Bishop Hill Sir John Lawton on AGW
Mar 30, 2010 Climate: Models The Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has just made some quite interesting comments in relation to the expected rate of warming. Speaking at the launch of a report into how the UK should adapt to possible climate change, he said:
The planet is already slightly above the worse case scenario so if we do nothing we could be looking at a temperature rise of 4C (7.3F) by 2100
When you look at the report, it's clear that by "above the worse [sic] case scenario" he is referring to carbon dioxide emissions. However it's an interesting position to state that we are going to hit 4 degrees of warming by 2100. If we equate that to 4C per century, then it's fairly clear that the models are far, far out in falsification territory. As Lucia is fond of pointing out, they are meandering around the brink of being falsified at 2C/century.
The Royal Commission includes among its members Prof Peter Liss, the acting director of CRU. You would have thought such an eminent climatologist would have pointed out the problems with making such wild statements to the press. They never seem to learn.
Reader Comments (39)
Which worst case scenario? Not Hansen's or any of the IPCC's. He should ask Phil Jones.
When one realises he means that CO2 emission levels are the one thing that are above worst case level and nothing else is ... it takes me back to Richard Lindzen's brilliant comment last year that we've got the stage where such more or less random pieces of data become omens of disaster. There's no evidence of dangerous warming but there is ... the omen. Be very afraid. Or perhaps not.
That's rightly making a mockery of the thing, through a direct parallel with an extremely primitive, superstitious form of religion. And that has to bring back to mind James Lovelock yesterday:
Again, religious language from a normally unreligious scientist - and again I feel used very powerfully and appropriately. But on the non-superstitious side of the fence I would say. There is something about this debate, in its widest sense, that means one ends up reaching for such language. Isn't that right, Bishop?
But whatever, CO2 emissions are worse even than we thought. Scary.
If there wasn't so much apparently spare cash about to support them, people like Sir John would be spending their days with sandwich boards ('The End of the World is Nigh') on high streets. But now that the loonies have seized control of the asylum, I fear that I will soon be on the high street myself ('The End of World is Not Nigh', 'We Have No Skill in Forecasting Climate', 'Beware of Climate Alarmists! Fraudsters are Making Money from your Fears', 'Shrug a Greenie Today', and so on)
Bishop,
We being the UK.
....we mistake local for global.
Why not link to the report.
Quote, Sir John Lawton, Sept 2005, "If this (Hurricane Katrina) makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/this-uisu-global-warming-says-environmental-chief-507995.html
Quote, The Times, Chris Landsea, March 2010, scientist at the American government's National Hurricane Centre, "Hurricanes are much less sensitive to temperature increase than the IPCC report suggested. There are a lot of legitimate concerns about climate change but hurricanes are not among them."
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n3/abs/ngeo779.html
Quelle surprise, Sir John Lawton turns out to be a fully-paid-up-member of the alarmist club.
Sir John has used the deaths of over 1800 innocent people for furtherence of his global warming cause.
It shows how low so called educated people will stoop.
I'm not sure what makes you think he's talking about local temperatures. His comment begins "The planet....".
I grant you that he could still be talking about local temperatures, but then he would be asking us to believe in the output of a regional climate model, and IIRC nobody has ever produced a regional climate model that has been shown to be skillful.
Do you think the 4C/century would not be falsified for the UK based on the temperatures of the last ten years?
Darn at the moment the beginning of this centaury in the UK the country is a shambles, corrupt and inept politicians, scientists and media becoming worse day by day but with all these forecasts of a tropical paradise by the end of it I’m gutted I’ll not be hear to enjoy it, with all the palm trees and coconuts that will be growing on the endless sun drenched beaches.
Bishop,
Read the report - it is about the UK and the only place it mentions 4C is in reference to the UK (only parts of it, at that).
The report is pretty open about the fact that the projections are hugely uncertain and that for some variables the direction of the change cannot even be predicted. Hence the recommendation for adaptation, presumably. It also makes the pretty reasonable point that we are not even all that well adapted to current climate.
Firstly it is not for the entire UK and secondly that is probably not enough data to draw any reasonable conclusion or even to have a reasonable expectation of Lucia-brand 'falsification'. Any such analysis would have the same issues that people have pointed out re Lucia's analysis for the globe as a whole, only presumably worse as the uncertainties in the projections themselves would be even greater.
I'm not sure why we have a Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, probably just one of those ways of using up all that spare cash we have?
and, your Grace, the language is getting very sloppy - 'eminent climatologist'. Assuming for the purposes of debate that such exist, they would not be pointing out the problems with making such statements, they would probably be encouraging it.
'Eminent scientist' would make more sense in the sentence, but not the context.
Similarly,
'nobody has ever produced a regional climate model that has been shown to be skilful'
I don't think anyone has produced ANY climate model that has been shown to be skilful?
"2.7 ....However, the Commission is concerned that if today’s extreme events become more frequent, as the modelled climate projections suggest,..." (and the observed data flatly contradict).... why is it that people with Sir in front of their names talk such rubbish?
No Frank, this would not falsify the theory. What would?
"2.19 The UK has significant, world-class capacity for analysing the nature and impacts of future global and regional climate change, through the Met Office Hadley Centre (which conducts work on global climate change), the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research..."
Oh, stop it, my sides are hurting.
Bishop,
My mistake, the report also talks about a global increase of 4C, here:
(2.30 in the report)
Whether or not you consider that 'falsified' depends whether you believe Lucia's "learning statistics" analysis over that produced by people who have already learned statistics.
If there is one worse case scenario any sceptic will tell you will be passed it's CO2 emissions. It seems the AGWers don't get out much, or rather they don't go to China, India, Mexico, Brazil etc. I have always maintained that there is no way of stopping the acceleration of CO2 emissions in the near future. I don't know how he got to 4C, the agreed doubling of CO2 is 1C if we get to a position where we switch to positive feedback does anyone know what mechanisms are going to stop this feedback once it's started, because I don't.
Frank,
You say: "The report is pretty open about the fact that the projections are hugely uncertain and that for some variables the direction of the change cannot even be predicted."
How does that square with the very first sentence of the report which reads: "The compelling and growing body of evidence on climate change points to the need for drastic and urgent action."?
Hi Geronimo maybe the hypothetical positive feedback can be counterbalanced by the hypothetical negative feedback.
For Frank, and for anyone else interested in the issue of climate sensitivity (the expected change in global mean surface temp per sustained doubling of atmospheric CO2), Lubos Motl has written the following argument based entirely on well understood, well tested physics.
Black body limits: climate sensitivity parameter can't possibly be high, a proof
geronimo,
There is no 'switching' involved in the water vapor feedback (which just requires that relative humidity remains about constant - by now strongly confirmed by observation - and on its own about doubles the warming from CO2 alone).
The Stefan-Boltzmann law means that the earth radiates proportionally more power as it warms - this means that not all positive feedbacks are runaway feedbacks (in the sense of runaway warming such as thought to have occurred on Venus). You need a huge positive feedback for that.
That said, at least Hansen argues that a runaway feedback is just about possible on earth - hardly the consensus view though and moreover IIRC it requires burning pretty much all the fossil fuels.
Frankie darlink
You haven't answered my comment on the other (Amazon) thread yet.
With love
Northie (Dr)
Since continuous "positive" feedback has no basis in climate reality, then one is forced to rely on temperature trends. When looking at multiple period trends, there is just no way the 4C increase is a reasonable outcome. Here are a few trends laid out to 2100:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/02/friedman-romm-temperature-predictions-for-nyt-elites.html
To Frank O'Dwyer
I'm curious about this runaway effect.
When the very first plant lay down in the swamp that would eventually become fossil fuels, (oil, coal, gas etc), surely the atmosphere then contained as much CO2 as if we now suddenly burned all our fossil fuels at once.
We didn't have runaway warming then, why should we now?
Or, going further back, when all we had to create Oxygen was blue-green algae, how did we get out of the Venusian effect?
I'm not a climate scientist, but I would like to know what the answer to this question is. It could be important!
Brian Williams,
Actually I believe that the earth has substantially exceeded the CO2 levels you would expect from burning all fossil fuels, and recovered from that. This does indeed seem to be a pretty good argument that runaway warming wouldn't happen on earth like on Venus.
Hansen's argument is that the sun is brighter now and that we are raising CO2 faster than then (plus I think he also has to throw tar sands into the mix). Like I said he is pretty much on his own and off in the weeds with that, and hopefully as wrong on that as many other experts think he is.
There is an interesting discussion of it here.
Of course you don't need Venus style runaway warming to have a problem and this is all a separate question from more mundane stuff like water vapor feedback for which there is plenty of observational evidence. A more interesting question to me is whether you can get a runaway warming in the sense that it runs out of human control, i.e. can no longer be mitigated by anything we do with emissions, due to warming crossing a line where natural positive feedback processes dominate and take over.
Your Lord Lawton should be anywhere near policy decision making. His assertion is so ridiculous as to beg the question of his sobriety or underlying capability.
'But Sir John said that adapting to climate change will not cost organisations extra money or add bureaucracy. '
Hands up all those who believe that.
Frankie darlink
You haven't answered my comment on the other (Amazon) thread yet.
With love
Northie (Dr)
Nor mine.
Frank O'D. Actually I'm probably nearly as old as Hansen and remember the theory was propounded in the 50s that the Earth would finish up like Venus if the carbon dioxide increased in the atmosphere. It was taught in physics lessons. I believe Hansen caught the bug then, and has been adusting everything since then to prove the theory is correct.Thanks for answering on the limiting of positive feedback, but I'm still not sure how it's limited once we pass the "tipping point" so often mentioned in the press. I'd like to see the sums they're using and what negative feedbacks or forcings that can stabilise the positive feedback.
During past warmings the llike the Eocene the carbon in the atmosphere was around 1000ppm but there was no postive feedback although the poles were probably ice free:
" Stanley, Steven M. Earth System History. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1999. ISBN 0-7167-2882-6.
The Eocene global climate was perhaps the most homogeneous of the Cenozoic; the temperature gradient from equator to pole was only half that of today’s, and deep ocean currents were exceptionally warm. The polar regions were much warmer than today, perhaps as mild as the modern-day Pacific Northwest; temperate forests extended right to the poles, while rainy tropical climates extended as far north as 45°. The difference was greatest in the temperate latitudes; the climate in the tropics however, was probably similar to today’s."
Way beyond the tipping point, and the world seems to have survived.
Or a return of the Dust Bowl in the mid-west.
So a return of the dust bowl would be enough to prod the skeptics into action? Incredibly poor and slow logic. The American dust bowl of the 1930s almost certainly had nothing to do with AGW, so why should a re-occurrence of it have a major impact on AGW?
The CO2 content of the atmosphere was substantially higher over geological time. In addition to fossil fuels, also consider the enormous quantities currently fixed into limestones. Historical CO2 levels are thought to have ranged as high as 5,000 ppm or even higher. Given this high level in the past it is difficult to see how a "tipping point" or "runaway greenhouse" effect could be a valid argument.
Similarly, there was discussion at RC some years ago to try and explain away the 800 year lag between temperature and CO2 levels in the Vostok ice core data. The lag is of course the wrong way round because the CO2 rise is after the temperature rise (conveniently ignored by Al G.). The explanation was that a sudden event caused the temperature to rise, the CO2 comes out of solution from the oceans and this then accelerates the warming. Presumably to then get the temperature to drop into the next ice age we need another sudden event of the opposite sign to cause the cooling. No explanation as to what these events are. So to explain CO2 following temperature (and therefore to support AGW) we need an unknown trigger event, warming caused by CO2 and then an even bigger (and sustained over along period) event to both overcome the CO2 warming effect and trigger an ice age.
Alternatively it could just be that CO2 follows temperature. This nicely follows the laws of physics concerning gases dissolved in liquids and the temperature cycling can be nicely explained by a well established idea by Milankovitich. It also fits rather well with the calculated residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere being very short at about 7 years.
Brian Williams:
Fair questions. And before that, there's the Early Faint Sun Paradox starting around four billion years ago. That has been considered an insoluble puzzle for almost forty years, for Carl Sagan and others, but is, according to Rondanelli and Lindzen, easily explained by a layer of thin cirrus clouds in the tropics - but only if such clouds provide strong negative feedback (in this case of course the negative feedback correcting a 30% forcing in the direction of cooling) allowing the earth to avoid total ice cover. Gerald North (no relation - don't panic Frank) said without hesitation he'd have to reconsider his views on cloud feedbacks if this thesis stood up, in a remarkably friendly debate with Lindzen the day after the paper was published in January. Because of the scale of 'negative forcing' at the time of the early faint sun this seems the biggest challenge of all for a complete account of how stable Earth's temperature has remained for so many billions of years. Worth tracking.
geronimo
I'm not sure that is a contradiction - it's just that the CO2 would have to increase enormously, and very quickly. This is more CO2 and probably also faster than we could manage with fossil fuels. So at least the CO2 would have to come from somewhere else (rocks etc).
Well I can certainly see why you wonder why it doesn't go on indefinitely - i.e. that if 1C of warming can mean another 1C thru water vapor feedback, why shouldn't that in turn trigger about another 1C and so on, indefinitely. It's hard to think about feedbacks especially when you have positive and negative pushing against each other. But the warming itself causes more outgoing radiation, i.e a negative feedback, and this varies by the 4th power of temperature, so any positive feedback is going to need to be very big to overcome that.
It's like the tipping point analogy itself - you could tip a double decker bus until it starts to fall of its own accord. So that's an initial force followed by a positive feedback - it will even accelerate away from the vertical. It will still stop when it hits the floor.
Don't forget, even Venus-style runaway warming stopped eventually.
This is all my understanding anyhow - you could try asking this question on Robert Grumbine's blog and I'm sure he'd answer and you'd probably get a better answer.
There have been higher concentrations, too, and the earth recovered. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a positive feedback. It just means it didn't result in a runaway warming. Like I said, hardly anyone thinks that is plausible but pretty much everyone thinks that positive feedbacks not only exist they are common.
The whole thing is complicated by the fact that different people mean different things by 'runaway warming' in this context. Some people just mean 'run out of control', i.e. hitting a tipping point such that natural feedbacks take over and it doesn't matter what we do then. Something like that may have happened before and could happen again. But that's not the same thing as runaway warming on Venus, and pretty much nobody means that when they talk about tipping points. Even Hansen would usually mean something else when he talks about them.
Mr O'Dwyer
So this is where you are hiding ... your version of the "runaway" effect? Still offering your unqualified opinions I see.
Sincerely
Richard North (Dr)
Richard North,
Why are you here and not answering my questions on the amazon thread?
Sure, what else would I do since I'm an amateur at this just like you. Of course one salient difference would be that people who are experts generally agree with me and not you. Another salient difference is I don't put forward my unrelated credentials in an attempt to pass myself off an expert.
The sun heats the Earth. “Greenhouse gases” mitigate the earth’s natural radiation into space (unlike the moon for example) giving us coincidentally a potentially habitable and evolutionarily-friendly (liquid water = tiny window) planet. Now while CO2 is merely a trace greenhouse gas, in the last 150 years mankind has suddenly released trillions (?) of kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere. Trace x trillions = ? So maybe, to have an informed judgment about the possible consequences of this, we do all need to understand the underlying physics in some detail, do we not?
We all know the hockey stick has been “discredited”. Well, so what? The “hockey stick” just showed an unbelievably mind-boggling late twentiest-century global temperature gradient. We don’t need to believe in that to think questioningly about the basics of what must have anyway been happening as a result of our century-and-a-half of industrialisation.
As Clinton might have said, it’s the physics, ..
Frank
The only credential required of us all is that we think for ourselves, and don't rely on authority and "experts" to do it for us.
As proven throughout history, and we've had this discussion before on another thread, the prevailing consensus of expert opinion is no guarantee of correctness. In fact the expert opinion has so often been overturned in science by a single experimental result, or by an individual willing to argue against the consensus, that it was given a name by Thomas Kuhn: paradigm shift.
Dr North and everyone else here with hard scientific, mathematical and engineering backgrounds are as well, if not better qualified to judge the science of climatology than many on the IPCC's extended list of contributors, as well as throughout the policy making, advocacy and marketing wings of the AGW industry, very few of whom it would appear have even basic science backgrounds.
if i'm not mistaken even BP seem to think oil will run out in 40 years roughly- so we still have to change the way we create and use energy. no?
it seems we will still have to take the same measures as if climate change is happening whether its 4 or 2 degrees or non, the same action must be taken.
geronimo
The earth has a built in air conditioner. Warming causes increased evaporation rate which in turn causes increased condensation at altitude (with likely increase in cloud cover).
@ John
You are mistaken. There is very little chance of oil running out in 40 years. And even if it did there are vast (and I mean VAST) reserves of gas and coal still to go at.
We will emphatically NOT have to take "the same measures" because the biggest and most dangerous "measures" we are taking will have an immeasurable effect on CO2 emissions and thus (even if you believe the shroudwaving AGW hoax) no effect on temperature. Amongst these measures are the Carbon Trading scam and the dash for Big Wind.
£100,000,000,000 to be spent over the next decade for off shore wind farms alone. (Compare that with today's statistic of the allegedly "unaffordable" £2 Billion per year cost of providing decent care of the elderly)
Note the proportion of wind energy from all the UK wind turbines put together as a percentage of total energy generation during three months Dec 09, Jan 10 and Feb 10 :- 0.8%. Yes, that's right, one 'one-hundred and twenty-fifth' of the total.
Meanwhile we learn that in the last 12 months the number of those in fuel poverty in the UK has doubled to 4.6 Million. And of course, energy prices have doubled in the last five years. And Ofgem predict that this will rise to £5,000 p.a. by 2010. How high will fuel poverty be then? How many pensioners dying of hypothermia?
The obvious point is that even if you think it makes sense to a "low-carbon economy" (and in the long term it probably does) it is absolute complete and utter nonsense to suggest that this must be done NOW and that the UK (less than 2% of total CO2 emissions) should for some reason be the first to jump off the cliff. Do you seriously believe that China and India will follow?
so why is there an apparent conspiracy to take the world towards a low carbon future?
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/world-oil-supplies-are-set-to-run-out-faster-than-expected-warn-scientists-453068.html>
fyi: this is where i picked up the piece about oil reserves