The Global Warming Debate Spectrum

via Roy Spencer, PhD.
http://ift.tt/1o1jAbd

In the debate arena, the public likes simple narratives. If the narrative supports their pre-conceived notions, they like it even better.

On technical issues which have major public policy impact, however, the nuances can be very important even if they are not easily explained or grasped.

The scientific nuances in the climate change realm are abundant: How much of recent warming has been natural? We aren’t sure. Will clouds respond to warming in ways that make it worse, or lessen it? We aren’t sure.

In the global warming (aka climate change) realm, there is a spectrum of beliefs among the public, as the following chart shows:

Those who tend to view issues in black-or-white terms, and who don’t want to be bothered with understanding the details of the global warming debate, tend to gravitate to one or the other extreme. Which one they choose depends upon their worldview, or even their view of the role of government in our lives.

I’ve heard from people representing the opposite ends of the spectrum over the last 25 years in emails, claiming either increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere simply cannot affect climate, or claiming that we have pushed the fragile climate system past a tipping point and unstoppable warming, more severe weather, rapidly rising sea levels, death, destruction, and mayhem, are the inevitable result of our burning of fossil fuels.

I find it more than a little ironic that Greenpeace was basically forced to admit its own extremism of message in their defense against a defamation lawsuit in Canada that their extremist statements really can’t be taken as factual, but more as hyperbole.

It should be obvious that the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes in the above chart. That is sort of a trivial statement, though, without much value because it is so unhelpful in the policy realm since it covers a wide range of potential outcomes.

Policy changes depend partly upon our confidence in our predictions. If we are certain that in exactly one year a large asteroid will hit Earth, there would be a legitimate global effort to come up with a scheme for averting disaster, no matter the cost. But if there is a relatively small chance of it happening in the next 100 years, there might be little or no effort.

Costs versus benefits must also be addressed, including the impact of forcing more expensive energy on the poor through either legislation or EPA regulations. If it was relatively painless to switch to renewable energy sources, sure, do it.

But it’s not. Ask the countries that have tried.

Also, global greening in recent decades indicates more CO2 isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Crop productivity continues upward, even without planting more acres. 2016 saw record yields in corn, soybeans, and wheat. I’ve been a consultant with corn market interests for the last 6 years, and climate change isn’t even on their radar screen… except indirectly, since the ethanol mandate was supposedly intended to reduce CO2 emissions. It didn’t.

We see in the global warming policy arena there has been a gradual loss of public interest in doing something about global warming. A lot has happened since NASA’s James Hansen sensationally testified in Congress that he was mostly sure that the 1988 heat wave and drought were at least somewhat the fault of humans influencing the climate system.

Despite the initial alarm, in the last 20 years Gallup polling has shown that climate change has remained at the bottom of the list of environmental concerns among Americans. Except for the most recent survey results, there has also been a long-term downward trend over that 20 year period in how serious the public views the threat of global warming.

Why has the public lost interest? The reasons are many.

For example, most of the world’s population experiences many tens of degrees of natural temperature variation, yet they are asked to fret over two degrees of warming on time scales so long almost no one would notice it in their lifetime. The observed rate of warming has been about half of that predicted by the average climate model, and the climate model average is what guides energy policy.

Furthermore, the models do not produce realistic natural climate variability without considerable fudging and tinkering to fit the observed temperature record. As a result, we really aren’t sure recent warming isn’t partly or even mostly natural in origin. (Our study of ocean warming since the 1950s suggests about 50% each).

Finally, like the rock musician who is embarrassed to admit he actually likes ABBA, we are hesitant to admit we love our fossil-fueled transportation. We like the convenience of flying in jets. And the smaller cars get, the more pickup trucks we buy. Leonardo DiCaprio loves his yacht, I’m sure.

The polarization of the debate has led to a simplification of the narratives: you are either a denier if you tend toward the no-impact end in the above chart, or an alarmist if you tend toward the dangerous impact end of the spectrum. Judith Curry has written a lot about the polarization of the debate in the years since the Climategate email release pushed her into the skeptic camp.

In the quarter century I have studied this issue, I dont think we are much closer to having an answer to just where the climate system will end up. Just about anything is theoretically possible. The science is much more difficult than putting a person on the Moon, which was basically just an engineering exercise involving man-against-gravity, and making sure he has air, food, and water for several days.

Nevertheless, a little-known hint of what direction the science might be going is the fact that the latest U.N. IPCC report (AR5), which historically tends toward the alarmist extreme (at least in its Summary for Policymakers) has lowered the lower limit of warming to about 1 deg. C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. (How could this be, you ask, if weve already experienced about 1 deg. C of warming without CO2 doubling? Because there could be natural warming influences causing a substantial portion of observed warming.) Admittedly, they consider 1 deg. C to be extremely unlikely. If I had to choose a number, I’d go with about 1.5 deg. C, but they consider that unrealistically optimistic as well.

The fact that our satellite observations have shown less warming than the surface, rather than more warming as would be expected theoretically is another hint that the theory encapsulated in the models has a serious bias. The most obvious potential reason for this is that water vapor feedback is not as strong in reality as in the models, since those models with the strongest positive water vapor feedback also produce the strongest amplification of warming with height in the troposphere.

My opinion tends toward the little-impact end of the spectrum. I suspect that future warming will be slow and relatively benign (say, 1.5 deg. C by the end of this century), severe weather events won’t become demonstrably worse, and slow sea level rise will continue roughly as it has for centuries. People will adapt to whatever slow changes occur.

And renewable energy (or maybe safer nuclear energy) breakthroughs will come from the private sector and market forces, not from legislative fiat.

While climate science will continue to try to nail down just where we are in the spectrum of climate impacts, what we hear in the news media will continue to veer toward the ends of the spectrum, with exaggerated claims from opposing tribes, based upon fears and click-seeking more than on evidence. Heat waves, freezes, floods, droughts… these events make news, just as they have throughout recorded history. Average weather does not. We lukewarmers will continue to be lost in the noise.

I suspect we will not have much more scientific confidence ten years from now. A lot will depend on where global temperatures go from now on, because the science will just remain too uncertain until Mother Nature shows her hand.

Congressional hearings into climate issues, put on mostly for show, will continue to pit competing views against one another. As usual, the opposing views will largely cancel each other out, despite each of the tribes claiming victory.

And the wheels on the bus go round and round.

via Roy Spencer, PhD. http://ift.tt/1o1jAbd

March 24, 2017 at 02:57AM

Leaked Paper Exposes EU Countries’ Abuse Of Climate Loophole

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

European Union countries exploited loopholes in United Nations forestry rules to pocket carbon credits worth €600 million and the equivalent of global-warming emissions from 114 million cars.

European Commission analysis, obtained by EURACTIV.com, exposed how by overstating their logging targets, governments scooped up carbon credits. These can be used to offset emissions from polluting sectors under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol.

Forests remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Countries were rewarded for undercutting their exaggerated UN felling targets, which were reported to the European Commission.

Forestry is not regulated under the bloc’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), the world’s largest carbon market. But efforts are underway to bring them under EU oversight in the draft Effort-Sharing Regulation.

The Commission “non-paper” was prepared in a bid to convince some EU member states to drop their opposition to the new rules.  It revealed that the problem was potentially up to 30% worse than first suspected.

In 2013-2014, the most recent years available, member states picked up a windfall of 120 million tonnes worth of carbon credits.

Those free credits, worth about €5 each at today’s EU carbon price, represent the same CO2 as the annual emissions of the four most polluting coal stations in Europe.

The document said that leaving the loophole open risked 133 million tonnes of unearned carbon credits falling into governments hands.

133 million tonnes is worth €665 million at today’s carbon price and is equivalent to 127 million cars on the road.

Full story

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 24, 2017 at 02:44AM

Recent Research Shows Climate Models Are Mostly “Black Box” Fudging, Not Real Science

via NoTricksZone
http://notrickszone.com

Climate models fail on the test stand

By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
[German text translated/edited by P Gosselin)

20 years ago climate models were celebrated as a huge breakthrough. Finally we were able to reproduce reality in the computer, which had been becoming ever more powerful and faster. Everyone believed that only minor adjustments were necessary, and the target would be reached. But when the computer-crunched results were finally compared to reality, huge unexplained discrepancies appeared.

In parallel, paleo-climatologists produced increasingly robust reconstructions of the real climate development, which served to make the computer problems even more glaring. Month after month new papers appeared exposing the major problems of the climate modelers. Model tests were preferably started in the middle of the Little Ice Age, around 1800, because the warming seemed to fit well with the rise in CO2 emissions.

But if one goes back 1000 years, the model technology falls apart.

In March 2016 Fabius Maximus pointed out the obvious: The models have to be more strictly tested and calibrated before they can be approved for modeling the future.

We can end the climate policy wars: demand a test of the models
[…] The policy debate turns on the reliability of the predictions of climate models. These can be tested to give “good enough” answers for policy decision-makers so that they can either proceed or require more research. I proposed one way to do this in Climate scientists can restart the climate change debate & win: test the models!— with includes a long list of cites (with links) to the literature about this topic. This post shows that such a test is in accord with both the norms of science and the work of climate scientists. […] Models should be tested vs. out of sample observations to prevent “tuning” the model to match known data (even inadvertently), for the same reason that scientists run double-blind experiments). The future is the ideal out of sample data, since model designers cannot tune their models to it. Unfortunately…

“…if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.”
— Thomas R. Knutson and Robert E. Tuleya, note in Journal of Climate, December 2005.

There is a solution. The models from the first four IPCC assessment reports can be run with observations made after their design (from their future, our past) — a special kind of hindcast.”

Another large point of criticism on climate models is the so-called “tuning”. Here climate models are adjusted so that they nearly produce the desired result. This takes part mostly in clandestine rooms behind closed doors where there is little transparency. Hourdin et al. 2016 described the problem in detail in an assessment paper. Judith Curry sums it up best:

Two years ago, I did a post on Climate model tuning,  excerpts: “Arguably the most poorly documented aspect of climate models is how they are calibrated, or ‘tuned.’ I have raised a number of concerns in my Uncertainty Monster paper and also in previous blog posts.The existence of this paper highlights the failure of climate modeling groups to adequately document their tuning/calibration and to adequately confront the issues of introducing subjective bias into the models through the tuning process.”

Think about it for a minute. Every climate model manages to accurately reproduce the 20^th century global warming, in spite of the fact that that the climate sensitivity to CO₂ among these models varies by a factor of two. How is this accomplished? Does model tuning have anything to do with this?”

Read the entire post at Climate Etc.

In November 2016 in the renowned journal Science, Paul Voosen described the necessity of ending all the secrecy and black boxes in order to allow some public transparency:

Climate scientists open up their black boxes to scrutiny
Climate models render as much as they can by applying the laws of physics to imaginary boxes tens of kilometers a side. But some processes, like cloud formation, are too fine-grained for that, and so modelers use “parameterizations”: equations meant to approximate their effects. For years, climate scientists have tuned their parameterizations so that the model overall matches climate records. But fearing criticism by climate skeptics, they have largely kept quiet about how they tune their models, and by how much. That is now changing. By writing up tuning strategies and making them publicly available for the first time, groups hope to learn how to make their predictions more reliable—and more transparent.”

via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com

March 24, 2017 at 02:39AM

Earth Hour: why not use it to reach out and help a victim of the CO2 Alarm?

via Climate Scepticism
https://cliscep.com

Tomorrow, 25th March, sees the annual abomination of Earth Hour, during which we are being cajoled to compete with North Korea in terms of just how dark, dismal, ill-informed, manipulated, obedient and coerced we can manage to be for a whole hour. My favourite text for the occasion is this classic piece from Ross McKitrick: […]

via Climate Scepticism https://cliscep.com

March 24, 2017 at 02:14AM