James Delingpole, the Telegraph
The story so far: with the release of its Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has proved beyond reasonable doubt that it cannot be taken seriously.
Here are a few reasons why: IPCC lead author Dr Richard Lindzen has accused it of having “sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence.” Nigel Lawson has called it “not science but mumbo jumbo”. The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Dr David Whitehouse has described the IPCC’s panel as “evasive and inaccurate” in the way it tried dodge the key issue of the 15-year (at least) pause in global warming; Donna Laframboise notes that is either riddled with errors or horribly politically manipulated – or both; Paul Matthews has found a very silly graph; Steve McIntyre has exposed how the IPCC appears deliberately to have tried to obfuscate the unhelpful discrepancy between its models and the real world data; and at Bishop Hill the excellent Katabasis has unearthed another gem: that, in jarring contrast to the alarmist message being put out at IPCC press conferences and in the Summary For Policymakers, the body of the report tells a different story that almost all the scary scenarios we’ve been warned about this last two decades (from permafrost melt to ice sheet collapse) are now been graded by scientists somewhere between “low confidence” to “exceptionally unlikely;” and this latest from the Mighty Booker.
And there’s plenty more where that came from.
Now, of course, I fully appreciate how the climate alarmists are going to respond to these criticisms: same way they always do with a barrage of lies, ad homs, cover-ups, rank-closings, blustering threats, straw men, and delusion-bubble conferences like the one they’ve just staged at the Royal Society in which one warmist pseudo-scientist after another mounts the podium to reassure his amen corner that everything’s going just fine and that those evil denialists couldn’t be more wrong.
Well, if that’s how they want to play it ‘ fighting to the bitter end for their lost cause like Werewolves in Northern Europe in ‘45 or those fanatical Japanese hold outs on remote Pacific islands - I guess that’s their problem.
But what I really don’t think we should be doing at this stage in the game is allowing it to be our problem too. As I argued here the other week, there is more than enough solid evidence now to demonstrate to any neutral party prepared to cast half an eye over it that the doomsday prognostications the warmist establishment has been trying to frighten us with these last two decades are a nonsense. The man-made global warming scare story has not a shred of scientific credibility. It’s over. And while I don’t expect the alarmists to admit this any time soon, I do think the rest of us should stop indulging them in their poisonous fantasy.
I’m thinking, for example, of this line from the Spectator’s otherwise superb, accurate and fair editorial summarising the state of play on climate:
Global warming is still a monumental challenge…
Is it? More of a “monumental” challenge than global cooling? And the evidence for that statement can be found where exactly? Please. I’d love to see it. Where’s the data that proves the modest 0.8 degrees C warming in the last 150 years has done more harm than good?
It may seem unduly picky to quibble over just seven errant words from an otherwise immaculate 800 word editorial. But it’s precisely intellectually lazy concessions like this that are serving only to prolong a propaganda war that really should have ended long ago.
I feel the same way when I read one of those on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other think pieces from someone on the “sceptical” side of the argument or an editorial in a newspaper trying to position itself as the voice of reasonable authority on the climate issue. You know the sort I mean: where, in order to make his case seem more balanced and sympathetic the author concedes at the beginning that there are faults and extremists on both sides of the argument and that it’s time we all met in the middle and found a sensible solution. (I call this the Dog Poo Yoghurt Fallacy)
This is absurd, dishonest, inaccurate and counterproductive. It’s as if, after a long, long game of cat and mouse between a few maverick, out-on-a-limb private investigators and an enormous Mafia cartel, an outside arbitrator steps in and says: “Well there’s fault on both sides. You Mafia people have been really quite naughty with your multi-billion dollar crime spree. But you private investigators, you deserve a rap on the knuckles too because some of that language you’ve been using to describe the Mafia cartel is really quite offensive and hurtful. Why, you’ve actually been calling them “thieving criminals.”
“But they are thieving criminals,” the investigators protest. “And do you have any idea what it has cost us pursuing this case? Do you realise how hard the cartel worked to vilify us, marginalise us, make us seem like crazed extremists? These people have stolen billions, they’ve lied, they’ve cheated, they’re responsible for numerous deaths, and you’re, what, you’re going to buy into the specious argument of their bullshitting consigliere Roberto “Mad Dog” Ward that they deserve special favours because their tender feelings have been hurt with unkind language?”
It’s time we took the gloves off in this fight - not to escalate it but to stop it being prolonged with this ludicrous diplomatic game where we have to pretend that there’s fault on both sides – not because it’s in any way true, but because the climate scam is so vast and all-encompassing that there are just too many people in positions of power or authority who need to be indulged by being allowed to save face.
Why?
To give you but one example, last week two warmists were given space to have a go at DEFRA Secretary of State Owen Paterson.
Professor Kevin Anderson, of Manchester University, told the Independent: “His view that we can muddle through climate change is a colonial, arrogant, rich person’s view.”
And Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, one of the authors of the report, said: “I find it very worrying that this person is charged with adapting [Britain] to climate change. I do think it is a good idea for whoever is planning for adaptation to have a realistic understanding of what the science is saying.”
This rightly taxed the patience of even the scrupulously non-combative Bishop Hill:
One can’t help but think that politicians’ understanding of the science might be helped if scientists, including Professor Allen, had tried to write a clear explanation of it rather than trying to obfuscate any difficulty that might distract from the message of doom.
Quite. What Paterson said about the current state of climate change is both demonstrably true and wholly unexceptionable:
“People get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries”, he said.
“Remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than heat in summer. It would also lead to longer growing seasons and you could extend growing a little further north into some of the colder areas.”
If shyster professors with cushy sinecures in state-funded seats of academe wish to counter such reasonable statements of the glaringly obvious – statements, furthermore, which are actually supported by the body of the new IPCC report (see above) – then the onus is on them to do so using verifiable facts rather than vague, emotive smears.
To return to my favourite field of analogy – World War II - the situation we’re in now is analogous to the dog days of 1945 when the allied advance was held up by small pockets of fanatical resistance. The Allies had a choice: either painstakingly take each village at the cost of numerous infantry or simply stand back and give those villages an ultimatum – you have an hour to surrender and if you don’t we’re going to obliterate you with our artillery.
We have to take a stand on this issue. One side is right; one side is quite simply wrong and deserves to be humiliated and crushingly defeated. And the sooner – for all those of us who believe in truth, decency and liberty – the better.
By Meteorologist Art Horn
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released their 5th assessment (big report) on how human activity (using fossil fuels to make energy) is causing global warming (that’s not happening). Actually the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) has been “leaked” for months. The SPM is a watered down version of the big report so that even politicians can sort of understand what it says.
The new report states clearly that with 95% confidence, humans are the “dominant cause” of global warming. The only difference in the percent of confidence from the previous reports is that the 95% figure is higher than all the other reports. This higher level of confidence is rather odd since they state that the climate systems sensitivity to forcing from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide is unknown! The report states that “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”. Without a solid understanding of what the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide and other forcings is, the whole “dominant cause” statement has no meaning. It’s a statement designed to inspire confidence in what they admittedly don’t understand.
What they are saying is that they are 95% sure that humans are the dominant cause of global warming but that they are so unsure of how the climate system reacts to increases in carbon dioxide, they can’t give us an “estimate” of how much global warming it causes. Yea, that inspires confidence for sure. Based on that “high level of confidence” we should abandon what works (fossil fuels) and gamble our future and prosperity on so called “renewables” that can’t survive without massive government support.
To further inspire this 95% confidence level we have the musings of the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. In October of 2008 he stated that “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate”. A glance at the actual temperature data at that time shows that there was no such thing occurring. Even earlier in 2007 he said “If there is no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Gee, here it is 2013 and we’ve had no warming since 1998, no increase in the number or strength of hurricanes, the fewest number of tornadoes since reliable measurements began, and despite forecast of a “very active” hurricane season we’ve had only two category 1 hurricanes to date and sea-level rise has not accelerated. Oh, and those predictions of an ice free Arctic Ocean never happened either. Is this a defining moment?
Then to add to the confusion Dr. Pachauri finally saw the light in February 2013. He admitted that there has been a pause in global warming but it would have to last 30 to 40 years before we could say the upward trend in temperature was broken. By the way, we are four years away from being two thirds to 30 years. He also said that “The climate is changing because of natural factors and the impact of human actions (translation: using fossil fuels)” Excuse me? did he say “natural factors?” I thought the use of fossil fuels was the “dominant cause” of climate change. Don’t tell me there could be something other than carbon dioxide changing the climate. You’re shaking my 95% confidence.
I wonder what those natural factors could be. Could it possibly have something to do with the oceans that contain 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere? In a recent paper titled “Recent global warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific cooling” (In other words the shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) to its cooler phase) the authors basically said just that. “Our results say the current hiatus (of global warming) is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La Nina like decadal cooling.” Meaning that the PDO shift to its cooler phase stopped the warming of the late 1970s through the late 1990s. This is rather shocking. If this is true it punches a massive hole in the “humans are the dominate cause of global warming” argument. It seems the authors are saying that carbon dioxide has been dethroned!
This idea that the PDO shift to cooler is responsible for the end of global warming (at least for now) got me to thinking about the other side of the PDO, the warm phase. Now get ready for this radical thought. If the PDO shift to cooler stopped the warming, is it possible that perhaps much of the increase in temperature from the late 1970s to the late 1990s was from the warm phase of the PDO? Ouch, that’s not going to go over very big! And, not to pile it on, but is it also possible that the cooling of earth’s average temperature from the mid 1940s to the late 1970s was caused by the previous cool phase of the PDO? I’m looking out my window to see if “Big Brother” is targeting me with a drone.
The IPCC is confused and desperate. Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the science working group said that the current hiatus in warming could not be predicted because “There are not sufficient observations on the uptake of heat, particularly into the deep ocean.” What he’s saying is that they think global warming is hiding in the deep ocean but they can’t prove it. I wonder if the boogeyman and the tooth fairy are there too? Remarkably, after saying they could not have predicted the current and ongoing cessation of global warming he boldly and confidently predicts “Heat waves are very likely to occur more frequently and last longer. As the earth warms, we expect to see currently wet regions receiving more rainfall and dry regions receiving less, although there are exceptions.”
So although the IPCC admits they don’t know what the sensitivity of the climate system is to increases in carbon dioxide and they could not have predicted the current pause in global warming nor how long it will last, they are 95% sure that it is caused by use of fossil fuels and they know how to fix it. Well now I feel much better! For a while there I was worried that the United Nations plan to take one hundred billion dollars a year from the western counties, you know the ones that caused global warming, and give it to whoever they want was gong to fail. Now I feel 95% confident that the UN IPCC has all the answers and has our best interests at heart.
----------
IPCC’s Artful Bias
The Washington Pest
Every trial lawyer will tell you that the key to presenting a strong case lies in carefully omitting the evidence against you. This is not lying, it is artful bias. Advocacy is the heart of our adversarial judicial system. Each side presents its case in the strongest possible terms, as though the other side’s case did not exist. The jury hears both sides, puts the whole story together, then decides.
Anyone who doubts that the new IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is an advocacy document is ineligible for duty on the jury of reason. So what ain’t they saying? Unfortunately the other side does not seem to be represented. We have looked in vain for the minority report. You would think that for $18 million they could afford one, but that just measures the advocationality of the thing. One side fits all.
Here is just a graphic peek at the missing side to give you the flavor of the game. Figure 2 shows a bunch of bars. Each represents one of the factors that is thought to have influenced global temperature. We see at once that all but one of these bars is human. Most are pretty big, especially the really big red one labeled CO2. There is one tiny natural bar labeled Solar.
There it is. Case closed. The jury can go home, no need to hear from the other side, it will only confuse them. We did it. The prosecution rests, let the persecution begin.
Well not really, as always in these proceedings. A big pile of contrary science is missing here. Good science, interesting science, being carried on by a whole lot of real scientists.
For simplicity let’s divide this mountain of contrary science into three high heaps.
The first heap has to do with this little bitty solar bar. This bar is based on the relatively small amount of variable, direct radiant energy coming from the sun. What is omitted is a huge amount of research going on into indirect and amplified solar mechanisms. The reason for this research is the close correlation between solar variation and global temperature, seen over a lot of time scales. Something is going on but we don’t know what and there are a lot of theories. Google Scholar lists over 500,000 scientific papers on solar variability. The IPCC omits this research because it does not help their case.
The second heap includes little things like the ocean, earth wobbles, etc., that are also thought to heavily influence climate. They get no bar at all, because we can’t measure their influence either, even though we know it is there.
The third heap is ugly but very real. It is research into natural climate variability per se, something that has received a lot of attention. We now know that climate varies all the time, for reasons we do not understand. It has varied quite naturally a lot more than the little bit we are fussing with today. So today’s warming may well be simply the emergence of mother earth from the famous Little Ice Age. But you can’t put a bar on the LIA because we don’t know what causes it. Looking at the IPCC bar chart you would never know there was a LIA, just a lot of human stuff and a bitty bit of sun. That is the truly artful part of their bias, simply ignore what we don’t understand, like it did not exist.
In short, it is easy to argue that humans control climate, if you omit nature. That is just what the IPCC does, and it is very good advocacy. It’s just not good science.
Ken Haapala,Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
NIPCC: The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was established analyze peer reviewed research on climate change and report the findings as objectively as possible. The latest reports, Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science and the Summary for Policymakers are available on the web and the full Physical Science report being printed. They are formatted to match as closely as possible the formatting of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to allow policymakers to make side-by-side comparisons of the reports.
One of the great shortcomings of the IPCC is that it was not set-up to evaluate all the influences on climate, both natural and human. Instead, it was set-up to evaluate only the human influences. This shortcoming should be emphasized in the IPCC reports. However, it is often glossed over.
Often, when exploring business opportunities or new products, private corporations will form two research teams to pursue alternative approaches, say the green team and the red team. The corporations will staff both teams with highly qualified people and give both equal levels of funding. One can think of the IPCC as the green team and the NIPCC as the red team. However, funding levels are vastly different. According to published reports by the US government, the total Federal funding of climate change activities is greater than $150 Billion since Fiscal Year 1993. The small funding of NIPCC is from private contributors who have no influence on the product. The NIPCC reports can be found here.
IPCC: On Friday, the IPCC released its Summary for Policymakers. The report was not yet complete, it referenced graphs that were not presented and will have to be inserted. Therefore, a side-by-side comparison of the NIPCC and the IPCC reports is premature. However, there are some disturbing omissions. As Roy Spencer points out, estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) are missing. Yet, this is the entire political issue. Is the climate sensitive to human emissions of CO2 or not? Does an increase in the molecules of CO2 from 3 to 4 per 10,000 parts of air make a difference in climate?
Further, the report glosses over the fact that there has been no statistically significant rise in surface temperatures for over 16 years. Instead, it asserts a greater certainty in its work than prior reports. It reduced the uncertainty from 10% to 5%, with no empirical basis.
Richard Lindzen writes
“The latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence. It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.”
Prior to issuance of the approved report, Steve McIntyre presented an overview on how the IPCC put itself in a mess, rather than properly addressing the hiatus in warming and the associated discrepancy between model projections and observations. He writes: “One cannot help but wonder whether WG1 [the physical science section] Chair Thomas Stocker ICECAP NOTE: Stocker advocated a 3 to 4 fold increase in gas prices and claimed “… there are still unknowns in our understanding of how climate works, but the ominous projections are “not crystal ball readings” but are based on facts and well-established scientific laws he told the Calgary Herald. The IPCC’s last report in 2007 stated “warming of the climate system is unequivocal"… a “fact” that Stocker said has not been challenged despite the IPCC recent troubles......might not have served the policy community better by spending more time ensuring that the discrepancy between models and observations was properly addressed in the IPCC draft reports, perhaps even highlighting research problems while there was time in the process, than figuring out how IPCC could evade FOI [Freedom of Information] requests.
The purpose of a physical science is to describe nature, and to understand how it works. It is becoming increasingly evident that IPCC science does not describe nature. Yet, the IPCC intensifies its certainty in its work? For these and other comments see Climategate Continued, IPCC Report, and the Summary for Policymakers.
Support EPA? Although a side-by-side comparison of the two summaries will be presented later, one can examine how the two reports support the EPA’s finding that human greenhouse gas emissions, principally CO2, endanger public health and welfare. When announcing its finding on December 7, 2009, the EPA stated that the finding was based on three lines of scientific evidence, which followed the 2007 IPCC report and US government reports:
1. There is a distinct human fingerprint, “hot spot,” of a pronounced warming trend centered about 10 km (33,000 feet) above the tropics. EPA claims this to be the physical evidence that supports the theory than CO2 emissions are causing significant global warming.
2. Indirect evidence that the late 20th century warming was unusual, unprecedented and dangerous.
3. Climate models are reliable for policy analysis. All these models forecast significant future warming.
Based on the EPA’s finding, government agencies have undertaken calculating the future social costs of carbon dioxide emissions, are attempting to control land use by claiming future floods and dramatic sea level rise, and the EPA announced drastic measures for controlling construction of new power plants, which will effectively prohibit the construction of coal-fired power plants without very expensive, untested technology. Thus, it is important to investigate how solid is the EPA science in light of new, comprehensive, scientific reports on climate change.
1. Hot Spot:
IPCC: The IPCC summary does not discuss the “hot spot”, though it discusses atmospheric temperatures. This is a sharp departure from the 2007 report that discussed the hot spot.
NIPCC: The NIPCC summary specifically rejects the “hot spot” because no one can find it. “Observations from both weather balloon radiosonders and satellite MSU sensors show the opposite, with either flat or decreasing warming trends with increasing height in the atmosphere.” (p.7)
2. 20th Century Warming Was Unusual:
IPCC: The last 30 years is “likely to be the warmest 30-year period in Northern Hemisphere in 1400 years (medium confidence) (SPM-3). However, it also states: “Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century. These regional warm periods did not occur as coherently across regions as the warming in the late 20th century (high confidence). {5.5} (SPM-4)” [The late 20th century global warming was not that unusual and largely confined to the Northern Hemisphere.]
NIPCC: “The glaciological and recent geological records contain numerous examples of ancient temperatures up to 3C [about 6F], or more, warmer than the peak reported at the end of the twentieth century.” (p.8)
3. Climate Models Are Reliable:
IPCC: “The long-term climate model simulations show a trend in global-mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2012 that agrees with the observed trend (very high confidence). There are, however, differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 1998 to 2012). {9.4, Box 9.2}” (SPM-10)
NIPCC: “Climate models project an atmospheric warming of at least 0.3C over the past 15 years; in fact, temperature stasis or slight cooling has occurred.” (p.9)
“We conclude that current generation of GCMs [Global Climate Models] are unable to make accurate projections of climate even 10 years ahead, let alone the 100 year period that has been adopted by policy planners. The output of such models should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation until they have been validated and shown to have predictive value.” (p.7) [boldface in original]
Conclusion:
The IPCC Summary fails to support the critical physical evidence the EPA claimed. It weakly supports the other two lines of evidence, ignoring the fact that surface temperatures have not increased in 16 years. The NIPCC Summary rejects all three lines of evidence the EPA offered.
It is sufficient to say that the EPA endangerment finding was premature, at best. At worst, it is completely wrong. The links to the two reports are provide above.
MET Model: Independent scientist Nicolas Lewis and Andrew Montford are questioning a possible strong bias in the global climate model use by the UK MET Office. As described by the IPCC, in the climate models the warming influence of CO2 is off-set, in part, by aerosols, minute particles in the atmosphere, such as sulfur dioxide. Among other things, aerosols promote the formation of clouds. Climate alarmists claim that the failure of the atmosphere to warm with increasing CO2 is due to increases in aerosols. Thus, high climate sensitivity to CO2 is offset by high climate sensitivity to aerosols.
Nicolas Lewis examined the procedures used in running the MET models and concluded that the process does not permit the possibility of a low climate sensitivity to both CO2 and aerosols. The MET office has been alerted about the issue and is under review. If correct, then MET model and procedure have a significant built-in warming bias, which may apply to other climate models as well. Certainly, when comparing runs to observations for the tropics, the climate models greatly overestimate the warming. Please see links under Model Issues
EPA: In Forbes, Larry Bell discusses the recent testimony of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy before the US House Energy Committee. Repeatedly, she was asked about the 26 objective indicators EPA has on its web site for tracking climate change and how the new regulations on new coal-fired will affect these indicators. She evaded the questions and did not identify any discernible health and welfare benefits from the new regulations. Bell concludes: “the apparent goal of the EPA"s current and proposed greenhouse gas regulations is to persuade the international community, particularly China, India, and other developing nations, to follow the Obama administration’s U.S. leadership over an economic precipice.”
Secret Science: In Forbes, Geoffrey Kabat discusses EPA’s evasion of a House committee subpoena to produce data justifying EPA regulation of minute air particles (PM2.5, 2.5 micrometers). These regulations are based on two studies, the Harvard Six Cities Study (HSCS) and the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Prevention Study II (CPS II). Citing confidentiality, and other reasons, the EPA has refused to publish or allow public review of these studies. A separate study by Stanley Young and Jesse Xia of the National Institute for Statistical Sciences calls into question the validity of the two secret studies. There is no justification for basing regulations on secret studies, but such is science at the EPA.
Number of the Week: 0.065C. In an amusing display of mathematics, Lubos Motl calculates that if the atmospheric warming is hiding in the ocean in the layer between 0 to 2000 meters (0-6560 feet), then it would have increased temperatures by 0.065C (0.12F) since the 1960s. He reports that the Argo web site has an estimate of 0.06 C since the 1960s, assuming the instruments can measure that precisely.
Commenting on the calculations, Judith Curry asks: “So, can anyone figure out why 0.06C is a big deal for the climate? Or how all that heat that is apparently well mixed in the ocean could somehow get into the atmosphere and influence weather/temperatures/rainfall on the land? Or is sequestering heat in the ocean a fortuitous ‘solution’ to the global (surface) warming problem?” See link.
Read the full TWTW newsletter with many hyperlinks here