Bishop Hill Counter-sceptics
Sep 1, 2013 Climate: IPCC Climate: Surface Climate: sensitivity In Bloomberg yesterday, it was announced that governments are asking the IPCC to spend more time on explaining away the pause in the imminent Fifth Assessment Report:
They’re requesting that more details on the so-called “hiatus” be included in a key document set to be debated at a UN conference next month that will summarize the latest scientific conclusions on climate change.
And why do they want this to happen? One suggestion for the reason why comes from Vivian Bob Ward:
Including more information on the hiatus will help officials counter arguments that the slowing pace of global warming in recent years is a sign that the long-term trend may be discounted, according to Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
Which makes it sound as if Ward believes that the IPCC is an overtly political body the objective of which is to win an argument rather than determine the truth. Its always good to find agreement across the lines.
Judith Curry considers this idea in a review of the Bloomberg article, but she doesn't sound entirely convinced by Ward's case:
Some policy makers may want this issue addressed so that they can effectively counter ‘denier’ claims; others may be more suspicious of the IPCC and want to see the IPCC justify its conclusions and confidence levels in view of the pause.
In fact, she reckons that overall policymakers may in fact want, you know, some science:
It looks to me like the national and international policy makers are expecting a serious treatment of the pause issue.
However, in the meantime the Met Office's Vicky Pope has tweeted that the
[d]iscussion about hiatus in warming should be about the new and important science.
Now while you might think this supports the Curry position, she then rather spoils the "honest broker" impression by linking to an article by...Bob Ward that is neither new, important nor science. She also links to the Met Office's recent report on the pause, which was, to say the least rather problematic. So one's suspicion is that the climatological mainstream does indeed see itself as being in the game of providing counter-sceptic talking points. Of course we already knew from the Slingo papers - the briefing put together for central government in the wake of Climategate - that the Met Office is in the counter-sceptic game; the briefing is full of Slingo's thoughts on how to counter Lawson. We should not therefore be surprised if the rest of the passengers on the global warming bandwagon feel the same way.
Reader Comments (43)
One thing is almost certain; the IPCC, when considering the temperature hiatus, will keep well away from addressing the feedback problem. Wait for a lot of new thermodynamics trying to explain lost, deep ocean heat,
.
IPCC explaining the current warming trend to a government committee:
"...and then we draw the differential of the rate of expansion of the deep water energy absorption coefficient, clearly showing...Oh look! Isn't that a heron?
Politicians of a non-religious bent are looking for a way to reverse out of the mess.
Why exactly are the statements of paid mouthpiece Ward of any relevance? Not what you would call an untainted source.
It seems to me that the mainstream is now more concerned about the sceptics than about the haitus.
Hurdles in the way of the IPCC include: 1) Sceptical arguments all based on the science/
2) Missing heat.
3)Haitus.
4) Arctic ice recovery.
To name just a few.
I hear the Great Anthropogenic Climate Alarmists state that the modeled excess heat has been sequestered in the deep oceans, even though more than half of the total ocean volume (deeper than 2000 meters) is not even measured.
This statement completely eviscerates the catastrophic part of CACC.
However, I also hear from the GACAs that sometime in the future the sequestered heat will come back to the surface and create *dire consequences*.
I still am waiting for the GACAs and their assorted minions to explain how a 0.1 C temperature rise in the deep oceans is going to do anything at the surface that is even noticeable (i.e. a temperature change bigger than 0.1 C).
IPCC has not learned the first rule of holes: stop digging. Addressing the pause in the SPM will probably just be hand waving about confidence levels and such. The deeper issue was revealed by AR5 WG1 SOD. There are at least four large problems in AR4. I have written about them and also posted on them elsewhere. They were knowable at the time, and there are a wealth of further papers since concerning all four, manynofmwhichnmade the deadline, some of which addressing consequences of the pause did not. Yet all four large mistaken biases are carried forth essentially without revision into the leaked SOD. An example frommthe executive summary of chapter 7, clouds. (paraphrased). Clouds remain the largestbfeedback uncertainty, butnconfidence has risen that cloud positive feedback is positive (0.46w/m2) based on "unknown contributions from sources yet to be identified". It appears the IPCC thinks repetition can make true things that are not. Since that is so at the basic climate science level, there is no hope for the more political SPM.
'New and Important science.'
Wouldn't that be the rack of low-climate-sensitivity papers?
It is not a hiatus, because nobody knows which way the temperature will go in the future. My money is on a cooling trend, thus the temporary period of fairly static global temperature should be called a plateau.
"We need updates to the forcings and a proper exploration of all the different mechanisms together," says climate modeler Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "This has taken time but will happen soon-ish." Anyone care to interpret what Gavin is talking about here? "Soon-ish?" After AR5? Why now? What does he see in the hiatus that requires "updating?"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pacific-ocean-and-climate-change-pause
Dr Vicky Pope played a leading role in the Met Office's fuelling the CAGW scare. Why should anything have changed?
"...governments are asking...". Really, Bishop - presumably Sunday does not concentrate the mind.
The Bloomberg piece mentions one government and one supra-national body: "U.S. and European Union envoys...". And who would these anonymous "envoys" be? "Isaac Valero-Ladron, a spokesman for EU Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement with the IPCC and the lack of a finalized text. Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the UN panel, and Nayyera Haq, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, both declined to comment."
Their weakness is the failure of their model predictions. Missing heat, hiatus, whatever are diversionary tactics. Add in up-to-date data and temperatures are outside predictions. Simples. They are out of rabbits and out of hats.
Add to that that burning fossil gas, of which there is plenty, reduces emissions and the game is up.
the answer is simply 'its magic but worse than we thought '
It is a mark of pseudoscience that it never progresses. There won't be any new explanations, just endless permutations of the old ones.
Lawson's GWPF championed the "hiatus" and took a lot of stick for it from the likes of Vicky Pope and Bob ward. Now it seems they were right and Vicky and Bob want to get the argument back.
It's too late. Vicky and Bob should have seen the wood for the trees years ago, like the GWPF did.
Whatever happens, when the IPCC report comes out Lawson's GWPF will win.
Hiatus haiku -
There is no hiatus.
It cannot exist, therefore
we must destroy it.
@ Mike Jackson
...Oh look! Isn't that a heron?
... and with its head at that angle it could almost be a hockey stick....
There you are, you see? That proves it....
Beware the ides of September!
Julia, Vivian and the Pope awaiting the descent of the tablets of stone.
A civilised society would have executed most of these climate hysterics, together with atheists such as Mr Dawkins.
A civilised society would have executed most of these climate hysterics, together with atheists such as Mr Dawkins.
Sep 1, 2013 at 9:22 PM john in cheshire
Let me guess. You're a Christian?
IPCC 2007 -
'A temperature rise of about 0.2 °C per decade is projected for the next two decades for all SRES scenarios.
Confidence in these near-term projections is strengthened because of the agreement between past model projections and actual observed temperature increases.'
Metoffice Sept 2009
'Global warming continues to pose a real threat that should not be ignored - a claim reinforced in a new study by scientists, reported in a supplement of the August issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This is despite very small global temperature rises over the last 10 years. Met Office Hadley Centre scientists investigated how often decades with a neutral trend in global mean temperature occurred in computer modelled climate change simulations. They found that despite continued increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, a single-decade hiatus in warming occurs relatively often. Jeff Knight, the article's lead author, explained: "We found about one in every eight decades has near-zero or negative global temperature trends in simulations which would otherwise be warm at expected present-day rates. Given that we have seen fairly consistent global warming since the 1970s, these odds suggest the observed slowdown was due to occur."
IPCC Sept 2013
Oh sh*t. But we have even yet higher confidence that dangerous anthropogenic climate change is even more unequivocal, yet again.
This then is the point in time at which we finally draw the line in the sand of the 'Guilty men'; namely those who make it obvious that their position is not to find out the truth, but those who are determined to 'argue away' any attempts to stop or slow down a gravy train/revolution.
Up until now it has been possible to (wrongly) plead that the 'science' supported the trillions of spending and re-ordering of the world's political make-up.
That point is about to be passed.
Our leaders need to be warned that they will now be held accountable.
pesadia says "It seems to me that the mainstream is now more concerned about the sceptics than about the haitus."
I think we can safely say we are up to the "Then they fight you", stage.
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
2 things spring to mind.
1. If governments can lean on the IPCC over this then they could just as easily leaned on it over 'proving' man made global climate weirding that would justify the policies we are being subjected to.
2. The input from Bob Ward: "Including more information on the hiatus will help officials counter arguments that the slowing pace of global warming in recent years is a sign that the long-term trend may be discounted, according to Bob Ward" Are there many sceptics who say it hasn't warmed? My impression of scepticism is that it's accepted the world has recovered from the little ice age.
Alarmists need to be careful in how they play this. Explaining the hiatus is to ascribe a significant power to natural processes that for the time being are working against a warming trend. They've got to be crossing their fingers and hoping nobody asks if those natural processes could have exaggerated the warming too.
This can be called the Bobwardization of science
I dont want to be, like, a total downer, man, but isn't that "Vyvyan"?
Maybe the policy makers will take more notice of the economics. Christopher Feild ( Topher) and his team have finished the 50:1 video project an it now live. They look at the economics based on the assumption the IPCC is correct with the science. That does NOT mean they agree with the science --they just wanted to discuss the economics without the warmists distracting the debate with scientific arguments. Obviously it also helps that that can show the economics of ETS or Cap & Trade schemes etc are nonsense even when using the IPCC data. The link is
www.50to1.net
Spread it around your email list contacts. It is compeling viewing.
john in cheshire:
Martin A:
1 John 3:15:
This is also a good answer for the Muslim radical who criticises Calvin's response to the request of Michael Servetus for open debate on the doctrine of the trinity in the 1550s. Muslim radicals delight to delve into such parts of church history at Speakers' Corner. I guess not everybody would know that.
Nice. But isn't invoking natural cycles, the new rage, also a new argument - at least for climate alarmists?
"Jake Hayes:
It is a mark of pseudoscience that it never progresses. There won't be any new explanations, just endless permutations of the old ones."
They make it up as they go along. If they come across a new explanation they'll embrace it.
The contradictions don't bother them. One of the principle arguments that CO2 causes significant warming is "We don't know anything else that could have caused the warming, with proves it was CO2" (© Met Office).
Now that the warming has stopped, the line is "the fact that warming has stopped proves that there is something else causing the effect of CO2 (whose warming effect has already been proved proved) to be precisely cancelled out" (© Entropic Man - not the exact words of EM but the gist of what he posted recently)
Some more-or-less random/relevant thoughts:
I think it's significant that global warming became an issue at the end of the 80s, ie shortly after the Cold War ended (rather ironically). Politicians need big issues to focus on in order to justify their existence, and global warming fitted the bill. I don't claim that this was done consciously (it's a separate and very interesting topic to consider how such issues wax and wane in public opinion over time - I suspect this process is itself highly chaotic and unpredictable).
Re: the 'heat in the deep oceans' thing - someone mentioned that 0.1C in the deep oceans can't ever affect the surface by more than 0.1C. This isn't true, of course, because the volumetric heat capacity of water (approx 4 J/(cm3·K)) is vastly greater than that of air (just 0.001 J/(cm3·K)) ; roughly speaking, the amount of energy required to heat a cubic metre of water by 0.1C would heat a cubic metre of air by over 400C. This works both ways, though, so the oceans could (in principle) soak up a lot of energy from the atmosphere, reducing its temperature greatly, whilst barely registering any increase in temperature themselves.
I've just been reading a little about the thermohaline circulation (http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/thc_fact_sheet.html). The Wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation) mentions cycle times up to 1600 years, so if a pulse of heat were to be soaked up by a patch of surface ocean and dragged down to the deep, it might take in the order of a thousand years to re-appear at the surface. Multiple such pulses of heat might be crawling along various ocean bottoms as we speak, ready to re-emerge who-knows-when.
Time to break out the modelling software! One might even be tempted to suggest that temperature profiles of the deep ocean currents might be used to reconstruct a paleoclimate signal :-)
'the amount of energy required to heat a cubic metre of water by 0.1C would heat a cubic metre of air by over 400C'
Like to see that demonstrated in that direction. Or any way whereby that 0.1 C could be pushed uphill to a higher temp without expending a considerable amount of outside energy. Seems like a reversal of entropy to me, but I'm only an Oxfordshire housewife.
rhoda - I didn't say that all that energy is likely to move from the water to the air in any real or imagined configuration of oceans and atmosphere, simply that the amount of energy is the same in each case. A given amount of energy can heat the air a lot, or the oceans a tiny amount. If all the 'extra' CAGW energy from doubling CO2 went into the atmosphere and caused it to heat by (for example) 3C, then that same amount of extra energy going into the oceans would heat them by approximately 0C.
"someone mentioned that 0.1C in the deep oceans can't ever affect the surface by more than 0.1C. This isn't true, of course, because the volumetric heat capacity of water (approx 4 J/(cm3·K)) is vastly greater than that of air (just 0.001 J/(cm3·K))"
The heat capacity of water is greater, and something that would heat the air a lot would heat the oceans much much less.
But that doesn't mean that the process can be reversed! Yes, water at, say, 20C can heat a heck of a lot of 15C air up to near 20C. But you can't take 15C water and cool it to 14C and heat 15C air to 20C in the process unless you have a pretty sophisticated mechanism such as goes on in a fridge or an air conditioner.
It's also a mystery why the "the missing heat is going into the oceans and will come out later" people implicitly assume -- apparently without thought -- that this is the first time it's ever happened.
It is claimed that the deep ocean is warming by 1000ths of a degree, but if so, it is extremely difficult to see how this could result in global warming notwithstanding the theoretical point raised by Chis Long
As the deep ocean (which is at a temperature of around 2 to 3 degC) comes up to the surface, it cools the ocean surface temperature and a cooler ocean surface cools the atmosphere. It would not matter whether the deep ocean were say 3degC or because of the absorption of the missing heat 3.001degC or even 3.003degC. The material point is that it is far cooler than the surface ocean temperature, and will therefore always significantly cool the surface ocean temperature. It never results in warming the surface ocean temperature. It could only warm the ocean surface temperature if the deep ocean temperature was warmer than the surface water temperature (which of course it is not and it will never be even if the missing heat gets absorbed for thousands of years).
We see a somewhat similar process at work on a small scale in La Nina conditions. Which results in the short term cooling of global temperatures.
Fortunately, the process is very slow, some 800 to 1000 years so any extra heat now contained in the deep ocean will not re-surface any time soon. If by some chance (or process) the ocean overturning process was in some way to speed up, so the extra heat would come back to the surface more quickly, since it is now part of the deep ocean it would still cool the globe, not warm it..
As Bruce Hoult observes, you cannot heat up the globe with water which is at about 3.001 degC rather than about 3degC.
"They’re requesting that more details on the so-called “hiatus” be included in a key document set to be debated at a UN conference next month that will summarize the latest scientific conclusions on climate change."
Recently, it has been suggested that model runs do produce pauses the precise duration of which they are less candid about. They argue that since model runs produce pauses, there is nothing wrong with the theory nor with the models.
However, like most things the devil is in the detail. It is important to consider when the model run pause occurs and at what level of CO2 forcing exists in the model at that time.
If CO2 drives temperature it is easier to have a 17 year pause when CO2 levels in the model are say 310 to 330 ppm than it is to have a similar pause when CO2 levels are say 380 to 400ppm.
Of course, this all goes to the strength of CO2 forcing verses the forcing from natural variation. The IPCC accepts that CO2 did not contribute substantially to the 1920s to 1940s warming when CO2 levels were only about 300ppm At this stage, they accepted that natural variation was dominant. However, everything changed by the time we get to the late 1970s and the warming that ensued through to the late 1990s. At this stage, the IPCC argue that natural variation no longer had the capability to explain the warming and by this stage CO2 was now the dominant player.
What had changed between the 1920s-1940s and the 1970s-1990s? The only changes of note were (i) CO2 levels had risen to around////, and there was cleaner air in cities due to better pollution control but whether there was a significant difference in global aerosols is moot since although by the 1990s there were better pollution controls there was also much more industrial activity than there was back in the 1920s-1940s and further the developing nations were beginning to come on stream and they were not applying the same pollution standards.
The upshot of the above is that the IPCC were essentially concluding that by the time CO2 levels reached 330ppm (approx CO2 level in the late 1970s) the CO2 forcing dominated natural variability. Accordingly, by the time CO2 levels reached ~330ppm one would no longer expect to see a pause in the rise in global temperatures which MUST follow from the so called basic physics of an ever increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The only explanation for the pause is that CO2 cannot even at 380 to 400ppm dominate natural variability, and natural variability still remains king. The problem with this is that the IPCC can now no longer assert that natural variation could not explain the 1970s-1990s warming. They can no longer assert that the only cause of that warming is CO2 since by then we had reached a stage (ie., a level of CO2 in the atmosphere) where CO2 was the dominant player.
It will be interesting to see how the IPCC address the pause since it is not only relevant to what is happening today, but is fundamental to what happened during the late 1970s-late 1990s and the reason fro attributing CO2 as being the cause (or the predominant cause) of that warming.
PS I attach a plot of the accumulated CO2 emissions - see
http://s1136.photobucket.com/user/Bartemis/media/emissions.jpg.html?sort=3&o=6#/user/Bartemis/media/emissions.jpg.html?sort=3&o=6&_suid=13781862256430152521980639523T6
There are a number of useful CO2 plots. Have a look at them.
Further to my post above. There is a missing figure in the 6th paragraph detailing the mid/late 1970s CO2 level. That figure is about 330ppm. Hence, that paragraph should have read:
What had changed between the 1920s-1940s and the 1970s-1990s? The only changes of note were (i) CO2 levels had risen to around 330ppm and rising through to about 370ppm, and (ii) there was cleaner air in cities due to better pollution control but whether there was a significant difference in global aerosols is moot since although by the 1990s there were better pollution controls there was also much more industrial activity than there was back in the 1920s-1940s and further the developing nations were beginning to come on stream and they were not applying the same pollution standards.
I hope that clarifies the point I make.
The problem with the "heat in the ocean, ready to return and get us" theory is that if this is possible, then the 80s and 90s warming might not be CO2, but heat coming out of the ocean from some earlier episode.
Hehehe! Good shot, BYJ!
The problem with the "heat in the ocean, ready to return and get us" theory is that if this is possible, then the 80s and 90s warming might not be CO2, but heat coming out of the ocean from some earlier episode.
Sep 3, 2013 at 12:12 PM TheBigYinJames
I'd like someone to explain how works the idea of heat coming out of the deep ocean, which I understand is a cold place, and warming things up in places that are already warmer than the deep ocean.
S.L.B.T.M.
Martin A
Perhaps it depends where the heat emerges. There is a current carrying water from the North Pacific into the Arctic through the Bering Strait. The heat it carries is then released into the colder Arctic atmosphere. Increase the temperature of the North Pacific water, even by a small amount, and you will warm that region of the Arctic.
This may already be happening. The Bering Sea is remaining ice free longer these days and a whole new fishery is developing as Pacific species colonise the low Arctic.
EM - If you re-read what I wrote, you'll see that I said
I'd like someone to explain how works the idea of heat coming out of the deep ocean, which I understand is a cold place, and warming things up in places that are already warmer than the deep ocean.