By Marlo Lewis
Months ago, indefatigable watchdog Anthony Watts called out Organizing for Action (OFA) for declaring, in a Tweet issued in President Obama’s name, that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
OFA was invoking a study in Environmental Research Letters by John Cook and colleagues, who supposedly found that 97% of climate scientists accept the “consensus” position on climate change. Cook manages Skeptical Science, a Web site dedicated to debunking climate “skeptics.”
As Watts and others, such as Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, point out, Cook et al. did not attempt to estimate the number or percentage of climate scientists who agree or disagree that climate change is “dangerous.”
But what about Cook et al.’s widely reported finding that 97% of climate scientists believe most of the 0.7C warming since 1950 is due to the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gases? Does the Cook team actually demonstrate overwhelming agreement with that core “consensus” position of the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?
Not by a long shot, argue University of Delaware climatologist David Legates and three colleagues in Climate “Consensus” and Misinformation. In fact, less than 1% of the 11,944 science papers (actually, just the abstracts) surveyed by the Cook researchers express agreement with the so-called consensus.
Of the 11,944 abstracts examined by Cook et al., 66.4% percent expressed no position. Cook and his colleagues claim that 97.1% of the 33.6% of the abstracts that expressed an opinion, or 32.6% of the entire sample, agree with the IPCC consensus position. “However,” contend Legates et al., “inspection of the authors’ own data file showed that they had themselves categorized only 64 abstracts, just 0.5% of the sample, as endorsing the standard [IPCC] definition. Inspection shows only 41 of the 64 papers, or 0.3% of the sample of 11,944 papers, actually endorsed that definition.”
So what is it that 97.1% of 33.6% of the science study abstracts actually agree on? The proposition that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for some unspecified portion of the warming of the past 50 years. And guess what? Just about every prominent skeptic, including John Christy, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, and Richard Lindzen, agrees with that as well. As an attempt to discredit skeptics, the Cook et al. study is a complete bust.
In the Legates team’s press release, co-author Christopher Monckton cheerfully concedes that “more than 0.3% of climate scientists think Man caused at least half the warming since 1950.” Nonetheless, he observes, “only 0.3% of almost 12,000 published papers say so explicitly,” and “It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written.”
Cook et al. argue as if simply establishing a consensus that climate change is “real” is enough to justify “public support for climate policy,” such as carbon taxes, renewable energy mandates, greenhouse gas regulations, cap-and-trade, and the like. But not even a consensus that climate change is “dangerous” would settle the critical policy questions.
The world is a dangerous place, and the resources available to address its many perils are finite. What policy makers need to know is not whether X is dangerous but how dangerous X is compared to other problems, and how many lives can be saved via interventions addressing X versus interventions addressing those other challenges.
Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus project repeatedly finds that many threats to global welfare such as malnutrition, trade barriers, and childhood diseases threaten more lives than climate change, and that proven methods for addressing those problems can save many more lives than can an optimal carbon tax, R&D in low-carbon technologies, or any other climate policy.
Indeed, since even a politically-impossible carbon tax that eliminated all U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions tomorrow would avert only at most a hypothetical 0.2C of warming by 2100, it is far from evident that any politically-feasible carbon tax or emission-control strategy would yield any discernible health or safety benefits.
Finally, Cook et al.’s fixation with “consensus” as a mandate for “policy” disregards the whole problem of unintended consequences. Responsible policy makers consider whether the potential side-effects of any proposed intervention might make corrective action a ‘cure’ worse than the disease.
For example, most people might agree that chemical weapons-wielding Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad is “dangerous.” That, however, hardly clinches the case for bombing Syria’s weapons stockpiles. Still less does it justify launching an Iraq-style invasion. Rightly or wrongly, many U.S. policymakers fear the potential repercussions of U.S. military intervention in the Mideast more than they fear Bashar.
Similarly, many “skeptics” see greater peril to human welfare from coercive de-carbonization than from mankind’s continuing use of fossil fuels. UCLA Prof. Deepak Lal expresses the point with his usual eloquence:
“The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green groups, to curb greenhouse gas emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. To put a limit on the use of fossil fuels without adequate economically viable alternatives is to condemn the Third World to perpetual structural poverty.”
Deepak Lal, Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies at UCLA and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at University College London, in his new book, Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths About Global Poverty.
Lubos Motl
Most of the mainstream media offered us a bizarre “story” in the recent two or three days. The absence of global warming in recent years - well, it’s really 17 years now has been “explained” by the Pacific waters. Problem solved, the belief in the global warming ideology may continue unchallenged, we’re de facto told.
PDO: warm and cool phase
The claims are based on the paper by Kosaka and Xie in Nature: Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling, which is bad enough but I will mostly focus on the journalists’ added spin which is even worse. The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey will be used as my sample but the comments below are applicable almost universally.
The first paragraph says that it’s the Pacific Ocean that “slowed” the global warming and the second paragraph tells us why this research is supposed to be important:
Their work is a big step forward in helping to solve the greatest puzzle of current climate change research, why global average surface temperatures, while still on an upward trend, have risen more slowly in the past 10 to fifteen years than previously.
I had to laugh. The most important insight of the “modern” climate science research is that the world is warming and the greatest puzzle is why it’s not true according to observations. Incidentally, it is not true that one may still find a “warming trend” in the last 10-15 years. One only finds noise and in various subintervals, the cooling and warming trends are about equally represented, as shown many times on this blog and elsewhere.
If you expect that half a degree or a degree Celsius of warming per decade is now inevitable, e.g. because you were brainwashed by the AGW charlatans or because your brain has been damaged in a similar sad accident, then the absence of the warming may look like a “great puzzle”. But what about the approach not to be brainwashed by unscientific superstitions? Isn’t it a bit more rational approach? In that case, there’s no puzzle. The temperatures are doing what they have always been doing: fluctuate by one or two tenths of a degree each decade in pretty random directions; after all, we know it from the historical data from decades when the man-made CO2 concentration was vastly lower than today that the temperatures were doing nothing less than that. CO2 may add a contribution but it’s just small enough so that the CO2-induced change remains more or less negligible relatively to the natural variability for 20 years if not much longer than that.
Isn’t it a more convincing explanation than the program to identify a huge puzzle and then to “solve” it by naming a culprit?
But I had to laugh throughout Harvey’s article, it’s just so utterly stupid and irrational. You would say that some analysis of the role of the Pacific Ocean will be presented as the research of a factor that influences the climate as a whole. Instead, we’re repeatedly told that what the paper studies is the ocean’s influence on the pause in global warming. This completely silly formulation - sometimes with the word “hiatus” replacing “pause” is repeated many times in the article. It’s a classic example of a tail wagging the dog. Climatology and this paper studies or should study the climate (which is pretty much equally likely to change in both directions, as empirically shown all the time), not “global warming” or even “hiatuses in this non-existent global warming”. But a lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth according to the key beliefs of Fiona Harvey.
However, what I found most comical is the suggestion permeating Harvey’s text and pretty much all similar articles that the “bad guy” has been found so everything is fine now. It’s the evil Pacific Ocean. I can’t believe my eyes because a reader must have IQ below 70 to buy this cheap trick. Is it likely that such humans or, more generally, primates have learned to read the Guardian? It is sort of hard to believe.
In reality, these AGW scammers have claimed that the global mean temperature is important, predictable.
It’s neither important nor predictable but they have simply made a prediction 20 years ago (and similarly in more recent years) and the prediction has totally failed. The warming in the 20 years wasn’t 0.6 C as predicted but pretty much zero. The error is 100 percent. It is a complete failure. The theory claiming that the global mean temperature is predictable in the 20-year horizon that makes these particular predictions must be thrown to the trash bin immediately if you’re doing science. If those who have made the predictions haven’t contributed anything substantially better, they must be thrown to the trash bin, too. If they don’t fit the trash bin, they must be at least humanely shot into their skulls. It’s that simple. It’s called science, stupid.
Instead, we’re sold stories about the Pacific Ocean as a “justification” of the failure. It’s no justification. If you totally screw your understanding of the Pacific Ocean, it pretty much means that you screwed your understanding of the climate on most of the globe. The Pacific Ocean covers one third of the Earth’s ocean. In fact, this largest ocean’s area exceeds the area of all lands on Earth. It’s in no way negligible.
So even if you just consider the Pacific Ocean’s contribution to the global average of the temperatures, it is a huge contribution that can’t be overlooked. The Pacific Ocean was this large and this important even 20 years ago even millions of years ago. It is no “news” that the Pacific Ocean was important. The global mean temperatures were always meant to include the contribution of the Pacific temperatures with the appropriate weights. It was the global mean temperature that did include the Pacific contribution that the global warming ideology advocates claimed to predict. They just failed. One may try to isolate which parts of the Earth had larger errors than others but it’s mostly silly because every sensible person agrees that regional temperature trends can’t be predicted for 20 years in advance with currently available tools. That’s why you can’t really say that “just the Pacific” predictions failed. Moreover, the predictions of every region are based on the same ideas so if one region empirically shows you that you misunderstand how it works, you probably misunderstand how every region works.
Now, despite the huge size, the actual temperature of the Pacific Ocean temperature isn’t that important for almost any humans. But almost every elementary school alumnus knew about this fact 20 years ago, too. Nevertheless, the Pacific temperatures have been included in the “important” quantity called the global warming temperature mainly because the contemporary climatologists are obliged to be obsessed with the greenhouse effect that operates more or less equally on every square mile of the globe. The obsessive focus on the (for the actual climate change not too important) global mean temperature that uniformly depends on each square mile of the globe has always been a key meme of the global warming ideology. You can’t just throw it away and claim that nothing about the ideology has to be changed. If you change this thing, you are really proving that it has been rubbish from the beginning.
One may always cherry-pick 1/3 or even 2/3 of the globe where the disagreement with the models is smaller than it is in the rest. But if you claim that a quantity is the most important and you completely fail in predicting it, you have just failed. In scientific disciplines that may be counted as hard science and that have corresponding standards, a hypothesis is really eliminated once any clear disagreement of its predictions with the reality is found. One wrong prediction is enough to falsify an idea. If you want to be satisfied with the agreement between the rough observations of 1/2 of the numbers (that you may cherry-pick a posteriori) and your predictions, then any hypothesis will end up as “viable”.
Moreover, the Pacific Ocean influences the globe by more than just this large area that “directly” influences the global temperature averages. The Pacific Ocean is the cradle of the El Nino/La Nina ENSO oscillations which have been known for quite some time to be the dominant contribution to the interannual temperature variability. If the global mean temperature changes significantly from one year to the next, chances are very high that it has something to do with the El Ninos or La Ninas.
The Pacific Ocean is important at the decadal scale, too. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation describes one of the most important regional degrees of freedom if not the most important one (AMO is a possible competitor) that changes at the timescale comparable to tens of years. In fact, both El Ninos and PDOs are mentioned by many of the articles. But they’re not able or willing to deduce the most obvious consequence of all these insights, and it is the following:
The more you use natural variations such as El Nino, PDO etc. to explain what’s actually going on and what’s being observed, the more important the natural drivers become, the more irrelevant the CO2 gets, the more the skeptics who claim that the climate change is mostly natural are shown to be right (many skeptics have talked about the important influence of the ocean cycles and patterns for many decades and most skeptics today are well aware about the tight PDO-global-temperature correlation in the last 100 years), and the more discredited the AGW doctrine becomes along with its defenders.
Is that really so difficult for Fiona Harvey to understand this trivial point? Do we have to read all the garbage about CO2 that manifestly has nothing to do with any of the important observations or insights and not even with these not-so-important observations of the recent events in the Pacific Ocean?
Even average U.S. and EU politicians are beginning to understand what the hiatus means (why not journalists in the Guardian?) and they want a credible explanation in the IPCC AR5 summary that will be out in one month from now.
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Posted on August 28, 2013
by Judith Curry
My mind has been blown by a new paper just published in Nature.
Just when I least expected it, after a busy day when I took a few minutes to respond to a query from a journalist about a new paper just published in Nature [link to abstract]:
Recent global warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling
Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie
Abstract. Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations.We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r 50.97 for 1970 to 2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southernUSA.Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Nina-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase.
The authors used the GFDL coupled global climate model. They conducted three simulations:
The historical (HIST) experiment is forced with observed atmospheric composition changes and the solar cycle. In Pacific Ocean Global Atmosphere (POGA) experiments, SST anomalies in the equatorial eastern Pacific (8.2% of the Earth’s surface) follow the observed evolution (see Methods). In POGA H, the radiative forcing is identical to HIST, and in the POGA control experiment (POGA C) it is fixed at the 1990 value [natural internal variability only]. Outside the equatorial eastern Pacific, the atmosphere and ocean are fully coupled and free to evolve.
The results in terms of global-average surface temperature are shown in Fig 1 below:
In Fig 1 a, you can see how well the POGA H global average surface temperature matches the observations particularly since about 1965 (note central Pacific Ocean temperatures have increasing and significant uncertainty prior to 1980).
What is mind blowing is Figure 1b, which gives the POGA C simulations (natural internal variability only). The main ‘fingerprint’ of AGW has been the detection of a separation between climate model runs with natural plus anthropogenic forcing, versus natural variability only. The detection of AGW has emerged sometime in the late 1970’s , early 1980’s.
Compare the temperature increase between 1975 to 1998 (main warming period in the latter part of the 20th century) for both POGA H and POGA C:
* POGA H: 0.68C (natural plus anthropogenic)
* POGA C: 0.4C (natural internal variability only)
I’m not sure how good my eyeball estimates are, and you can pick other start/end dates. But no matter what, I am coming up with natural internal variability associated accounting for significantly MORE than half of the observed warming.
Like I said, my mind is blown. I have long argued that the pause was associated with the climate shift in the Pacific Ocean circulation, characterized by the change to the cool phase of the PDO. I have further argued that if this is the case, then the warming since 1976 was heavily juiced by the warm phase of the PDO. I didn’t know how to quantify this, but I thought that it might account for at least half of the observed warming, and hence my questioning of the IPCC’s highly confident attribution of ‘most’ to AGW.
Although this was not a specific conclusion of the paper (the focused on the period 200 to 2012), the conclusion jumps out from their Fig 1 (and my eyeball analysis).
Climate models are notoriously poor at simulating natural internal variability. My recent post Climate model simulations of the AMO provides some insights here. The bottom line is that if I were to pick a single climate model with which to conduct these experiments, I would choose the GFDL model. The interesting thing from a scientific perspective is that specifying the surface temperature in this region seems to anchor the coupled atmosphere/ocean circulations in a way that not only gives a better simulation of global average surface temperature, but also provides better simulations of the variability of key regional circulation features.
How might this anchor work? Well, this suggests a number of additional climate model experiments. But a recent paper by Marcia Wyatt entitled A secularly varying hemispheric climate signal propagation previously detected in instrumental and proxy data not detected in CMIP3 data base. I don’t want to go into this in any detail here since Marcia has a new paper that is almost published, which will be the topic of its own thread. But my idea here is that the network of connections is anchored in a few regions (notably equatorial Pacific, Norwegian Seas, Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas), and numerically constraining what is going on in these regions can anchor the hemispheric circulations.
Checking in with Uncertain T. Monster
After my initial exuberance of reading this paper, I forced myself to step back and ask what might be wrong with this story? Here is what I came up with:
If you accept the following two premises:
* climate models are useful for untangling natural from anthropogenic climate variability/change
* the missing heat is being sequestered in the deep ocean for the past decade or so then an inescapable corollary seems to be:
* the same natural internal variability (primarily PDO) that is responsible for the pause is a major and likely dominant cause (at least at the 50% level) of the warming in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Does this explanation rule out contributions to the pause from stratospheric aerosols, solar cooling, etc.? No, but I am not seeing the potential from these forcing mechanisms to dominate over the PDO given the ‘fingerprint’ evidence.
Are climate models useful for untangling anthropogenic climate change and natural internal variability? I have argued on a previous thread that the answer is no, i.e. climate models are not fit for this purpose. However, the POGA simulations, which seem to be successful at simulating natural internal variability, might be a better framework for interpreting AGW detection and attribution.
Apart from the actual results, the significance of this paper is the novel experimental design. Using climate models to understand how the climate system works is arguably the best use of climate models. Here is to hoping that this paper will stimulate some more interesting climate model experiments.
Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller
Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
According to Lindzen, scientists make essentially “meaningless” claims about certain phenomenon. Activists for certain causes take up claims made by scientists and politicians respond to the alarmism spread by activists by doling out more research funding - creating an “Iron Triangle” of poor incentives.
“How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?” Lindzen asks.
Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.
“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”
“There may be a growing realization that this may not add all that much meaning to one’s life, but, outside the pages of the Wall Street Journal, this has not been widely promulgated, and people with no other source of meaning will defend their religion with jihadist zeal,” he added.
President Obama announced his plan to tackle global warming this summer.
“I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing,” Obama said. “And that’s why, today, I’m announcing a new national climate action plan, and I’m here to enlist your generation’s help in keeping the United States of America a leader - a global leader - in the fight against climate change.”
A recently leaked report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims there is a 95 percent chance that human activity - mostly from burning fossil fuels - is the main cause of global warming.
However, there has been no rise in global temperatures for the past 15 years.
“[T]he cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are, I think, becoming much harder for the supporters to defend,” writes Lindzen. “Despite official whitewashes, the Climategate scandal was a clear manifestation of pathology. Opposition to alarm is having some impact among certain groups including physicists.”
Lindzen also muses that politicized scientific movements may have a natural life cycle before they die out, comparing the about 30 year lifespan of global warming alarmism to the roughly equal lifespans of the eugenics and Lysenkoism movements.
Activists have ratcheted up their claims about global warming as some scientists have scaled theirs back.
“Environmental advocates are responding by making increasingly extreme claims,” Lindzen writes. “Politicians are recognizing that these claims are implausible, and are backing away from both the issue and support for climate science. The incentive is then for scientists to look elsewhere for support. Regardless of whether this will be sufficient, one can only hope that some path will emerge that will end the present irrational obsession with climate and carbon footprints.”