Bishop Hill Working Group II
Mar 31, 2014 Climate: IPCC Climate: WG2 The Working Group II report is out today and should be available here, although the site appears to be down at the moment.
YOKOHAMA, Japan, 31 March – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report today that says the effects of climate change are already occurring on all continents and across the oceans. The world, in many cases, is ill-prepared for risks from a changing climate. The report also concludes that there are opportunities to respond to such risks, though the risks will be difficult to manage with high levels of warming.
The report, titled Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, from Working Group II of the IPCC, details the impacts of climate change to date, the future risks from a changing climate, and the opportunities for effective action to reduce risks. A total of 309 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and review editors, drawn from 70 countries, were selected to produce the report. They enlisted the help of 436 contributing authors, and a total of 1,729 expert and government reviewers.
The report concludes that responding to climate change involves making choices about risks in a changing world. The nature of the risks of climate change is increasingly clear, though climate change will also continue to produce surprises. The report identifies vulnerable people, industries, and ecosystems around the world. It finds that risk from a changing climate comes from vulnerability (lack of preparedness) and exposure (people or assets in harm’s way) overlapping with hazards (triggering climate events or trends). Each of these three components can be a target for smart actions to decrease risk.
“We live in an era of man-made climate change,” said Vicente Barros, Co-Chair of Working Group II. “In many cases, we are not prepared for the climate-related risks that we already face. Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future.”
Adaptation to reduce the risks from a changing climate is now starting to occur, but with a stronger focus on reacting to past events than on preparing for a changing future, according to Chris Field, Co-Chair of Working Group II.
“Climate-change adaptation is not an exotic agenda that has never been tried. Governments, firms, and communities around the world are building experience with adaptation,” Field said. “This experience forms a starting point for bolder, more ambitious adaptations that will be important as climate and society continue to change.”
Future risks from a changing climate depend strongly on the amount of future climate change. Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe and pervasive impacts that may be surprising or irreversible.
“With high levels of warming that result from continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, risks will be challenging to manage, and even serious, sustained investments in adaptation will face limits,” said Field.
Observed impacts of climate change have already affected agriculture, human health, ecosystems on land and in the oceans, water supplies, and some people’s livelihoods. The striking feature of observed impacts is that they are occurring from the tropics to the poles, from small islands to large continents, and from the wealthiest countries to the poorest.
“The report concludes that people, societies, and ecosystems are vulnerable around the world, but with different vulnerability in different places. Climate change often interacts with other stresses to increase risk,” Field said.
Adaptation can play a key role in decreasing these risks, Barros noted. “Part of the reason adaptation is so important is that the world faces a host of risks from climate change already baked into the climate system, due to past emissions and existing infrastructure,” said Barros.
Field added: “Understanding that climate change is a challenge in managing risk opens a wide range of opportunities for integrating adaptation with economic and social development and with initiatives to limit future warming. We definitely face challenges, but understanding those challenges and tackling them creatively can make climate-change adaptation an important way to help build a more vibrant world in the near-term and beyond.”
Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the IPCC, said: “The Working Group II report is another important step forward in our understanding of how to reduce and manage the risks of climate change. Along with the reports from Working Group I and Working Group III, it provides a conceptual map of not only the essential features of the climate challenge but the options for solutions.”
The Working Group I report was released in September 2013, and the Working Group III report will be released in April 2014. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report cycle concludes with the publication of its Synthesis Report in October 2014.
“None of this would be possible without the dedication of the Co-Chairs of Working Group II and the hundreds of scientists and experts who volunteered their time to produce this report, as well as the more than 1,700 expert reviewers worldwide who contributed their invaluable oversight,” Pachauri said. “The IPCC’s reports are some of the most ambitious scientific undertakings in human history, and I am humbled by and grateful for the contributions of everyone who make them possible."
Working Group II is not really my stamping ground, so I don't have a huge amount to say at this stage. I will watch with interest to see how much airtime the UK's pre-eminent environmental economist (and IPCC coordinating lead author) Richard Tol gets today.
Bishop Hill
The appearances by Richard Tol and Chris Field on the Today programme are worth listening to.
Reader Comments (104)
Harry Passfield
Mass of atmosphere = 5.5 quadrillion tons = 5,500,000,000,000,000 tons, so as a rough approximation bearing in mind all the other factors such as jamesp has pointed out.
@ 10ppm mass of CO2 = 55,000,000,000 tons = 55 gigatons
55 gt ≡ 0.4(55/10) °C
≈ 2.2 °C
Pleas check the workings or add in any adjustments.
You can see why they are so worried by the missing heat if my guesstimate is in the right area.
The inhabitants of "doggerland" were somehow able to adapt as the North Sea rose slowly above their heads 6000 years ago. They simply moved to East Anglia or to Holland.
This is just a report of what bad weather can do.
Boredom alone should have caused the end of the IPCC. Apparently, the human population is suffering from catastrophic memory loss.
Did Walport also not remember that CO2 has a logarithmic effect? Therefore the if the first 10 gigatons cause .4C warming it will take 20 gigatons to cause the second .4C warming and 40 gigatons to cause the next .4C warming.
Interference by UK Government???
http://www.thegwpf.org/britains-secret-bid-to-fix-un-climate-report-impact-on-economy-is-ramped-up/
A few days back I read a tribute to Norman Borlaug and his "Green Revolution" which increased crop yields dramatically around the world (it may have been on GWPF). One example was the 70s prediction that India would never feed itself which was confounded well before the end of the century.
Interestingly this huge advance in agriculture took place during the period of warming which caused all the fuss. If so much progress was made despite the rising temps of the time, why should there be any concern for the future?
The Mail carries this story pert to above link from - A C Osborn
Not content with mere green zealotry, phrases, paragraphs have to be 'rewritten' and the dossier 'sexed up'.
Says it all really - what a set of
to88erspropagandist pols - that this is a last ditch attempt by all involved UN-IPCC and - particularly our lot - HMG - to ramp up the hyperbole of catastrophe scenarios. It didn't work before, now what makes them think that this time around - it'll work better?!Um but no warming since 1995................I must say, that they, the DECC, Potato-ED, the UN-IPCC are truly the deniers of reality.
Did anyone listen to the piece on the ever increasing effects of climate change on Jeremy Vine's tawdry tabloid radio show today?
The most effective emetic I have been exposed to in a long time.
A procession of non stop alarmism from beginning to end. BBC favourite Tom Burke agreed that it was right that we had now learned to exclude sceptics (like Lord Lawson). He added "Climate Change is like diabetes, a progressive disease we need to eradicate". Jeremy seemed to like that analogy.
All day long the BBC have spouted that we are all doomed, not that we could, might, if pigs learn to fly. So funny to hear all the garbage they make of it all, and to see the originator and cover up boy for the 2035 vs 2350 debacle, speak as if he knew it all. Trust us, give us all your money and we will save you. Follow the money and you will be lead to charlatans. Might be, could be, if, but, the language of the weasel.
Alexander
It is not surprising that the BBC has given up inviting sceptics to contribute. With no British sceptic scientsts available their only option was laymen such as Montford and Lawson, who have made no useful contribution to the debate.
Even Dr Curry on the World Service could only come up with the old logical fallacy that anything not 100% certain is wrong.
In the face of the evidence in WGI and WGII more is required of a sceptic interviewee than for them to metaphorically close their eyes, cover their ears and say "What climate change?" If sceptics want airtime, they need to come up with something more constructive.
Hum
The decrease in warming effect due to increasing CO2 is natural logarithmic (base e), not base 10 logarithmic. Over the range of concentrations you describe the link between CO2 and temperature is close to linear.
It's not "What climate change?", it's "What global warming". I saw the pea move. IPCC have stated that there is low confidence in extreme events and therefore 'climate change' is weather.
7:23 was in response to Entropic.
... and close to parallel to the x axis (over the last decade or so)?
Bwahaha! EM demonstrates once again that all he needs is enough rope.
What do you all reckon, not a peep about this in the media by the weekend?
Mar 31, 2014 at 7:54 PM | Jake Haye
You will have to explain that to him...slowly.
Ssat
Global warming is the increase in energy content of the climate system. Climate change is the consequences.
The latter is defined on page 4 of WGII as
"A change in climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability over comparable time periods."
Osseo
Patience. It is likely that ENSO will have delivered one, possibly two, new record temperature years by the end of 2015.
Jake Haye
The standard formula for calculating the effect of an increase in CO2 forcing is
dF = 5.35 * ln (C/Co)
dF is the change in forcing in w/m^2
Ln is natural logarithm
Co is the initial CO2 concentration
C is the final CO2 concentration
5.35 is a constant of proportionality.
www.globalwarmingequation.info/eqn%20derivation.pdf
EM - "Patience. It is likely that ENSO will have delivered one, possibly two, new record temperature years by the end of 2015."
Please can you make this claim in a way which will allow for a definitive evaluation of its accuracy at the end of 2015?
Not banned yet
Certainly. The warmest year in the GISS global temperature record to date is 2010, at anomaly 0.60C.corresponding to 14.60C.
I expect 2014 or 2015, possibly both, to exceed that value as a result of the el nino currently forecast for later this year.
The uncertainty in year is due to the uncertainty in onset. If El Nino starts early it may be enough to take 2014 over the top. If it starts later, 2015 will show most of the warming effect.
Note that the both of the most recent large el nino events, in 1998 and 2010, produced new temperature records.
http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/
From NOAA website
El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
CPC Synopsis: ENSO-neutral is expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere spring 2014, with about a 50% chance of El Niño developing during the summer or fall.
At 50%, perhaps the question is not whether El Nino starts early or late but if it starts at all.
"When first this was leaked, Richard Betts was at pains to dismiss the alarmism of the Indy's take on the story. Now that all the MSM in the world have echoed that alarmism, would he like to repeat that dismissal? "
-----------------------------------------
Very good question, Rhoda, and one I was about to post myself. Hello, Richard, where are you? What say you to the IPCC contributor in Australia who claimed that humans were headed for extinction? What about all the other claims that we are all going to Hell in a handbasket? Hello? Anyone there?
Apr 1, 2014 at 7:05 AM | johanna
But didn't Richard write this report? I assume the media headlines at least reflect the actual content of WG2.
The IPCC is in the business of monetizing nothing. It takes everyday events, also known as 'weather' and turns them into a bonanza of cash and travel opportunities with 5* luxury accommodation as a side benefit. What's not to like? ... especially if you are a third rate scientist whose efforts lean towards the less intellectually demanding pursuit of activism.
I find the entire charade pathetically laughable. It is incredible how much painting you can still do when your corner was quite clearly almost complete years ago.
I had a small disagreement with Richard when he said his colleagues who were writing the SPM for WG1 had been told they would have the final word - I didn't believe they would because the IPCC reports are political documents not aimed at shaping policy at all, but aimed at persuading the public that the policies already in place, and to come, are the right policies. I think he thought I was saying his colleagues were lying, I was saying no such thing, I was saying the bureaucrats were lying and there was no way they would let largely apolitical scientists write the SPM, and I quoted the 95% of scientists believe that humans are responsible for most of the 20th century warming asking if it was likely that scientists would have even considered putting that into a scientific report.
We have not communicated since, but I'm wondering if, as a lead author of WG2, Richard is comfortable with the hysterical headlines following the leak of the draft SPM. Or whether the penny has dropped that the scientists, willingly, or unwittingly, are spending their time writing political documents for the UN and the Club of Rome.
Tony Hansen
There is one paper giving a 75% probability.
http://m.pnas.org/content/111/6/2064
The preliminary changes have started. The upper graphic of this pair shows the Kelvin wave of warm water rising to the surface which precedes the onset of an El Nino.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/weeklyenso_clim_81-10/wkteq_xz.gif
February/March is usually the least skilful time of year for the ENSO forecasters. This forecast should firm up or go away as the year goes on.
RB is kinda conspicuous by his absence so far.
Has anyone actually read the report? I waded into the section on freshwater and did not find much alarmism. Then had a look at the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). A paragraph crops up quite early which basically states that we get floods and droughts regardless of climate change because of "current climate variability". From the SPM:
"Impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability (very high confidence).
Impacts of such climate-related extremes include alteration of ecosystems, disruption of food production and water supply, damage to infrastructure and settlements, morbidity and mortality, and consequences for mental health and human well-being. For countries at all levels of development, these impacts are consistent with a significant lack of preparedness for current climate variability in some sectors."
See what they are doing here? This is a nothing statement beyond stating that climate variability exists. But by putting it in the report in abstruse language, the impression is left that extremes are all to do with AGW. We could say that insertion of this paragraph in the SPM is "consistent with climate change" and they are pleased to claim "very high confidence" that floods and droughts occur.
potentilla,
I had a feeling that was what they were doing.
Even if we only get weather within "normal variability", people will assume it's "climate change" and the warnings were correct.
Normal weather is merging with "climate change" and in a few decades everyone will have forgotten about it.
The UN has determined that more money is required to calm the extreme extremeness of IPCC reporting.
UN message is "Governments of the West your money is required now! "
Potentilla:
I had the same general sense. Last night I read Chapter 7 on Food Security since that seemed to be a hot button issue that could be readily leveraged and was explicitly highlighted on Bill Moyers program here in the States. More specifically, the first takeaway in the Moyers piece states the following:
"1. The food supply is in trouble –> “Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said at a news conference presenting the report. Climate change has already affected the global food supply; crop yields for wheat, for example, are beginning to decline even as the human population continues to grow."
There is little in Chapter 7 that supports this assertion. The authors of the chapter repeatedly lament the fact that they do not have the data needed to attribute changes in crop yields to climate as opposed to other factors. To do attribution studies you need some combination of carefully controlled extensive experiments or large amounts of data covering periods that are at least twice the length of existing known regional climate cycles. The data does not exist especially for those areas that are currently vulnerable to food insecurity regardless of the cause.
This coupled with the frequent use of moderate confidence around intermediate inputs into an outcome statement makes me doubt the basis for the alarmist predictions. This, of course, does not mean that we should not do things to alleviate food insecurity. The question is what are the actual causes.
Bjorn Lomborg should be smiling about this report and muttering "I told you so!"
Have I misunderstood? I thought the belief was that warming increased with increasing CO2?
If what you say is in fact correct, the next ice age can't be far away.
And what difference does the base of logarithms make, give or take a scale factor?
Mathematics Level 1 (Foundation)
Question 1
(a) Write the above Magic Climate Formula to use log10 instead of ln. Hint: you may need to change the Magic Climate Number. [2 marks]
(b) Hence, or otherwise, show that the statement, "The warming effect due to increasing CO2 is natural logarithmic (base e), not base 10 logarithmic" is ignorant bollocks. [2 marks]
Entropic Man
Is your ENSO event(s) going to release some or all of the missing heat, known unknown, or is it heat we know about, known known, or some other heat an unknown unknown?
I thought the media coverage was variable. Some (like the Independent last week) focussed on the most dramatic-sounding (but often also least certain) aspects of the report, and also ignoring all the extensive discussion on the potential for some degree of adaptation. Others were more careful to reflect these points. If they acknowledged the potential for reducing climate-related risks through adaptation (which the WG2 SPM is very clear about) then I'm more comfortable with them.
FWIW my quick summary of the WG2 report would be:
1. Changes in climate (from whatever cause) are having an influence on the natural world, and some influences on human society are also being seen - but the latter are relatively minor in comparison with other things.
2. Natural climate variability has impacts on people, but these can be reduced by improved adaptation to current climate.
3. In the near term (next few decades), further inevitable anthropogenic climate change will probably contribute to changes in these impacts, but it's hard to say exactly how - a range of changes are possible. Again, much can be done to reduce risks through adaptation, and it's important to recognise that climate change is not the only thing that effects either the natural world or people.
4. In the long term (late 21st Century), any further increases in climate risks would be dependent on greenhouse gas concentrations - larger increases in concentrations would generally lead to larger risks.
5. Clearly, actions to minimise the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations can have other implications. Most of this side of things is Working Group 3's area (report to be finalised soon), but one issue covered in WG2 is the impacts of bioenergy on natural ecosystems. Not only are ecosystems affected by a changing climate, they are also affected directly by human land use, and the use of land for climate change mitigation can be quite substantial in some scenarios. Therefore it's important to think about the whole picture and not regard climate as the only driver of change.
I would strongly encourage people to read the report for themselves, instead of relying on what the media or people on blogs say. There's a lot in it, and it's quite complex, and it's clear that different people can contract different narratives from it. Don't take other people's word for it - please read the report yourself, starting with the SPM but then tracing the statements back to the underlying chapters for the evidence supporting them.
The heat released by an el nino event is a known known.
ENSO is an irregular oscillation between La Nina and El Nino.
La nina tends to have a cooling effect as the Pacific ocean becomes a net energy absorber. It is associated with wind and current flows from the Eastern to Western Pacific.
El Nino tends to produce net warming as the heat stored during a past La nina is released back into the atmosphere. The winds and currents tend to flow Eastwards.
This is a normal part of natural climate variation. During the last decade the Pacific has spent most of the time in neutral or La Nina conditions, wirh a corresponding tendency towards heat uptake and storage.
When enough heat accumulates, it would be expected to cause the balance to tip towards an El Nino. The last significant El Nino was in 2010, so another now is not surprising.
Double the concentration of CO2 and its direct forcing effect increases by 5W/m^2. That leads to about 1.2C of direct warming, plus extra warming due to secondary forcing. The size of the latter depends on climate sensitivity.
Double the concentration again and you get another 5W/m^2. Warming increases with extra CO2, but the slope of the temperature/ CO2 graph decreases at higher CO2 concentrations.
Jake Haye is right that each extra unit of CO2 has a smaller warming effect than the one before, but his insistence on base 10 logarithmic change exaggerates the effect.
Richard Betts:
Thanks for this and for the quick summary. Will read the full report, just don't know when. :)
By the way, my favourite article was in the Daily Mash:
;-)
Richard Betts -
From Stevenage to Ealing: IPCC name man responsible for climate change. h/t steveta_uk in Unthreaded
Entropic man: "[Jake Haye's] insistence on base 10 logarithmic change exaggerates the effect."
The base of the logarithm is immaterial.
5.35*ln(C/C0) = 3.71*log2(C/C0) = 12.32*log10(C/C0) = 5.35*ln(b)*log_base_b(C/C0) for any b>0.
The math is quite settled on this.
Entropic Man
So what have to fear is a coincidental unknown unknown, or known unknown event?
Personally I'm still waiting for the climate doing something unheard of, even if you are right I don't think that is going to happen, not without adjusting the data anyway.
Bullshit is saying what you think might (or might not) be true without actually knowing or checking but with the intention of convincing that you seem to know what you are talking about.
EM is an artist with some talent.
This seems to be the man responsible for climate change:
http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2014/04/01/ipcc-name-man-responsible-for-climate-change/
The key words here are appropriately scaled.
You have produced an alternative formulation of the same calculation using log base 10 and an appropriate constant. That's fair enough; but is it what Jake was saying?
Jake or hum (Mar 31, 2014 at 5:45 PM) ?
Martin A, Harold W, hum, Jake Hayes
Hum said " if the first 10 gigatons cause .4C warming it will take 20 gigatons to cause the second .4C warming and 40 gigatons to cause the next .4C warming.".
I said that each doubling of CO2 concentration produces the same warming as the previous doubling.
I stand corrected. The two statements say the same thing.
Jake and Harold are right too. I hadn't picked up on what he meant by the magic climate number, nor remembered that you could get equivalent formulations using different bases by using different constants.
Mea culpa :-)
Sandy S
Most of of this is not unheard of. Even a rapid increase in CO2 producing a rapid increase in temperature has precedent, witness the Pliocene-Eocene Temperature Maximum.
What is unheard of is an intelligent(?) species producing the rapid increase in CO2.
Sandy S
One known unknown. This will be the best instrumented El Nino so far. Lots od juicy new detail to be learned!
Entropic man -
Well done on that.
You quote hum's original statement, "if the first 10 gigatons cause .4C warming it will take 20 gigatons to cause the second .4C warming and 40 gigatons to cause the next .4C warming" which I assumes refers to emissions. In which case, I disagree with hum. You wrote that "each doubling of CO2 concentration produces the same warming as the previous doubling" which is fine, but doubling emissions does not mean doubling concentration.
I'm struggling to understand Walport's original statement, quoted by Alex Cull as: "... every 10 gigatonnes we put into the atmosphere each year commits us probably to another 0.4 degrees of warming." The annual global emissions are in fact, about 10 GtC/year (~36 GtCO2/year). But it doesn't make any sense that each year's emissions will cause 0.4 K of warming; one year's emissions currently increase pCO2 by about 2 ppmv, or 0.5%, or 1/140 of a doubling. Multiplying 0.4 K by 140 gives an absurd ECS of 56 K/doubling. So that couldn't be what he intended.
AR5 WG1 posits a near-linear relationship between temperature increase and cumulative CO2 emissions. (See figure SPM.10 or TFE.8 Figure 1) The slope, TCRE, was given as 0.8 to 2.5 K/TtC emitted. [Tt = teratonne = 1000 Gt = 1 Eg.] Assuming Walport is subscribing to that relationship, 10 GtC emission would amount to 0.008 to 0.025 K of eventual temperature increase, which is a factor of 16 to 50 times lower than Walport's 0.4 K. [I suppose that he may have intended 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in which case his figure is only about 10 to 30 times too high.]
While on the subject of TCRE, I note a new paper (haven't read it yet and unfortunately paywalled) suggesting a lower, and more limited, TCRE range of 0.8 to 1.0 K/TtC. The abstract says that the lower end of the range is applicable to current emission rates. If this is accurate, then 10 GtC implies an eventual rise in temperature of about 0.008 K.