By Lauren Morello of ClimateWire
The research, published yesterday in the journal Science, appears to solve one of of the biggest remaining mysteries in climate science: How well do computer climate models predict the behavior of clouds?
That’s important because clouds can work to cool or heat the Earth, depending on the type of cloud and where it sits in the atmosphere. Clouds cool the planet by reflecting incoming radiation from the sun. They heat it by trapping outgoing radiation from the planet’s surface. The question scientists have been struggling to answer is which of these two effects will dominate as climate change intensifies.
“Clouds are really, I would say, the biggest uncertainty in understanding how much warming we’re going to get in the future,” said study author Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. “And up until my paper, all we really had were the models. We had no idea if the models were completely wrong.”
Computerized climate models vary widely in their predictions of how clouds will respond to long-term climate change. A few models predict clouds will be neutral players, neither compounding warming nor counteracting it, while others predict clouds will exacerbate warming.
Some climate skeptics have alleged that models “got clouds completely wrong,” Dessler said. He believes that his paper, which suggests long-term climate change will create a positive feedback from clouds that produces additional heating of the planet, “shows that models are doing a reasonable job as a group.”
A bolt from Cancun
One of those skeptics is Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. He issued a statement (pdf) yesterday attacking Dessler’s study, calling its “central evidence weak at best, misleading at worst.”
Spencer has published a paper arguing that clouds will cool the planet and counteract warming. He drew on that work to argue that Dessler’s study confuses the cause and effect of warming by failing to take into account the idea that changes in clouds drive temperature, rather than temperature changes driving cloud behavior.
Dennis Hartmann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, agreed with Dessler.
“I do think it’s very significant that this analysis shows that a strongly negative, short-term cloud feedback is very unlikely, based upon the evidence, and that positive cloud feedback is more likely,” said Hartmann, who did not contribute to the new study. “Current climate models vary widely on their assessments of cloud feedback. But if you were forced to draw consensus on what models are saying so far, they’re saying that cloud feedback is moderately positive.”
The new analysis is based on the first 10 years of data collected by an instrument flying aboard NASA’s Terra satellite that monitors how much radiation is entering and leaving Earth’s atmosphere. The instrument, known as CERES (short for “Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System"), began collecting information in March 2000.
Dessler used the data to determine how the El Nino-Southern Oscillation weather cycle affected the amount of radiation leaving the atmosphere over a 10-year period—an indirect measurement of cloud behavior and the ensuing climate response.
A 10-year glimpse of cloud behavior
That’s not a precise analogue for cloud behavior in response to long-term climate change, he said.
The latter “is really what we care about,” Dessler added. “In order to understand how clouds are going to respond to long-term warming, you have to wait until there is long-term warming. That will take decades. Looking at the short-term is the best we can do right now.”
Hartmann noted that the warming observed during an El Nino cycle of a year or two is different than the long-term climate change prompted by human activities that produce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
El Nino warms the tropics, whereas climate change driven by greenhouse gases warms the planet up everywhere, Hartmann said. But the scientist said he thought Dessler’s approach still amounted to a “useful diagnostic tool” for trying to understand whether climate models’ representation of clouds is on the right track.
Meanwhile, Dessler said his next step is aimed at identifying how well individual climate models do predicting cloud behavior, by examining their output for different regions of the globe—such as land versus ocean, or high latitudes versus low latitudes.
“This is a significantly harder problem, and it’s a tougher test of the models,” he said. “My hope is that looking at the spatial distribution will allow me to say, ‘These models are doing a good job. These models are doing a terrible job.’”
Interfering with skeptics’ ‘negative impact’?
In his statement attacking Dessler’s study, Spencer also said he suspected, but had no proof, “that Dessler was under pressure to get this paper published to blunt the negative impact our work has had on the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]’s efforts.”
Spencer appeared in Cancun accompanied by Marc Morano, founder of Climate Depot, which regularly attacks mainstream climate change science, and Lord Christopher Monckton, a British skeptic who asserted the Kyoto Protocol threatens national sovereignty and individual freedom.
In a response posted yesterday afternoon on the blog “RealClimate,” Dessler said his disagreement with Spencer stemmed from their very different views about the cause of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), quoting an e-mail exchange (pdf) with Spencer.
“My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research,” Dessler wrote on the blog. “This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO. Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO—based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation).”
He added: “And as far as my interest in influencing the policy debate goes, I’ll just say that I’m in College Station this week, while Dr. Spencer is in Cancun.”
By Lauren Morello of ClimateWire
The research, published yesterday in the journal Science, appears to solve one of of the biggest remaining mysteries in climate science: How well do computer climate models predict the behavior of clouds?
That’s important because clouds can work to cool or heat the Earth, depending on the type of cloud and where it sits in the atmosphere. Clouds cool the planet by reflecting incoming radiation from the sun. They heat it by trapping outgoing radiation from the planet’s surface. The question scientists have been struggling to answer is which of these two effects will dominate as climate change intensifies.
“Clouds are really, I would say, the biggest uncertainty in understanding how much warming we’re going to get in the future,” said study author Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. “And up until my paper, all we really had were the models. We had no idea if the models were completely wrong.”
Computerized climate models vary widely in their predictions of how clouds will respond to long-term climate change. A few models predict clouds will be neutral players, neither compounding warming nor counteracting it, while others predict clouds will exacerbate warming.
Some climate skeptics have alleged that models “got clouds completely wrong,” Dessler said. He believes that his paper, which suggests long-term climate change will create a positive feedback from clouds that produces additional heating of the planet, “shows that models are doing a reasonable job as a group.”
A bolt from Cancun
One of those skeptics is Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. He issued a statement (pdf) yesterday attacking Dessler’s study, calling its “central evidence weak at best, misleading at worst.”
Spencer has published a paper arguing that clouds will cool the planet and counteract warming. He drew on that work to argue that Dessler’s study confuses the cause and effect of warming by failing to take into account the idea that changes in clouds drive temperature, rather than temperature changes driving cloud behavior.
Dennis Hartmann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, agreed with Dessler.
“I do think it’s very significant that this analysis shows that a strongly negative, short-term cloud feedback is very unlikely, based upon the evidence, and that positive cloud feedback is more likely,” said Hartmann, who did not contribute to the new study. “Current climate models vary widely on their assessments of cloud feedback. But if you were forced to draw consensus on what models are saying so far, they’re saying that cloud feedback is moderately positive.”
The new analysis is based on the first 10 years of data collected by an instrument flying aboard NASA’s Terra satellite that monitors how much radiation is entering and leaving Earth’s atmosphere. The instrument, known as CERES (short for “Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System"), began collecting information in March 2000.
Dessler used the data to determine how the El Nino-Southern Oscillation weather cycle affected the amount of radiation leaving the atmosphere over a 10-year period—an indirect measurement of cloud behavior and the ensuing climate response.
A 10-year glimpse of cloud behavior
That’s not a precise analogue for cloud behavior in response to long-term climate change, he said.
The latter “is really what we care about,” Dessler added. “In order to understand how clouds are going to respond to long-term warming, you have to wait until there is long-term warming. That will take decades. Looking at the short-term is the best we can do right now.”
Hartmann noted that the warming observed during an El Nino cycle of a year or two is different than the long-term climate change prompted by human activities that produce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
El Nino warms the tropics, whereas climate change driven by greenhouse gases warms the planet up everywhere, Hartmann said. But the scientist said he thought Dessler’s approach still amounted to a “useful diagnostic tool” for trying to understand whether climate models’ representation of clouds is on the right track.
Meanwhile, Dessler said his next step is aimed at identifying how well individual climate models do predicting cloud behavior, by examining their output for different regions of the globe—such as land versus ocean, or high latitudes versus low latitudes.
“This is a significantly harder problem, and it’s a tougher test of the models,” he said. “My hope is that looking at the spatial distribution will allow me to say, ‘These models are doing a good job. These models are doing a terrible job.’”
Interfering with skeptics’ ‘negative impact’?
In his statement attacking Dessler’s study, Spencer also said he suspected, but had no proof, “that Dessler was under pressure to get this paper published to blunt the negative impact our work has had on the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]’s efforts.”
Spencer appeared in Cancun accompanied by Marc Morano, founder of Climate Depot, which regularly attacks mainstream climate change science, and Lord Christopher Monckton, a British skeptic who asserted the Kyoto Protocol threatens national sovereignty and individual freedom.
In a response posted yesterday afternoon on the blog “RealClimate,” Dessler said his disagreement with Spencer stemmed from their very different views about the cause of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), quoting an e-mail exchange (pdf) with Spencer.
“My position is the mainstream one, backed up by decades of research,” Dessler wrote on the blog. “This mainstream theory is quite successful at simulating almost all of the aspects of ENSO. Dr. Spencer, on the other hand, is as far out of the mainstream when it comes to ENSO as he is when it comes to climate change. He is advancing here a completely new and untested theory of ENSO—based on just one figure in one of his papers (and, as I told him in one of our e-mails, there are other interpretations of those data that do not agree with his interpretation).”
He added: “And as far as my interest in influencing the policy debate goes, I’ll just say that I’m in College Station this week, while Dr. Spencer is in Cancun.”
By Tom Harris and Bryan Leyland
The science has crumbled, but too much money backs the scare.
Climate change” has suffered significant setbacks in the past year. First there was Climategate. Then the Copenhagen conference ended without binding agreements on either mitigation or adaptation. This was followed quickly by Glaciergate, Amazongate, Kiwigate and serious challenges to the credibility of Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Next, professor Phil Jones of the United Kingdom’s Climatic Research Unit (and lead author of the IPCC chapter on temperatures) admitted that there has been no statistically significant warming for 15 years. Then “hockey stick” promoters finally acknowledged that there indeed was a Medieval Warm Period.
These events, coupled with the economic downturn and the education efforts of climate realists - those who take a balanced perspective of climate change - have impacted public opinion. Now, a significant fraction of the public regards the past century’s warming as primarily natural and a human-induced global-warming catastrophe as improbable. So public support for expensive greenhouse-gas-reduction policies has eroded.
Republican climate skeptics have taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives, thereby killing any chance of federal “cap-and-trade” legislation for now. Republican congressional leaders also have vowed to use every trick in the book to block Environmental Protection Agency carbon-dioxide (CO2) regulations scheduled to start on Jan. 2. And, not surprisingly, the United Nations’ 2010 Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, is failing, with Mother Nature helping to dampen warming fears as an early winter sets in across the Northern Hemisphere.
Some commentators tell us that this is the beginning of the end of the climate scare. More likely, it is just the end of the beginning. If this were a hockey game, the first period would have just ended with a couple of quick goals by climate realists. But alarmists built up a 5-0 lead while realists were still learning to play. The score is now 5-2, with most of the game yet to go. While it is appropriate for realists to revel in their late-period success, it is vastly premature to celebrate.
Through the tireless work of hundreds of thousands of mostly unpaid activists, aided by unquestioning journalists, grant-seeking scientists, pandering politicians, opportunistic or naive industries and well-meaning but misinformed citizens, climate campaigners made “stopping global warming” a cause celebre. The warmists’ message was pounded out, free of charge, daily for years: “We in the West are causing a planetary emergency and the poor of the world are the primary victims.” Celebrities, leading scientists and charismatic mega-fauna such as the polar bear were recruited as the faces of responsible environmental stewardship.
As a result, massive donations from left-wing foundations poured in to groups focused on promoting alarm. With unprecedented resources at their disposal, climate campaigners hired communications and legal exerts to help craft long-term, often ruthless strategies to sway public opinion and frighten industry away from effectively defending itself. Meanwhile, throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, nature cooperated. Global warming, later to become “climate change,” was ready for prime time.
It wasn’t long before scientifically illiterate politicians faced intense pressure to “do something to save the planet.” And so, instead of helping educate the public about climate realities or even seeking qualified alternative opinions, they capitulated, signing international agreements prescribing crippling restrictions on “global warming pollution.” Western governments then diverted billions of dollars of public money to help finance climate alarmism, resulting in the creation of countless climate-change public- and private-sector jobs. These bureaucrats then rewarded activists with yet more grants and donations, which were used to push governments and industry to do still more.
Today, climate alarmism is de rigueur “science” in virtually all public schools, colleges and universities. Most mainstream media, corporations, even churches and essentially all environmental organizations promote the now politically correct view of human-caused climate change. Aside from President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, not a single prominent world leader contests the hypothesis that humanity’s CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The fact that the basic science behind the scare is crumbling appears to have no impact on these groups. Instead, science is cherry-picked to prop up public policy that has more to do with pleasing vested interests and satisfying social ideology than protecting the environment.
There simply is too much money and political capital, and too many reputations are at stake for alarmists to back down. After their late first-period letdown, environmental activists have stepped up their campaign to keep governments and media from falling off the climate-change bandwagon. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars are still being funneled into promoting alarm and futile solutions. In the third quarter of this year, the McKnight Foundation alone donated $26 million to the Climate Works Foundation, a group originated in 2008 with roughly a half-billion dollars in start-up funding.
As a result, the worldwide climate movement continues to enjoy significant successes. For example, Australia’s new prime minister has just called for a countrywide price on CO2. Across the world, “climate-safe energy solutions” such as wind turbines still receive billions in subsidies. This has led to soaring energy costs in many jurisdictions, where dangerous brownouts and blackouts await if such programs aren’t canceled quickly and replaced by lower-cost and more effective solutions to the need for more power. See more and comments here.
As we enter into the second period of the climate game, no one should be under the illusion that victory will be quick. Although they are still behind, climate realists finally have earned some respect. But we can be sure alarmists are strategizing to bring the contest back under their control. Now the game is going to get really interesting.
Tom Harris is the executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Bryan Leyland is ICSC’s founding secretary and energy issues adviser.
(Washington, D.C.) - U.S. Sens. David Vitter and John Barrasso today introduced S. 4015, the Public Access to Historical Records Act, which would dramatically improve the transparency and accuracy of NASA’s historical records and guarantee public access to the data.
“Recent incidents, such as the investigation showing that the Obama administration manipulated data to justify the drilling moratorium, have raised concerns that some scientists and government agencies are using misleading data to support their favored viewpoints,” said Vitter. “This bill would open NASA’s temperature records to public scrutiny and establish an objective set of data to ensure that influential climate research is protected from political agendas.”
“Each year, Americans are forced to spend billions of their hard-earned dollars to support climate change research. Since this administration promised to be the most open administration in history, it should immediately share NASA’s temperature data with the American public,” said Barrasso. “There are too many questions regarding temperature models not to allow all Americans access to this data. This legislation will ensure that our nation has the most accurate and transparent historic temperature record in the world.”
The bill by Vitter and Barrasso is consistent with the Data Quality Act, which requires that scientific information from government agencies be accurate, clear, complete and unbiased. The Public Access to Historical Records Act would require NASA and the National Climatic Data Center to immediately release relevant climate data that outside groups have long been attempting to review through the Freedom of Information Act.
The bill would also force NASA to make all of its raw historical temperature data available online to the public and would require the agency to compile an official U.S. historical temperature record with oversight from an independent council of appointed meteorologists and statisticians. The resulting temperature record would be routinely reviewed for accuracy by an independent auditor and would be required for use as a primary source by any scientists or groups accepting federal money for climate research.
By Neil Reynolds, Globe and Mail
The American Petroleum Institute reports that the United States produced more crude oil in October than it has ever produced in a single month, “peak oil” or not.
This reversal of trend helps explain why U.S. domestic production for the year will be 140,000 barrels a day higher than last year (which was 410,000 barrels a day higher than 2008). Although the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says U.S. production will decline next year, who knows?
Could these numbers reflect the beginning of the end for U.S. dependence on Mideast oil? Well, in fact, they could be. As Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes optimistically asserted the other day, the whole world is “awash in energy.”
Mr. Forbes isn’t the only one to notice. As an article last month in The New York Times observed: “Just as it seemed that the world was running on fumes, giant oil fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, and Canadian oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia. In addition, the United States has increased domestic oil production for the first time in a generation.” Further still: “Another wave of natural gas drilling has taken off in shale rock fields across the United States, and more shale gas drilling is just beginning in Europe and Asia.”
Mr. Forbes was explaining why CNOOC, China’s principal state-owned oil company, was paying Chesapeake Energy $1.08-billion (U.S.) in cash for a one-third interest in the company’s next shale gas play in Texas - and paying 75 per cent of the cost of developing it.
Yes, China was investing in drilling technology: China itself has abundant shale gas reserves. But China had another objective. “Within a decade,” Mr. Forbes said, “the U.S. will be a major natural gas exporter.” And China will be a major importer.
The two countries signed an accord (the U.S.-China Shale Gas Resource Initiative) last year to reflect this coming U.S. energy reversal. “The United States,” the accord notes, “is a world leader in shale gas technology.” The accord commits the U.S. to deliver this technology to China - and, by implication, requires China to open further its oil and gas industry to Western companies.
With rising production from shale fields, the U.S. surpassed Russia last year to become the world’s largest supplier of natural gas. Shale now accounts for 10 per cent of the country’s natural gas production - up from 2 per cent in 1990. Chesapeake’ production from its next Texas project, expected by the end of 2012, will by itself supply the energy equivalent of 500,000 barrels of oil a day.
For new oil, the U.S. has the huge Green River play that overlaps Colorado and Utah, one of the largest shale oil fields in the world. The EIA reports that the country’s proven reserves of crude rose last year by 9 per cent to 22.3 billion barrels.
For natural gas, the U.S. has the four largest fields in the world: the Haynesville field in Louisiana (with production up by 77 per cent in 2009); the Fayetteville field in Arkansas and the Marcellus field in Pennsylvania (both with production up by 50 per cent); and the Barnett field in Texas and Oklahoma (with production up by double-digit increases). The EIA reports that proven U.S. reserves of natural gas increased last year by 11 per cent to 284 trillion cubic feet - the highest level since 1971.
Beyond shale oil and shale gas, there’s the awesome energy promise of methane hydrates, frozen crystals of water and gas that lie beneath the northern permafrost and beneath oceans floors around the world in quantities that boggle the imagination.
“Assuming 1 per cent recovery,” the U.S. Geological Survey says, “these deposits [in U.S. territory] could meet the natural gas needs of the country (at current rates of consumption) for 100 years.”
The UN Environment Program describes methane hydrates as “the most abundant form of organic carbon on Earth.” The agency says field testing, in which Canada has been a leader, will be finished by 2015; and that commercial exploitation will be under way by 2020 or 2025. Within a decade or so, North America will almost certainly emerge as the world’s biggest supplier - and exporter - of reasonably cheap energy.
See full story here.
Lawrence Solomon, National Post
Scam artists from around the world, capitalizing on [external] lax regulations at the Danish emissions trading registry, have made off with an estimated $7-billion over the last two years, according to Europol. Denmark’s Office of the Auditor General is now investigating the fraud, which occurred after the Danish registry dropped requirements that carbon traders be documented. While allowing a free-for-all served the carbon market on the short term, by appearing to inflate the interest in carbon as a commodity, it ultimately backfired when much of the trading proved to be phony.
Aided by lax rules, the Danish emissions registry became the world’s largest, with 1256 registered permit traders, most of them fake. As one example, a registered trader used a London parking lot as his address. Following the discovery of the scam, some 1100 of these have been de-registered, leaving scant few traders in the Danish market.
The Danish Minister of Climate and Energy who oversaw the illusory growth in the carbon market, Connie Hedegaard, has since been promoted to the post of EU Climate Commissioner. She is now in Cancun, representing the EU’s interests and arguing for steps that the global community needs to take for the carbon industry to regain credibility.
This story, greatly underreported, came to me via a Norwegian reader, Geir Hasnes, who has translated one of the few press reports to have appeared. His translation appears [external] here.
Read more here.
By Dr David Whitehouse, The Observatory
If the media headlines are to be believed 2010 is heading to be either the warmest or in the top three warmest years since the instrumental global temperature records began 150 years ago, and proof that the world is getting ever warmer. But looking more closely at the data reveals a different picture.
2010 will be remembered for just two warm months, attributable to the El Nino effect, with the rest of the year being nothing but average, or less than average temperature.
With November and December¹s data still to come in (that will account for 16% of the year’s data) the UK Met Office estimates the temperature anomaly (with respect to the end of the 19th century) for 2010 so far as 0.756 deg C. As it has been cooling for the past 4 months we can expect that figure to decline below the 2005 0.747 deg C level and the El Nino influenced 1998 of 0.820 deg C.
2010 will therefore be no higher than the third warmest year, possibly lower.
Warm Spring
What has made 2010 warm is March and June due to El Nino, a short-term natural effect and nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.
January was cooler than January in 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 1998.
February was cooler than February in 2007, 2004, 2002, and 1998.
March was exceptionally warm at a temperature anomaly of 0.971. However it was, given the errors, statistically comparable with March 2008 (0.907) and March 1990 (0.910).
April was cooler than April 2007, 2005, and 1998.
May was cooler than May 2003 and 1998.
June was exceptionally warm at 0.827 deg C though statistically identical to June 2005 (0.825) and 1998.
July, when things started to cool, was cooler than July 2006, 2005 and 1998.
August was cooler than August 2009, about the same as 2005, and cooler than 2001 and 1998.
September was cooler than September 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001 and 1998.
October - the last month for which there are records was cooler than October 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 1998.
The pattern is therefore of an unexceptional year except for a Spring/early summer El Nino that elevated temperatures.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the lack of warming seen in the global average annual temperatures seen in the last decade has changed.
Check the figures for yourself here.
See post here.
By John Vidal, Guardian
Japan refuses to extend Kyoto protocol. ‘The forthrightness of the statement took people by surprise,’ said one British official. Link to this video.
The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancun suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol - the binding international treaty that commits most of the world’s richest countries to making emission cuts.
The Kyoto protocol was adopted in Japan in 1997 by major emitting countries, who committed themselves to cut emissions by an average 5% on 1990 figures by 2012.
However the US congress refused to ratify it and remains outside the protocol.
The brief statement, made by Jun Arima, an official in the government’s economics trade and industry department, in an open session, was the strongest yet made against the protocol by one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
He said: “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances.”
The move came out of the blue for other delegations at the conference.
“For Japan to come out with a statement like that at the beginning of the talks is significant,” said one British official. “The forthrightness of the statement took people by surprise.”
If it proves to be a new, formal position rather than a negotiating tactic, it could provoke a walk-out by some developing countries and threaten a breakdown in the talks. Last night diplomats were urgently trying to clarify the position.
The move provoked alarm among the G77, the grouping of developing countries who regard the Kyoto protocol as the world’s only binding agreement on climate change cuts.
Japan gave no reasons for making its brief statement on the second day of the talks, but diplomats said last night that it represented a hardening of its line. “Japan has stated before that it wants only one legal instrument and that it would be unfair to continue the protocol,” said one official who did not wish to be named.
Japan, which last night declined to clarify its position, has said in the past that it would not reject a new legally-binding overall agreement, but is concerned that it would be penalised if it signed up to cuts while other countries such as India and China were not legally bound to make similar cuts.
Britain and other countries, recognising the totemic significance of Kyoto for developing countries, have said that they would be prepared to agree to a second commitment period - as long as other countries also did so.
“This is a very bad start to the negotiations. The danger is that other countries may want to follow Japan’s example and run away from binding commitments to cut emissions,” said Poul Erik Laurisden, a spokesman with the aid agency Care International.
Read post here.
Snow irony (H/T Steven Goddard and Marc Morano)
Vicky Pope, head of the climate predictions programme at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, was stuck at Gatwick airport this week, a victim of Britain’s brutal cold snap. Ironically, she was on her way to Cancún to announce, together with the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation, that 2010 had provisionally tied with 1998 as the hottest year on record. Scientists from the NOAA and NASA, the two other institutes that provide data on global temperatures were wisely staying put in the US, having already stated that it looked like being the hottest year ever.
By Dr. David Whitehouse, The Observatory
It’s a curious phenomenon that examples of climate ‘forcing’ always seem to occur just before big environmental summits, and that the forcing only ever goes in one direction. The UN Climate Change meeting at Cancun this week is no exception. The UK’s Met Office, among others, released a series of statements and in the Met Office’s case a brochure about climate change. Their conclusion is that things are probably worse than we thought, and in their opinion, is worse than the current science is telling us. I suppose in the face of uncertainties in the science, and contradictory data, touting authoritative opinion is seen as a way to influence important meetings (the Royal Society obviously thinks the same), although it must be said that when it comes to opinion the Met Office track record for accuracy is not shining.
Just four lines of information released in the Met Office’s brochure attracted most of the attention in the media. It seems that there is a case to be made that ocean temperatures need to be adjusted. Prior to about 2002 they need to be lowered, and post 2002 they need to be raised slightly.
Those four lines were:
Changes in the way sea-surface temperatures were measured over the last decade have introduced a small artificial cooling of up to 0.03C over the last decade. This is being corrected in a new version of the Met Office dataset.
The reference for the statement was given as; J. Kennedy, R. O. Smith and N. A. Rayner, 2011. Using AATSR data to assess the quality of in situ SST observations for climate studies, in press Remote Sensing of Environment.
It would be fair to say that the most inconvenient truth in climate science at the moment is that the world has refused to warm in the past decade. That includes the land as well as the oceans and the scientific literature is replete with research that arrives at this conclusion. It’s a topic we have discussed several times in the Observatory, most recently here. Obviously given the importance of such a finding that the ocean temperature dataset needs adjusting it is important to check, and recheck, the data on which it is based.
This is what the Met Office has done showing that recent warming may have been as much as 0.03 C per decade larger than previously thought. But does it matter, and does it justify the headlines?
Despite the unequivocal headlines no mainstream environmental journalist (in the UK at least) did anything other that repeat those four lines, and the associated comments on the Met Office’s press release. Indeed, when contacted for the scientific paper on which those four dramatic lines are based the Met Office Press Office didn’t have it and had to scramble to track it down.
Measuring Temperature
The research paper deals with different ways to measure the sea’s temperature, from ships, buoys (drifting and moored) and satellite-based observations.
They all measure different things. Temperature measurements from ships are the most variable. Some have done it by lowering a bucket (sometimes a specially designed one), which is raised, and the temperature measured and recorded with the time and ship’s position. Some ships measure the temperature of the water engine intake that comes from a different water depth and is specific to the design of the individual ship. Buoys are specially designed to take meteorological readings and sea temperatures but until recently were of a mix of designs each with their own idiosyncrasies and errors. Satellite observations (looking at the infra-red spectra of the ocean) measure something different, the temperature of a very thin slice of the ocean’s surface. When compared to the other data satellite observations have to be converted to ‘bulk temperatures’ which is a non-trivial process with scientific problems of its own.
To investigate the relationship between ships, buoys and satellites the researchers take the satellite data as the most accurate and (taking only night-time satellite observations in the first instance) then look for simultaneous ship-satellite observations as well as simultaneous buoy-satellite data between 2002 - 2007.
The satellite temperature data has an average scatter of 0.14 C. Ship data are less accurate with a scatter of 0.71 +/- 0.74 C when compared to the satellite data. Buoy data are better with a scatter of 0.29 +/- 0.26 C when compared to satellite data. None of these figures are surprising, or particularly new.
Taken together these figures suggest that, when compared to (processed) satellite data buoys tend on average to read cooler and ships warmer. According to the researchers this means that ship temperatures must be depressed and buoys raised. In addition the increasing number of measurements of sea surface temperature from ocean buoys and the decreasing proportion of measurements from ships since 1980 should be taken into consideration.
As the number of buoys has increased, the proportion of ship measurements has fallen. The researcher’s Fig 13 shows this. Click here to enlarge.
The top graph shows satellite data (labeled ATSR) intermittently from 1991. Night-time satellite data is used post 2002, whilst daytime satellite data has been used 1992 - 96. The solid line is the ocean temperature uncorrected whilst the dashed line is the corrected curve.
The correction has been done with reference to the second graph which is the percentage contribution from buoys shown up to 2008 that has been rising steadily up to 2006, with particularly strong rises 2005-2006. This produces a sliding scale adjustment that gets steadily larger up to 2006.
Upper Limit
The researchers conclude that this difference spread across the globe and over the years is sufficient to add a warming of 0.03 C per decade to the HadCRUT surface temperature record. Despite the impression given in the media this is a small correction. It should also be noted that the 0.03 C is very much a statistical upper limit on the purported shortfall in warming. It assumes that the bias in global average sea surface temperature is on the large size of estimates and that the sea surface temperature contributes around 70 per cent of the average global surface temperature.
Superficially then, one can say the temperature in the past decade has been adjusted upward and therefore the oceans have warmed more than was realised. That view however does not take into account the variability in the data, which should not now be ignored, as that was the whole point of the exercise in the first place.
The correction is smaller than the inter-year variability and does not change the impression that there was no oceanic warming before 1997 and after 2002, after which there is if anything a slight cooling. Also note that this lack of warming occurred when the percentage of buoys rose from 40% to 80% of the data set and the cooling when the percentage of buoys remained constant at about 80%.
To my mind the new corrected data tells us nothing new and nothing that the satellite data when taken in isolation (it is after all claimed to be the best data) hasn’t already revealed.
When the errors in measurements and the scatter in the data are taken into consideration the adjustments, if confirmed and accepted, do not make much difference to way the global average annual temperatures have changed in the past twenty years and in fact confirm the non-warming of the oceans in the past decade.
So the media headlines could have just as accurately have read ‘New Met Office data confirms no warming of the oceans in past decade.’ But that would have meant abandoning journalistic acceptance of authority statements, as well as reading beyond four lines in a brochure.