warming".

The concerns about global cooling in the 1970s were based on seven (7) papers. There were forty two (42) contemporaneous papers that were concerned with global warming. Yet the PCC chooses to set these seven cooling papers on a par, not just with the 42, but with the thousands of papers in modern times which concern global warming.

This particular judgment is appalling. It reflects very badly on the overall judgment of the PCC and on its competence as a neutral assessor of content of its members' newspapers.

[Update 4/7/13: Enjoy this:  David Rose was taken in by a faked Time magazine cover, which he used as "evidence" that there was concern about global cooling in the 70's]

Addendum Another point has been made by Ed Hawkins, a climatologist from the University of Reading, whose graph Rose used. Rose got the uncertainty ranges wrong. 

Conclusion

The PCC would have made a better play of it if it had allowed just one criticism through - for instance, it could have said that "plotted in retrospect" is just a bit too brief to be an accurate portrayal of model hindcasting. But it did not, and its total support for Rose, and its misjudgment in point (5) above suggests that it is not an unbiased judge.

I made the complaint in good faith, believing that the Press  must not publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information. Some said I was wasting my time, that the PCC would not criticise the Mail, whose representative sits round the table (though not on this case, of course). 

I went ahead on the same basis as the old lady that Berthold Brecht saw in a shop, during the Great Depression. She picked out some food items, took them to the counter, asked the price, then slowly walked away, leaving them there.  

Brecht asked her why she did that.

"I cannot afford food, but if we do not ask for food, maybe they will think we do not want it any more"

If we do not complain, the Mail will think that we do not know that they are misleading us.

I happen to know that the BBC is besieged with complaints from the climate contrarians. We should be swamping the PCC with complaints. As it is, the Mail is top of the league for complaints against it. 

So despite the flaws in the PCC's judgment in this case, we should continue to complain about inaccurate, misleading or distorted information in our newspapers.  Hopefully, post Leveson, the PCC will be abolished and replaced, and we can hope for a less flawed process.

[Useful posting by Carbon Brief on the PCC]

The climate change debate has moved on to sensitivity and 2C

I used to debate extensively with climate change contrarians on Twitter and on the blogs, but I'm more selective recently, realising that many of them are just time wasters.

The contrarians' hypothesis is that our CO2 will not have a serious effect on Earth's climate.

Some claim that CO2 has NO effect on climate. There are the ones who talk instead about CO2 being a plant fertiliser, being a trace gas and other red herrings. They are total time wasters, not worth debating since they deny physical science in the way creationists deny biological science.

Others accept the physics of the situation, and accept that doubling CO2 levels will cause a 1.2C rise in global temperature eventually, when the globe comes to equilibrium (that is, when the ocean has finished taking in extra heat. Oceans are slower to heat than land).

This second group - who call themselves lukewarmers - are worth debating time, since they do at least accept basic physics. The debate with them is over climate sensitivity - the extent to which feed backs will amplify this initial 1.2C rise.

In fact, there is an overlap between the sensitivity figure accepted by climatologists and that accepted by "lukewarmer" contrarians. It is in the region of 2C.

Therefore the debate has moved on, to the nature and stability of the climate changes that will occur about 2C. Naturally the lukewarmers say that these changes will be minor. Climatologists have a more serious view of a 2C rise.

But that's where the debate is at these days.

Cox and Nova present la creme de la contrarian creme

View from Mendip

A recent post here by Anthony Cox and Joanne Nova claims to "disprove" Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). It is a useful post, because it assembles the cream of contrarian argument in one place.

The use of these papers illustrates the "Zombie Effect" in contrarian science: their papers get refuted by climate scientists, but they continue to be quoted by contrarians in the media and in the blogosphere as if the refutation did not take place. The aim is not to establish truth, but to maintain an impression.

1 Lindzen and Choi
They begin with Lindzen and Choi 2011,  dealt with here.

2 Spencer and Braswell
Dealt with here.

3 Ocean Heat - Knox and Douglass
An interesting paper by Knox and Douglass (KD12). Climatologists say that heat is being stored in the oceans. K&D claim to show that more radiative energy has been leaving the ocean than being stored in the oceans.

Their claim is rebutted by Nuccitelli et al  here.
Basically KD12 looked at 700 metres of ocean, whereas Nuccitelli looked deeper, to 2000 metres. This shows that the ocean heat content continues to rise.

 From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).

The figure shows the data used by KD12 as light blue, and the deeper ocean heat content in dark blue. There is no falling off in ocean heat content.

There is more on ocean heat content here, which shows there is more heat stored even deeper than 2000m, and also that the time period chosen by KD12 was badly chosen. The conclusion: "Douglas and Knox is a fundamentally flawed paper, whose conclusion rests wholly upon analysing only carefully selected short-term periods which the authors preferred."


4 Novel theory - Miscolczi
The fourth evidence put forward by Cox and Nova is that of Miscolczi  here  and here.

He uses his own highly complex model to create a new "law" for the greenhouse effect which claims that the effect does not change over time, and then deduces that his law fits the data.

Significantly, Roy Spencer, one of the contrarians who is a real scientist, does not agree with him.

Miscolczi is comprehensively refuted here, and a layperson summary is here. Basically, his "law" does not fit the facts. There is no reason that the greenhouse effect should not vary over time, since it depends on the composition of the atmosphere.

5 Statistics-  McShane and Wyner 2011
These statisticians gave a workover to the material of the Hockey Stick temperature records, and conclude that the uncertainties were greater than is generally thought.

Lazarus summarises here, "the major point and problem with this paper were that the results still showed a ‘hockey stick’ indicating current warming was pretty anomalous and that the authors were not climatologists,"

This is an intensely technical statistical matter, and the nearest I can find to a clear critique is here.
Deep Climate has a fuller and stronger critique here.

RealClimate gives a review here which is a technical discussion rather than a full on rebuttal, appropriately since the paper is a review of statistical methods.

McShane and Wyner conclude “our model gives a 80% chance that [the last decade] was the warmest in the past thousand years”…, so it hardly qualifies for being another FINICOF (final nail in the coffin of agw).

6 The Tropospheric Hotspot
Cox and Nova point to papers which indicate that climate models overestimate the warming that will occur in the air above the tropics as a result of global warming. They cite McKitrick, McIntyre and Herman 2010, Fu Manabe and Johnason 2011, and McKitrick and Vogelsang 2011.

I summarise the response from Skeptical Science here.
This argument hinges on the contrarians' misunderstanding of the prediction of what greenhouse warming will do. The scientific prediction is that the stratosphere will cool while the troposphere warms. Observations confirm this stratospheric cooling - though CFC destruction of ozone is also contributing to the cooling.

Any warming - whether from solar or greenhouse - will increase tropospheric temperature.

Having said that, the models do predict increased warming with height. Radiosonde data (from instruments attached to weather balloons) shows less warming than expected, or even cooling. This may be due to difficulty with the radiosonde data. Radiosondes were designed for weather predictions, not for more long-term climate predictions.

Indirect estimations of temperature from wind data and precipitation shows more agreement with the models.

My opinion, fwiw, is that I feel uneasy about the discrepancy between models and observations, but confident that further work will reduce the gap, either by improving the data, or improving the models, or both. In the end, the discrepancy is not (as contrarians would claim) another FiNICof (final nail in the coffin of agw), because it relates to difficulty in predicting the atmospheric response to warming from any source.


6a Climate shift
I have put this in as 6a because the topic is not given a separate category by Cox and Nova, but deserves its own treatment. It is presented by Cox here.

John Cook has a very helpful discussion on climate regime shift here. The key point is "Climate shifts do not stop the planet's energy imbalance. They merely cause temporary slow downs or speeding up of surface temperature warming."

This is a good point to go look at John's excellent "Escalator", showing the variable nature of the continuing increase in global temperatures.

7 Climate Models  Koutsoyiannis et al. 2008 and 2011
He shows that predictions from four models bear very little relation to observed conditions in specific locations over periods of 100 years.

Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate argues that taking the regional part of the models is bound to invalidate them. "The answer to their effective question – are very local single realisations of weather coherent across observations and models? – is no, as anyone would have concluded from reading the IPCC report or the existing literature. This is why no one uses (or should be using) single grid points from single models in any kind of future impact study. "
He points to a different approach which seem to show a different result.

Here is Skeptical Science on climate models.


Conclusion

I have pointed to a few rebuttals to Cox and Nova's (C&N) best endeavour attempt to refute anthropogenic global warming. 

They have failed to falsify the AGW theory. 

On the other hand, they have not attempted to make their own hypothesis stand up. 

Perhaps because they know it cannot be made to stand up.

What is the #endfossilfuelsubsidies Twitterstorm about?

Everyone knows there was a Twitterstorm today around the #endfossilfuelsubsidies.

A few background facts.

Fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 came to about $775billion. Most was for consumer subsidy in LDCs, but $100 billion went from the taxpayer straight into the pockets of oil companies.

Most go to oil and gas, though coal gets a million here and a million there.

The figure does not include the cost of externalities (health impacts &c) which amount to $120billion in the USA alone.

Fossil fuel subsidies are about 5-12 times greater than those given to the developing clean energy industry, the subsidies which the right wing press make such a song and dance about. It is reasonable to subsidise infant technologies. It is unreasonable to subsidise a hugely profitable, century old industry.

Finally, eliminating these subsidies will get us halfway towards meeting our CO2 reduction targets.

Piers Corbyn on Weather and Global Climate

I have been engaged in a Twitter discussion with @PiersCorbyn, who claims accurate long-range weather forecasting based on solar activity. His methods are secret, and he sells his forecasts to farmers and others interested in weather. He claims 86% accuracy, based on assessments of some of his forecasts.

Piers Corbyn on Weather


I find Piers interesting as far as his forecasts are concerned. The next step in confirming or refuting his claims should be to assess his full forecast stream for accuracy, in order to avoid potential selection bias in the segments of his forecasts that have been examined.

He cannot claim scientific status for his methods because he keeps them secret. One of the characteristics of real science is that all the methods used must be laid out so that other workers can try to replicate the original results.

So there are two separate issues: his claim to be able to forecast extreme weather events based on solar activity, and his contention that the sun, not CO2, controls the global climate.

This argument is based on a common misconception, a belief that climate scientists give CO2 as the sole determinant of climate. They do not. They factor in solar intensity, particulates from volcanoes and industry, ocean currents, albedo and as many other factors as they can. They are open to including other factors as and when they become credible, and it is quite possible that an influence of cosmic rays (related to troughs in sunspot activity) could be factored in to the models in the future.

Piers Corbyn on Global Climate change


Piers puts his argument against CO2 having an influence on global climate here.
Overall, he is talking about very long time periods, and his graphs squeeze out the last 150 years, thus excluding any real consideration of anthropogenic climate change.
His graphs are sometimes unreadable, often they have no source, and rarely show confidence errors.
Being a Powerpoint presentation, they are not self-explanatory.

But here are his arguments, insofar as they can be gleaned, with answers from the excellent Skeptical Science site.

1 CO2 is a tiny fraction of the atmosphere.
True. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), which are not greenhouse gases.
Of these,
Water vapour contributes 36-72% of the greenhouse effect,
CO2, 9-26%
CH4, 4-9%
O3,  3-7%

Water vapour has a short residence time in the atmosphere, about 9 days, as opposed to about 5 years for CO2 which is why CO2 has more importance as a greenhouse gas, since it accumulates.

The natural cycle adds and removes CO2 to keep a balance; humans add extra CO2 without removing any.


2 Solar flares cause weather changes

As above, we can have an open mind on this. Weather is distinct from global climate.

3 Piers Corbyn predicts falling temperatures over the next 20 years
Based on his expectation that we are going to move into another solar minimum. I have written before about this possibility, and we should greatly welcome it, as solar cooling might save our sorry asses by offsetting our CO2 warming, and give us a chance to sort out our act.


4 Climategate means all climate science is to be distrusted.
This common point is answered here

5 Earth history going back 500 million years shows no relation between CO2 and temperature


Piers uses this common figure, below. He does not say where it comes from. [Update: in fact is seems to be derived from the work of the excellent H.H. Lamb, one of the earliest true climatologists. It is bizarre that contrarians still use this early work as a reference point.]

One interesting feature is the dip in CO2 levels during the Carboniferous, which is consistent with storage of atmospheric CO2 by vegetation into coal and oil. That process took about 100 million years, but we have moved a large part of that stored carbon back into the air in our 150 years of industrialisation. 


The best way to understand Paleoclimatology  is by watching this brilliant and entertaining video lecture by Richard Alley. He dives into this whole graph, showing what is happening at every point.

Paleoclimate is very complex, but key is that solar activity was far less in ancient times.


6 CO2 lags temperature

Alley addresses this point at 35:25 in the above link.
It is true that in the warming episodes that followed the Ice Ages, CO2 levels rise after temperature rises.

CO2 and temperature follow each other over the last 400 million years, but CO2 tends to lag behind temperatures by a few centuries. To be honest, there are some rises where CO2 clearly leads, and in most of the upswings CO2 and temperature are far closer than on the downswings, where CO2 fall as a distinct lag.

The Ice Age swings are caused by variations in earth's orbit, which cause slight warming. CO2 release from oceans in response to the initial warming leads to further rises in temperature. In other words, CO2 is acting as a positive feedback in response to solar forcing. The effect of the CO2 is to amplify the temperature swings resulting from solar changes.

In summary, Piers may or may not have an important contribution to add to weather forecasting, but his views on climate change are not convincing.

Extreme weather: is there a link with global warming?

As Britons sit at the end of a dull summer bracing ourselves for high winds created by the tail end of Hurricane Katia, it is natural to question whether extreme the weather may be connected to our driving habits global warming.


I wrote a year ago about extreme weather events. Time for an update.
It is impossible to say at the moment whether a single particular event is down to global warming (though we can say that all extreme events are consistent with global warming theory).

We have to look for trends.

This is what we're finding:

Thanks to Meehl/NACR

In a recent report, Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research finds that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent.  He also finds that record highs are trending ahead of record lows:

Meehl et al, 2009

Hurricanes must increase as sea surface temperatures increase.

And the record suggests that hurricanes are indeed increasing:

These figures and other  interesting facts on this US Global Change Research Program page.

So a picture is emerging. This is not proof: regular readers of this blog (peace be upon them) will know that science does not do proof. But a picture is emerging. 


Strange things are happening to the weather, as predicted by climate science.


The Norwegian Cicero Institute commissioned a report in 2002, titled Climate change and extreme weather events: Is there a connection? In it we find these words:


It’s hard to escape the perception that extreme weather events are increasing... However, extensive press coverage on extreme weather events may be prejudicing our perception of the issue.


Which is true.


Natural phenomena that might explain a possible increase in extreme weather events do exist. For example, El Niño and La Niña are known to precipitate extreme weather events. 


This is also true. 


However, warm El Nino events are on an increasing trend, again, consistent with climate science:

Their conclusion:
No clear consensus exists linking the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events to changes in climate patterns, but it would be reckless to not expect that climate change will have some impact on extreme weather events.


That was in 2002. Nine years later, it seems, unfortunately, that we are slowly moving closer to a consensus.


[update 27 Aug 2012] 
here is a pretty good match between hurricane intensity and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (a measure of temperature of the Atlantic)

Data courtesy of NOAA and Landsea et al. 2010.

[update 5/9/13

Here is a link to US extreme weather index. Clear evidence of a recent increase: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/cei/dk-step4.ytd.gif ]

Some commenters have said there is no point in continuing the climate debate because the sceptics are unchangeable. While this may be true, we must try to present the reality to journalists and general public. In a nutshell:

• 97% of scientists believe we have a problem
• 50% of Joe Public thinks we have a problem.
  
• This doubt is holding politicians back from acting seriously over decarbonisation.
• The main explanation for this state of affairs:
  a) denial is a natural reaction to any serious problem, so the uncommitted will tend to accept the "no change" argument
  b) the carbon companies have mobilised to cast doubt on the science with a masterly propaganda exercise in which they have dominated both right leaning newspapers and the blogosphere.
  c) free market ideology is incompatible with a co-operative global effort to decarbonise the economy, so the free marketeers have joined with the carbon companies
  

There has been a failure of the media to communicate the thinking of , because they always feel the need to "balance" the 97% scientists with the 3% sceptics, who are expert in the production of what is in the main an endless set of anecdotes and special pleadings.

This controversy could be resolved by showing that the position held by the sceptics is refuted by some important facts.
The debate is thus reeled in from an infinity of niceties about dendrochronology, cosmic rays &c, to a single question:

What is the most probable effect that CO2 has have on global temperatures?

Though the science is dauntingly complex, the background can be explained by well written documentaries and articles.

To get to a public debate (perhaps a series, round the country, culminating in a Council of Trent type decision, we need first to elucidate their core case.

It is most probably this:

"The climate sensitivity to CO2 is less than 1.5*C".

The debate is now focussed on one central statement. If it can be fully substantiated, we can all relax. If on the other hand it can be refuted, in the minds of the scientific community and intelligent people who can follow the debate, the doubt can be resolved, and humanity can set about transforming the global economy to renewable energy. If the debate is inconclusive, the council must specify the additional work that must be done to resolve the question.

Correspondence with an AGW sceptic

Today's I am firing emails to anyone I can find, regarding the refutability of the AGW sceptic's position. 


I've had a further exchange with Benny Peiser, continuing from this post:

Benny says:

As an agnostic on the theory of anthropogenic global warming, I do not
hold a position that can be refuted. I am completely open-minded in this
respect and guided in my assessment by empirical evidence, not by computer
modelling.

Perhaps I should return your question and ask you: what evidence would be
required to falsify the theory anthropogenic global warming?

With best regards

Benny Peiser 

To which I reply:

We are discussing a matter of science. Agnosticism relates to religious belief.

You have taken a position. If your position is scientific, it must be refutable.  If it is not refutable, it must be a matter of belief or ideology.

In a spirit of helpfulness, I suggest that your position is that climate sensitivity to CO2 is less than 1.5*C.

If not that, then what is your hypothesis?

Regarding computer modelling, would you be safisfied if the calculations were carried out by hand, as they were in the pre-computer days?

I am prepared to list the conditions that would refute our position, and will share them when you have provided your refutable hypothesis.

Cheers
Richard

On 15/06/2011 12:43, Benny Peiser wrote:

You say that I have taken a position. Would you be inclined to tell me

what that position is? I certainly have no position on the thorny issue of

climate sensitivity which is a contentious issue among climate scientists.

 Neither do I adhere to any other hypothesis.

Yes, the emission of greenhouse gases have a warming effect. But the magnitude and speed of this warming remains uncertain, as does the extend

of natural factors that compete and may even eclipse anthropogenic global

 warming.

With best regards

 Benny Peiser

To which I have replied:

It is odd for me to have to inform you what your position is.

It seems from what you have said that your position is that anthropogenic GH gases do not have a significant effect on global climate.

If your position is scientific, there must be a testable hypothesis underlying that position. I am trying to help you define that hypothesis, in order to define what set of observations  would be effective in refuting your hypothesis, and thereby confirm scientific status for your statements.

All parties to this debate accept that there are several other factors influencing global warming, including the sun, volcanoes, ocean currents and albedo.

Uncertainty is inherent in all science, and is managed by providing ranges in all figures.

I note that you accept that GHGs have a small warming effect rather than a significant one. To arrive at that conclusion, it seems that either you reject the basic physics of CO2 and infra red radiation, or the extent of increase in anthropogenice CO2 and other GHGs is less than generally agreed, (both of which would demand major revisions of science) or that your hypothesis is that the climate sensitivity for CO2 is much less than is generally agreed. I'm trying to help you here. Is that your hypothesis? If not, what is it?


If there are no facts that could refute your contention that human emissions do not have a significant effect on global warming, your contention cannot be considered scientific, and would therefore fall into the realm of ideology.

Sincerely

(Dr) Richard Lawson

To which Benny Peiser wrote: Dear Mr Lawson
I'm afraid your's isn't a scientific but a political response. What you are suggesting is that governments should act now, regardless of the potential cost to our economies - and act before we are able to confirm the magnitude and speed of any CO2-induced warming. The problem is that we don't know whether the diagnosed fever is serious, moderate or nothing much too worry about (at current low levels). I guess that's at the bottom of the political stalemate - but it is not a scientific validity test. That, I'm afraid, will take quite some time. With best regards
Benny Peiser


My response:


 Dear Mr Benny Peiser

The vast majority of atmospheric "doctors" are persuaded that the condition is serious and needs treatment.

The small but influential lobby of which you are an important member denies the seriousness of the situation.

The scientific debate precedes the economic decisions.

Our case is scientific, i.e. refutable.

It seems from our discussion here so far that your counter arguments have no scientific status, in that they are not refutable by observation or experiment. You are reluctant to put forward a testable statement of your case.

The nearest you have come to such a statement is the assertion that the effect of CO2 is minor. This can readily be translated into the assertion that the climate sensitivity to CO2 is small, perhaps less than 1.5*C. Such an assertion could be tested. Are you prepared to put that forward as the testable core of your case? If not, what testable statement would you prefer?

If you choose to refrain from any such testable statement, if follows that your case is not scientific, but ideological.

Your argument below is consistent with an ideological case, and can be formulated as follows:

1. The idea of the free market must be supreme in all economic matters.
2. A transition from carbon-based and finite fuels to renewable energy would require interference in the workings of the free market.
3. Therefore the science that drives that requirement must be incorrect.

I hope that we can at least agree with this formulation?

Sincerely

Richard Lawson

On 16/06/2011 10:29, Benny Peiser wrote:
Dear Mr Lawson

I'm afraid hardly anything you allege reflects my own thinking.

You seem unwilling to engage in an open-minded dialogue and seem more
interested in attacking positions that I do not hold.

I regret that you seem unwilling to engage in a genuine debate which
doesn't surprise me given that you are a self-proclaimed Green Party
activist. I suggest that we call it a day.

Yours sincerely

Benny Peiser

To which I replied:

Dear Mr Peiser

If I attack positions that you do not hold, it is because you have been unable to articulate your position, actually inviting me at one point to tell you what your position is.

The bottom line is that you have been unable or unwilling to put forward a testable scientific hypothesis.
Your case therefore does not have any status as science.

I am grateful to you for continuing the debate thus far.

Hopefully this debate will receive more general attention in the coming months.

Sincerely

Richard Lawson

Science: AGW sceptics are reactionaries, not revolutionaries

There is a brisk debate about science occurring below. I have a feeling that what goes on in comment slots is often lost to public vies, so I am bringing this exchange forward. 

Anonymous said:
"There is always consensus in science and most of the scientific community are generally 'won over' by the arguments of the day

Until the Next Big Idea comes along... and they all subscribe to that".

RL: It's not quite like that. There is a process of debate, sure. But it is not an empty dialectic.

Science walks on three legs: Observation, Hypothesis Formation, and Experimentation designed to refute the hypothesis. If the hypothesis survives (often with modifications) a reasonable amount of experimentation, it becomes accepted as the consensus.

Science is not a random walker. Each step or cycle adds to what we know, taking us as it were closer to the truth about how reality works.

New scientific ideas are a matter of pattern recognition, aka induction.

It is very very clear what the pattern is with regard to man made heat trapping gases on the planet.

But there's none so blind as them as will not see, and the oil companies and free marketeers ones who are threatened by climate science, and therefore they will not see the pattern. Their ideology refuses to let them accept the facts, because of the consequences attached to the facts.


I witnessed a cameo of this phenomenon in debate, where an intelligent Green Party member refused to accept the axiom that it is impossible to  expand forever into a finite space, because he saw what this would mean in terms of immigration policy.




In terms of scientific progress, Climate change "sceptics" try to make out they are the valiant vanguard of a new way of viewing climate data, against an entrenched warming paradigm. In fact they are the rearguard of the early 20th century view, which was that CO2 could not affect the planet, based on a misunderstood experiment by Koch to test a hypothesis by Arrhenius. The "Warmists" are in fact the new, revolutionary idea which is accepted by the scientific community, but is struggling to establish itself in the public mind due to the overweening influence of free market ideology on scientifically illiterate journalists.

Here is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News' latest offering, trying to undermine confidence in the latest data, which shows 1998, 2005 and 2010 to the hottest years on record.

Cancun: waiting for the addict to run into trouble...

I feel a bit bad at ignoring what is going on, or rather, not going on, at Cancun. I have really given up hoping that Governments are going to do anything rational and realistic about the biggest problem that humanity has ever faced in its entire history. Not at the moment, not until a rapid acceleration in global warming takes place over the next decade, and not until a succession of adverse events, compatible with global warming, take place.

The fact is that the economy is addicted to oil, and it is very difficult to separate an addict from the object of his desires by persuasion alone. It can be done, but generally you have to wait for the addict to undergo an adverse experience connected with his addiction.

Stuff is happening now, consistent with AGW, but it is going to take more.

This is all very sad.

However, the good people at FEASTA are engaging their minds with the problem, and have a useful notion in Cap and Share, that attacks the problem at the upstream end - addressing the mining companies who put carbon into the economy, rather than the many processes that squirt CO2 into the air. Worth a look at their site.

Here is a video. The acting is a bit clunky in parts, but stay with it.

Cold UK weather does not disprove Man-Made Global Warming

Just as the Daily Telegraph letters page reliably has an April entry from someone who has heard the first cuckoo of Spring, so also we should shortly expect letters happily claiming that the current cold weather disproves man-made global warming.

The fact is that despite the abnormally cold weather in parts of the Northern Hemisphere last winter (and now), global data suggests that 2010 is likely to be warmer than 1998, the previous record. Obviously, the full data is not yet in, and a volcano (causing cooling) could cause 2010 to lose out.

The current cold weather in the UK is balanced by abnormal warmth in North America.

[thanks to the Met Office for the graph]

We see a band of abnormal cold blue across Northern Europe and Russia, with warm reds counterbalancing it in other areas.

The Met Office does not mention the Northern Polar Jet Stream, but it is well south of its normal position, north of Scotland. In fact, it is today shooting across the Bay of Biscay. This downward displacement may be due to low solar activity in the last few years, because higher solar activity (and long term global warming) tends to push the jet stream northwards.

Here's the current position of the jet stream.

It is winding down eastwards north of Scotland (easterly jet streams are a bit unusual) then looping back over France.  The blues and yellows denote the jet stream.

So that's why it is cold.


Which illustrates the distinction between weather and global climate. Weather is what is experienced in any specified part of the planet. Global climate is the sum total of temperatures measured all over the planet.

Take a look here at what happened last year: abnormal cold in normally temperate areas, and abnormal warmth in normally cold areas.

Economist needs lesson in energy economics

Over on the Economist, there is an account of the $312 billion global subsidy (mostly in Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran) given to fossil fuels, as compared to the $57 billion subsidy to renewables. They choose to compare the subsidy on the amount of power provided by each form.

Some reports suggest that cutting these fossil subsidies  would produce a 6% decrease in global annual CO2 emissions.


My 2p of comment:


In dismissing the comparison between subsidies to renewables and fossil fuels, you ignore the obvious point that new technologies need pump-priming. I should not have to remind the Economist that all new ventures need capitalisation to cover start-up costs.

You also ignore the historic subsidies over the years that have accrued to fossil fuels.

Renewables are a form of energy income, whereas with fossils, as    E F Schumacher pointed out many years ago, burning fossil fuel is equivalent to using capital as a form of revenue. He proposed a tax on all capital fuels to subsidise the transition to renewables. Again, it is remarkable that an non-economist should be having to point this out to economists.

Also, with renewables, the fuel itself comes free of cost.

Not only do renewables fight climate change, they also mitigate Peak Oil and Peak Gas, and increase our energy security and independence.


They are also diverse and decentralised, leaving us less open to blackmail by groups who can shut down large sections of our energy supply.

To anticipate commentators who will raise the intermittency problem, this will be met with HVDC supergrids and emergent storage solutions.

The case for renewables is overwhelmingly strong. The fact that this is not universally recognised, and that fossils are still receiving subsidies, can only be ascribed to the lobbying power of the fossil lobby.

The energy cost of water

I have long been pondering the carbon footprint of the tap water we so take for granted.  Water is heavy, viscous stuff, and it takes a lot of energy to collect, deliver, and process.

Recently I came across a figure: running a tap for 5 minutes represents the same power consumption as running a 60 watt bulb for 14 hours. Unfortunately I have lost the source for that.

But today I get a figure from the Energy Saving Trust. "The energy needed to treat and pump mains water to our homes, and to collect and treat waste water from the sewage network, is responsible for nearly 1% of the UK's annual greenhouse gas emissions."

OK. The UK Carbon Footprint Project says: The UK's carbon footprint is over 500* million tonnes of CO2 per year. 1% of 500 is 5, so the embodied CO2 in our annual water is 5,000,000 tonnes, right? or 5 trillion grammes? (Correct me if I'm wrong, I am poor at sums).

Now, Water UK says "Each day the UK water industry collects, treats and then supplies more than 17 billion litres of high quality water to domestic and commercial customers and then collects and treats over 16 billion litres of the resulting wastewaters, returning it safely to the environment."

So 33,000,000,000 litres a day, or 12,012,000,000,000 litres a year. Divide CO2 in grammes  by volume of water in litres to get number of grammes of CO2 per litre, right?

 5,000,000,000,000
_______________
12,012,000,000,000
= 0.42 grammes CO2 per litre.

In fact, 1 litre of tap water is about twice that, 0.8 grammes CO2, say, since once it's out of the tap, most of it has to be dealt with as sewage. Of course, sewage also  picks up some rain water runoff.

I should now go and check this against the thing of 5 minutes tap run = 14 hours of a 60watt bulb, but I need to go and have a little lie down after all this calculation.

Anyway, it all goes to prove that we shouldn't poo in our drinking water.

Global temperatures set a new record.

Bad news for human beings of both types, the rational and the climate sceptics. The 12 month running mean of global temeperature has set a new record, despite the fact that we are in a period of cooler solar input. Things will get worse if there is a La Nina (warming oceanic currents) this year, and over the next 5 years as the solar cycle starts a warming upswing.

The full paper with the data is here.

Here is one of the graphs derived from the paper:

Blue curve: 12-month running-mean global temperature.   Note correlation with Nino index (red = El Nino, blue = La Nina).   Large volcanoes (green) have a cooling effect for ~2 years.





Here is a longer look back:

The New Your Times, which has sided with the sceptics in the past,  has carried an editorial calling for action on global warming.

Dare we hope that this means that the mainstream media is at last waking up to the reality of what is happening to our home planet?

Iain Stewart and the Last Ice Age

Graph - grateful thanks to Climate Art.

Iain Stewart is your man for getting a handle on what is happening to our planet. Today he tells the story of how human economics have affected the planet.  Great photography, clear narrative, and few if any annoying habits. Great guy.

It is worth listening to right through, but the thing that interested me is his assertion that agriculture about 7000 BC  released CO2 from soil and forest, and prevented an expected Ice Age.  This is new to me, and of course it is not gospel, it's science, so it may be wrong.  However, looking at the graph of ice age cycles, they all have sharp peaks except the last one. The level area after the last peak, on the extreme right, may be what Iain is talking about.

If the idea that we have postponed an Ice Age by our early greenhouse gas emissions is well attested, then this is another mighty piece of confirmation for AGW theory.

He also dived on some undersea methane emissions. That'll keep me busy tomorrow.