Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 6 Jul 2017

Finds Temperature Adjustments Account For ‘Nearly All Of The Warming’ In Climate Data

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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From the Daily Caller:

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

“Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming,” according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Basically, “cyclical pattern in the earlier reported data has very nearly been ‘adjusted’ out” of temperature readings taken from weather stations, buoys, ships and other sources.

In fact, almost all the surface temperature warming adjustments cool past temperatures and warm more current records, increasing the warming trend, according to the study’s authors.

“Nearly all of the warming they are now showing are in the adjustments,” Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, a study co-author, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “Each dataset pushed down the 1940s warming and pushed up the current warming.”

“You would think that when you make adjustments you’d sometimes get warming and sometimes get cooling. That’s almost never happened,” said D’Aleo, who co-authored the study with statistician James Wallace and Cato Institute climate scientist Craig Idso.

Their study found measurements “nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history,” which was “nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern.”

“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three [global average surface temperature] data sets are not a valid representation of reality,” the study found. “In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

Based on these results, the study’s authors claim the science underpinning the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases “is invalidated.”

The new study will be included in petitions by conservative groups to the EPA to reconsider the 2009 endangerment finding, which gave the agency its legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Sam Kazman, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), said the study added an “important new piece of evidence to this debate” over whether to reopen the endangerment finding. CEI petitioned EPA to reopen the endangerment finding in February.

“I think this adds a very strong new element to it,” Kazman told TheDCNF. “It’s enough reason to open things formally and open public comment on the charges we make.”

Since President Donald Trump ordered EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to review the Clean Power Plan, there’s been speculation the administration would reopen the endangerment finding to new scrutiny.

The Obama-era document used three lines of evidence to claim such emissions from vehicles “endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”

D’Aleo and Wallace filed a petition with EPA on behalf of their group, the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC). They relied on past their past research, which found one of EPA’s lines of evidence “simply does not exist in the real world.”

Their 2016 study “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.”

“In sum, all three of the lines of evidence relied upon by EPA to attribute warming to human GHG emissions are invalid,” reads CHCC’s petition. “The Endangerment Finding itself is therefore invalid and should be reconsidered.

Pruitt’s largely been silent on whether or not he he would reopen the endangerment finding, but the administrator did say he was spearheading a red team exercise to tackle climate science.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry also came out in favor of red-blue team exercises, which are used by the military and intelligence agencies to expose any vulnerabilities to systems or strategies.

Environmental activists and climate scientists largely panned the idea, with some even arguing it would be “dangerous” to elevate minority scientific opinions.

“Such calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate,” wrote climate scientist Ben Santer and Kerry Emanuel and historian and activist Naomi Oreskes.

“They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science,” the three wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

“Frankly, I think you could do a red-blue team exercise as part of reviewing the endangerment finding,” Kazman said.

Though Kazman did warn a red team exercise could be a double-edged sword if not done correctly. He worries some scientists not supportive of the idea could undermine the process from the inside and use it to grandstand.

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There is nothing there that I and others have not covered in the past, but it is helpful to have it all confirmed in one paper

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July 6, 2017 at 12:42PM

Uncategorized 6 Jul 2017

Leading Climate Scientist Says Debating Scientific Theories Would Be ‘Un-American’

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

You’d think the 97 percent of scientists who supposedly all agree about climate change would eagerly line up to vanquish climate deniers—but apparently not.

Way, way back in April 2017, scientists around the world participated in the ‘March for Science’ as a show of force and unity against an allegedly anti-science Trump administration. Their motto was “science not silence”: many wrote that mantra on pieces of duct tape and stuck it across their mouths.

March for Science organizers claimed that “the best way to ensure science will influence policy is to encourage people to appreciate and engage with science. That can only happen through education, communication, and ties of mutual respect between scientists and their communities — the paths of communication must go both ways.”

But that was so three months ago.

Many scientists are now rejecting an open debate on anthropogenic global warming. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt appears ready to move forward with a “red-team, blue-team” exercise, where two groups of scientists publicly challenge each other’s evidence on manmade climate change. The idea was floated during a Congressional hearing last spring and outlined in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Steve Koonin, former undersecretary of energy in the Obama administration. Koonin said the public is unaware of the intense debate in climate science and how “consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the “settled,” “hoax” and “don’t know” memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change.”

It would work this way: A red team of scientists critiques a key climate assessment. The blue team responds. The back-and-forth continues until all the evidence is aired and refuted, followed by public hearings and an action plan based on the findings. It happens entirely out in the open. Koonin said this approach is used in high-consequence situations and “very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.” (Climate scientist Judith Curry has a good primer on this concept here.)

Pruitt is prepared to pull the trigger on this idea, according to an article in E&E News last week. In an interview with Breitbart News on June 5, Pruitt touted the red-team, blue-team initiative, saying that “the American people need to have that type of honest open discussion, and it’s something we hope to provide as part of our leadership.”

Instead Of Dialoguing, Climate Scientists Preach

Now you would think the scientific establishment would embrace an opportunity to present their case to a wary, if disinterested, public. You would think the 97 percent of scientists who supposedly all agree human activity is causing climate change would eagerly line up to vanquish climate deniers, especially those in the Trump administration. You would think the same folks who fear a science-averse President Trump would be relieved his administration is encouraging a rigorous, forensic inquiry into the most consequential scientific issue of our time that has wide-ranging economic, social, and political ramifications around the world.

You would think.

But instead, many scientists and activists are expressing outrage at this logical suggestion, even advising colleagues not to participate. In a June 21 Washington Post op-ed, three top climate scientists repudiated the red-team concept, offended by the slightest suggestion that climate science needs fixing. Naomi Oreskes, Benjamin Salter, and Kerry Emanuel wrote that “calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”

In a July 1 post full of irony, leading climate scientist Ken Caldeira blasts the climate contest: “We don’t want red team/blue team because science doesn’t line up monolithically for or against scientific positions.” What? Never mind the 97 percent consensus claim that’s been shoved down our throats for the past decade. (Caldeira also wrote just a few months ago that “the evidence for human-induced global warming is now so strong that no sensible person can deny a human role in these temperature increases. We can argue about what we should or should not do … but the argument is over.”)

Caldeira then smugly questions why “politicians who have never engaged in any scientific inquiry in their lives believe themselves to be the experts who should tell scientists how to conduct their business?” (Shall we then ask why scientists who have never engaged in any legislative or political endeavor in their lives believe themselves to be the experts who should tell lawmakers how to conduct their business?)

Full post

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

July 6, 2017 at 11:45AM

Uncategorized 6 Jul 2017

Comments on the New RSS Lower Tropospheric Temperature Dataset

via Roy Spencer, PhD.
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It was inevitable that the new RSS mid-tropospheric (MT) temperature dataset, which showed more warming than the previous version, would be followed with a new lower-tropospheric (LT) dataset. (Carl Mears has posted a useful FAQ on the new dataset, how it differs from the old, and why they made adjustments).

Before I go into the details, let’s keep all of this in perspective. Our globally-averaged trend is now about +0.12 C/decade, while the new RSS trend has increased to about +0.17 C/decade.
Note these trends are still well below the average climate model trend for LT, which is +0.27 C/decade.

These are the important numbers; the original Carbon Brief article headline (“Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998”) is seriously misleading, because the warming in the RSS LT data post-1998 was near-zero anyway (140% more than a very small number is still a very small number).

Since RSS’s new MT dataset showed more warming that the old, it made sense that the new LT dataset would show more warming, too. Both depend on the same instrument channel (MSU channel 2 and AMSU channel 5), and to the extent that the new diurnal drift corrections RSS came up with caused more warming in MT, the adjustments should be even larger in LT, since the diurnal cycle becomes stronger as you approach the surface (at least over land).

Background on Diurnal Drift Adjustments

All of the satellites carrying the MSU and AMSU instruments (except Aqua, Metop-A and Metop-B) do not have onboard propulsion, and so their orbits decay over the years due to very weak atmospheric drag. The satellites slowly fall, and their orbits are then no longer sun-synchronous (same local observation time every day) as intended. Some of the NOAA satellites were purposely injected into orbits that would drift one way in local observation time before orbit decay took over and made them drift in the other direction; this provided several years with essentially no net drift in the local observation time.

Since there is a day-night temperature cycle (even in the deep-troposphere the satellite measures) the drift of the satellite local observation time causes a spurious drift in observed temperature over the years (the diurnal cycle becomes “aliased” into the long-term temperature trends). The spurious temperature drift varies seasonally, latitudinally, and regionally (depending upon terrain altitude, available surface moisture, and vegetation).

Because climate models are known to not represent the diurnal cycle to the accuracy needed for satellite adjustments, we decided long ago to measure the drift empirically, by comparing drifting satellites with concurrently operating non-drifting (or nearly non-drifting) satellites. Our Version 6 paper discusses the details.

RSS instead decided to use climate model estimates of the diurnal cycle, and in RSS Version 4 are now making empirical corrections to those model-based diurnal cycles. (Generally speaking, we think it is useful for different groups to use different methods.)

Diurnal Drift Effects in the RSS Dataset

We have long known that there were differences in the resulting diurnal drift adjustments in the RSS versus our UAH dataset. We believed that the corrections in the older RSS Version 3.3 datasets were “overdone”, generating more warming than UAH prior to 2002 but less than UAH after 2002 (some satellites drift one way in the diurnal cycle, other satellites drift in the opposite direction). This is why the skeptical community liked to follow the RSS dataset more than ours, since UAH showed at least some warming post-1997, while RSS showed essentially no warming (the pause).

The new RSS V4 adjustment alters the V3.3 adjustment, and now warms the post-2002 period, but does not diminish the extra warming in the pre-2002 period. Hence the entire V4 time series shows more warming than before.

Examination of a geographic distribution of their trends shows some elevation effects, e.g. around the Andes in S. America (You have to click on the image to see V4 compared to V3.3…the static view below might be V3.3 if you don’t click it).

Gridpoint lower tropospheric temperature trends, 1979-2016, in the V3.3 versus V4 RSS datasets.

We also discovered this and, as discussed in our V6 paper, attributed it to errors in the oxygen absorption theory used to match the MSU channel 2 weighting function with the AMSU channel 5 weighting function, which are at somewhat different altitudes when viewing at the same Earth incidence angle (AMSU5 has more surface influence than MSU2). Using existing radiative transfer theory to adjust AMSU5 to match MSU2 (as RSS does) leads to AMSU5 still being too close to the surface. This affects the diurnal drift adjustment, and especially the transition between MSU and AMSU in the 1999-2004 period. The mis-match also can cause dry areas to have too much warming in the AMSU era, and in general will cause land areas to warm spuriously faster than ocean areas.

Here are our UAH LT gridpoint trends (sorry for the different map projection):

In general, it is difficult for us to follow the chain of diurnal corrections in the new RSS paper. Using a climate model to make the diurnal drift adjustments, but then adjusting those adjustments with empirical satellite data feels somewhat convoluted to us.

Final Comments

Besides the differences in diurnal drift adjustments, the other major difference affecting trends is the treatment off the NOAA-14 MSU, last in the MSU series. There is clear drift in the difference between the new NOAA-15 AMSU and the old NOAA-14 MSU, with NOAA-14 warming relative to NOAA-15. We assume that NOAA-14 is to blame, and remove its trend difference with NOAA-15 (we only use it through 2001) and also adjust NOAA-14 to match NOAA-12 (early in the NOAA-14 record). RSS does not assume one satellite is better than the other, and uses NOAA-14 all the way through 2004, by which point it shows a large trend difference with NOAA-15 AMSU. We believe this is a large component of the overall trend difference between UAH and RSS, but we aren’t sure just how much compared to the diurnal drift adjustment differences.

It should be kept in mind that the new UAH V6 dataset for LT uses three channels, while RSS still uses multiple view angles from one channel (a technique we originally developed, and RSS followed). As a result, our new LT weighting function is a little higher in the atmosphere, with considerably more weight in the upper troposphere and slightly more weight in the lower stratosphere. Based upon radiosonde temperature trend profiles, we found the net effect on the difference between the two LT weighting functions on temperature trends to be very small, probably 0.01 C/decade or less.

We have a paper in peer review with satellite dataset comparisons to balloons (radiosondes) and reanalyses. These show that RSS diverges from these and from UAH, showing more warming than the other datasets between 1990 and 2002 – a key period with two older MSU sensors both of which showed signs of spurious warming not yet addressed by RSS. I suspect the next chapter in this saga is that the remaining radiosonde datasets that still do not show substantial warming will be the next to be “adjusted” upward.

The bottom line is that we still trust our methodology. But no satellite dataset is perfect, there are uncertainties in all of the adjustments, as well as legitimate differences of opinion regarding how they should be handled.

Also, as mentioned at the outset, both RSS and UAH lower tropospheric trends are considerably below the average trends from the climate models.

And that is the most important point to be made.

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July 6, 2017 at 10:03AM

Uncategorized 6 Jul 2017

Why Climate Models Run Hot

via Watts Up With That?
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by Rud Istvan,

EPA administrator Pruitt wants to “Red Team” the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) consensus best reflected in the IPCC assessment reports (AR). At its core, CAGW rests on just three propositions:

1. CO₂ is a ‘greenhouse’ gas retarding radiative cooling. This should not be in serious dispute since Tyndall experimentally proved it in 1859.

2. The Earth is warming. Although the details are in dispute because of temperature data quality problems and ‘adjustments’, the general fact is not. The Earth has been intermittently warming since the Little Ice Age (LIA) ended. For example, the last Thames Ice Fair was in 1814.

3. CO₂and its knock-on effects caused the recent warming, and climate models (such as the CMIP5 archive for IPCC AR5) predict this will continue to catastrophic levels. This is an extremely dubious proposition.

This guest post addresses proposition 3. It does so in a short sound bite ‘abstract’ useful for debating warmunists, and then in a typical WUWT full climate science guest post. It is a modest Red Team contribution.

Sound bite ‘abstract’

Climate models have run hot since 2000. Except for the 2015-16 now fully cooled El Nino blip, there has been no warming this century except by Karlization or (newly) Mearsation. Yet this century comprises about 35% of the total increase in atmospheric CO₂ since 1958 (Keeling Curve). The climate models went wrong on attribution. The warming ~1920-1945 is essentially indistinguishable from that of ~1975-2000. AR4 figure SPM.4 said the earlier period was mostly natural (because not enough change in CO₂). The CMIP5 archive assumes the latter period is mostly CO₂ (and other GHG). That assumption is fatally flawed; natural variation did not magically cease in 1975.

Fully documented post

CMIP5 climate models have run hot since before 2000, and the divergence of CMIP5 from observations is highly statistically significant. Details are in Dr. Christy’s 29 March 2017 Congressional written testimony (available on line), from which Figure 2 provides sufficient up-to-date evidence.

This divergence is rooted in the attribution problem between natural and anthropogenic warming. It is unavoidably inherent in CMIP5 models for a very basic reason.

To properly model essential climate features like convection cells (thunderstorms), a grid cell needs to be less than 4km on a side. The finest resolution in CMIP5 is 110km at the equator; the typical resolution is 280km. This is because halving grid size requires an order of magnitude more computation. So adequately simulating such atmospheric processes from first principles is computationally intractable. Details are in my 8/9/2015 WUWT guest post “The Trouble with Climate Models”.

The solution is to parameterize such processes (for example, put a number on the probability of how many thunderstorms per grid cell per time step –a conceptual rather than actual example as parameters are a bit more complicated). Parameters are obviously just guesses. So they are tuned to best hindcast compared to observations; for CMIP5 the ‘experimental design’ was from yearend 2005 back three decades to 1975.[1]

Parameter tuning implicitly drags the attribution problem into CMIP5.

Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT professor emeritus, first made the observation that the period of warming from ~1920-1945 is essentially indistinguishable to that from ~1945-2000. This is readily apparent visually, and is also true statistically.

IPCC AR4 WG1 figure SPM.4 and the accompanying text make clear that the earlier period (circled in blue) was mostly natural; there simply was insufficient change in atmospheric CO₂ to explain the rise in temperature without natural variability. A portion of figure SPM.4 (readily available via the IPCC) is reproduced below as sufficient evidence.

The IPCC intent of AR4 WG1 figure SPM.4 was to convince policy makers that the second warming (circled in red) had to be AGW. But that IPCC logic is fatally flawed. The SPM did not tell policy makers about model parameter tuning, which clearly drags natural variation into the model parameter tuning period assumed by IPCC to be AGW. So the warming is falsely attributed only to CO₂. Note also the subtle “cheat” in Fig SPM.4 of models using only natural forcings. The issue is not guessed natural forcings. We do not know why natural variation occurs, only that it does (no model of ENSO periodicy, for example). Natural forcings are not the issue; only the resulting natural warming variation is. Natural temperature variation, not ‘forcings’, is the proper statement of the attribution problem. The AR5 WG1 SPM makes IPCC’s erroneous and unscientific belief explicit:

§D.3 This evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. [Bold mine]

Natural variation did NOT stop in the mid-20^th century. And that is why CMIP5 models now run hot.

[1] Taylor et. al., An Overview of CMIP5 and the Experimental Design, BAMS 93: 485-498 (2012).

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July 6, 2017 at 10:01AM