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.
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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.