Friday, June 21, 2013

The State of the Climate Wars June 2013. The Science and The Politics.

THE SCIENCE


1.Modelling - How Not To Do Climate Science
"This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! .......... ... THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!….."
This Monte Python quote (TOH  Jimbo) accurately describes the current state of the CAGW paradigm based on the IPCC- Met Office climate models. It also describes the status  of the modelling approach in general as a  means of investigating climate change.
Fig 1   (From Spencer http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/06/climate-modeling-epic-fail-spencer-the-day-of-reckoning-has-arrived/ )

Fig 1 is but  one illustration among an ever increasing  number, of  the growing discrepancy between model outputs and reality.This disconnect has been acknowledged by the establishment science community which is now busy suggesting various epicycle like theories as to where the "missing" heat went.Some say its in the oceans (Trenberth) some say its due to Chinese aerosols (Hansen) but the all main actors  still persist in the view that it will appear Lazarus like at some unspecified future time.This is like the Jehovah's witnesses recalculating the end of the world each time a specified doomsday passes.
In Britain , the gulf between the Met Office expectations for the last several years and the actual string of cold and snowy winters  and wet summers which has occurred has made the Met Office a laughing stock-
to the point of recently holding a meeting of 25 "experts" to try to figure out where they went wrong.
The answer is simple.Their climate models are incorrectly structured because they are based on three irrational and false assumptions. First that CO2 is the main climate driver ,second that in calculating climate sensitivity the GHE due to water vapour should be added to that of CO2 as a feed back effect and third that the GHE of water vapour is always positive.As to the last point the feedbacks cannot be positive otherwise we wouldn't be here to talk about it .
 Further ,Trenberth  in a presentation at :
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outreach/proceedings/cdw31_proceedings/S6_05_Kevin_Trenberth_NCAR.ppt
proposes a strong natural negative feedback which has not been included in the IPCC- Met Office models and which independently of all the other evidence would necessarily substantially reduce model warming predictions.
Temperature drives both CO2 and water vapour independently,. The whole CAGW - GHG scare is based on the obvious fallacy of putting the effect before the cause.As a simple (not exact) analogy  controlling CO2 levels  to control temperature is like trying to  lower  the temperature of an electric hot plate under a boiling pan of water by capturing and sequestering  the steam coming off the top.A corollory to this idea is that the whole idea of a simple climate sensitivity to CO2 is nonsense and the sensitivity equation has  no physical meaning unless you already know what the natural controls on  energy inputs are already ie the extent of the natural variability.
Furthermore the modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a large number of  variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. There is no way of knowing whether the outputs after the parameterisation of the multiple inputs merely hide compensating errors in the system as a whole. The IPCC AR4 WG1 science section actually acknowledges this fact. Section IPCC AR4 WG1 8.6 deals with forcings, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. The conclusions are in section 8.6.4 which deals with the reliability of the projections.It concludes:
"Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections,consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed"
What could be clearer. The IPCC in 2007 said itself that we don't even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability.- ie we don't know what future temperatures will be and we can't calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2.This also begs a further question of what mere assumptions went into the "plausible" models to be tested anyway.
This quoted statement was necessarily ignored by the editors (censors) who produced the AR4 Summary for Policymakers. Here predictions of disaster were illegitimately given “with high confidence.” in complete contradiction to several sections of the WG1 science section where uncertainties and error bars were discussed. Almost all the worlds politicians, media and eco-activist organisations uncritically accepted and used these predictions as infallible guides to the futrure and acted on these delusions of certainty which are now, six years later ,seen to be just that -delusions.
In summary the projections of the IPCC - Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them really have  no useful place  in any serious discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money.

2.How To Do Climate Science - Look for Recurring Patterns and Periodicities in the Temperature and Possible Climate Driver Record.

How then can we predict the future of a constantly changing climate?
When,about ten years ago ,I began to look into the CAGW - CO2 based scare, some simple observations presented themselves.
a) Night is colder than day.
b) Winter is colder than summer.
c) It is cooler in the shade than in the sun
d) Temperatures vary more wildly in deserts and hot humid days are more uncomfortable than dry hot days - humidity (enthalpy) might be an important factor.
e) Being a Geologist I knew that the various Milankovic cycles were seen repeatedly in the Geologic record and were the main climate drivers controlling the Quaternary Ice Ages.
f) I also considered whether the current climate was unusually hot or cold. Some knowledge of history brought   to mind frost fairs on the Thames and the Little Ice Age and  the Maunder Minimum without sunspots during the 17th century . The 300 years of Viking settlements in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period and viniculture in Britain suggested a warmer world in earlier times than at present while the colder Dark Ages separate the MWP from the Roman Climate optimum.
g)I noted  that CO2 was  about  0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out,  that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.
I concluded ,as might any person of reasonable common sense and average intelligence  given these simple observations that the sun was the main climate driver . More specific temperature drivers were the number of hours of sunshine,the amount of cloud cover,the humidity and the height of the sun in the sky at midday. It seemed that  the present day was likely not much or very little outside the range of climate variability for the last 2000 years and that no government action or policy was required or would be useful with regard to anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change.
These conclusions based on about 15 minutes of anyone's time are much nearer the truth and certainly much  more useful as a Guide to Policymakers than the output of the millions of man hours of time and effort that have been spent  on  IPCC - Met Office models.
The IPCC,academic and governmental climate science industry obviously needed to do more than simply inform the governments of the common sense conclusions seen above  in order to keep the grant money flowing and professional opportunities expanding.Certainly the scope ,mechanics, and drivers of climate change are topics of very considerable legitimate scientific interest in their own right but funding would be limited unless catastrophe was forecast.
The IPCC "team" realised correctly that in order to predict the future they needed a good record of past temperatures certainly over at least last 2000 years or so and as much further back as proxy data would allow.Also in order to scare the public and drive policy it was necessary to show that current warm temperatures were out of the range of previous measurements. First they had to do away with Lamb's (and the real world's) Medieval Warming Period which appeared in the first IPCC report. In 1998 and 99 Mann produced the infamous" Hockey Stick" so beloved and exploited by Al Gore. The estblishment modelling community and the ecoleft MSM  implicitly or explicitly still appear conceptually locked in to the original Mannian graph although he himself has moved on to a limited extent...A large amount of extremely valuable work has been done in gathering proxy temperature data in the last 15 years.  links to some of the most relevant papers are provided  at
 http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/01/global-cooling-timing-and-amountnh.html
The general principal is to perfom spectral and wavelet analysis on the the temperature and any possibly useful driver associated time series to find any quasicyclic patterns which can be cross correlated. (possibly with appropriate time lags)
For a general review of this approach see several Scafetta papers eg
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/scafetta-JSTP2.pdf
In some cases simple inspection of the temperature data is sufficient to detect useful periodicities.
For decadal scale variations a 60 year cycle ,which seems to correlate temperatures and the PDO, is well established.  See the post" Global Cooling -Methods and Testable Decadal Predictions" at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
Furthermore it is clear that the cosmic ray intensity time series is the best proxy for "solar activity "and that this correlates meaningfully with temperature with perhaps a 10- 12 year lag.
see Fig 3 CD from Steinhilber
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/30/1118965109.full.pdf
Fig2

Having some passing acquantance with the various temperature time series literature I would suggest that the currently most useful compilation for thinking about the record of the last 2000 years is.
Christiansen and Ljungqvist 2012
http://www.clim-past.net/8/765/2012/cp-8-765-2012.pdf
Fig 3


The point of most interest in Fig 3 is the present temperature peak and the MWP peak at 1000 AD which correlate approximately with a solar millenial cycle .The various minima of the Little Ice age and the Dalton minimumof the early 19th century also show up well.
It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On the basis that the sequence from 1000- 2000 may be about to repeat - and also referring to the Oulu cosmic ray related neutron count time series the following climate forecasts may be made .
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
For a dicussion of the effects of cooling on future weather patterns see the 30 year Climate Forecast 2 Year update at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/07/30-year-climate-forecast-2-year-update.html
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty drops rapidly.



THE POLITICS

For the best exposition of the global politics behind the entire AGW scam I refer readers to Donna   Laframboise's excellent book The Delinquent Teenager ...... especially pages 41 and 42.
I quote briefly:
"At an event celebrating the IPCC's 20th anniversary, its chairman gave a speech in which he publicly
acknowledged that the IPCC's primary purpose is not to help governments make wise climate change
decisions. Rather, in his words:
The UNFCCC is our main customer, if I could label them as such, and our interaction with them
enriches the relevance of our work...
UNFCCC stands for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This international
treaty was launched in 1992 at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. When the chairman of the IPCC
says his organization's main purpose is to assist a UN body that administers a political agreement
between nations - what he's really telling us is that there's no conceivable way the Climate Bible can be
an objective scientific document.............This is a situation in which political operators (UN bureaucrats) pursuing a political goal (a greenhousegas treaty) have recruited scientists to help them achieve their objective"
Most establishment climate modelling scientists in the UK and USA either through scientific incompetence or because of the opportunity to obtain grants and career advancement (and public honours in the case of the UK) have acted as useful idiots to promote the political ends of the UNFCC.
The current state of the poltical climate wars is illuminated by comparing in broad outline the situations in the USA and the UK.
Most politician's primary goal is to gain power by gaining elective office and then stay in power by financially rewarding their corporate contributors or influential  friends and interest groups who can deliver votes  .This creates a congressional or parliamentary - scientific (when government funded )- military- industrial complex,- which creates for all intents and purposes a  national- socialist state.The UN would like to establish a similar world governing bureaucracy.
 By regulating greenhouse gas and thus contolling energy supply and demand governments can essentially take over all economic activity and indeed private property without having to go through a nationalisation process.If this seems far fetched one needs look no further than the provisions of  the Waxman - Markey bill in the U.S.to see the extent of the power grab which its authors contemplated. Global Warming was  used as a pretext to try to grab control of all economic activity in the country because congress would decide the price of all energy via the distribution of carbon credits to whomever contributes most to their campaign funds. Energy production would  be diverted to so called "green " sources which are hopelessly uneconomic unless heavily subsidised.If this  bill had passed all private real estate would  essentially cease to exist because governemnt climate police would ,in the guise of government trained  real estate appraisers,  decide the appraisal value of all real estate and thus control the sales price of everyone's home. Any alterations or improvements would  have to be approved by government inspectors.A vast bureaucracy would  be created to run this virtual totalitarian police state run for the benefit of the congress and whichever corporations or special interests pay them the most.
Fortunately, because of the separation of powers in the US constitution this disaster was temporarily averted.
However aided by the worst Supreme Court decision in history which effectively transferred total control of the economy to the Executive branch via the EPA, the Obama administration is planning to achieve the Orwellian objectives of the Waxman Markey bill by the piecemeal regulation of GHG emissions using fear of global warming as a tool to carry the public with him.
Britain by contrast ,having  replaced  a powerful king by an equally all powerful prime minister and small cabal of ministers had no constitutional barriers to a power grab by the nomenclatura for the benefit of themselves and their corporate and land owning friends.The GHG scare promoted by the  fellow travelling ecoleft press  and especially by the BBC propaganda machine enabled successive governments to first, in 2008, pass ,with only four dissenting votes, a climate bill which by law established legal requirments  for draconian CO2 emission limits.As I write this, the House of Lords is debating an energy bill ,already approved by the Commons ,by which the government would run the economy with  detailed control of energy supply and demand via a Russian Communist style central planning sytem where energy sources and demand and prices  are decreed by the Secretary of State and a  supposedly all knowing government bureaucracy.The majority of Britains political leadership retains its impenetratable ignorance of  the significance of the fact that there has been no warming since 1997 with CO2 up 8% and retains its unshakeable faith in the delusionary CAGW religion. During the debate the "fact" of CAGW was hardly questioned. The chief discussion was about how  to attract  investment in inherently uneconomic renewables such as windmills by rigging the market by subsidy and regulation.
When this literally lunatic bill is finally passed into law Britain will be firmly set on course for economic disaster.
In the U.S.A  the battle is about to commence in earnest.In Britain the ongoing collapse of the CAGW delusion amongst the scientists made no difference to the discussion. I see no evidence  that either Obama and his hand picked true believers in the CAGW religion or the Democratic Congressional leadership will be any more influenced by the changing science than their British counterparts.With the Supreme Court decision behind them can the EPA be stopped? We'll see.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

E-Mail to Stephen Belcher re Climate Change - Global Cooling

From Dr Norman Page


Houston  Blog http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.

Dear Professor Belcher
There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up over 8%, The warming trend peaked in about 2003 and the earth has been cooling slightly for the last 10 years . This cooling will last for at least 20 years and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that.. The Met office and IPCC climate models and all the impact studies depending on them are totally useless because they are incorrectly structured. The models are founded on two irrationally absurd assumptions.First that CO2 is the main driver - when CO2 follows temperature .The cause does not follow the effect. Second piling stupidity on irrationality the models add the water vapour as a feed back to the CO2 in order to get a climate sensitivity of about 3 degrees. Water vapour follows temperature independently of CO2 and is the main GHG.
Furthermore apart from the specific problems in the Met- IPCC models ,models are inherently useless for predicting temperatures because of the difficulty of setting the initial parameters with sufficient precision.Why you think you can iterate more than a couple of weeks ahead is beyond my comprehension.After all you gave up on seasonal forecasts.
For a discussion of the right way to approach forecasting see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/05/climate-forecasting-basics-for-britains.html
and several other pertinent posts also on http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com.
Here is a summary of the conclusions.
"It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On that basis the conclusions of the post referred to above were as follows.
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

For a dicussion of the effects of cooling on future weather patterns see the 30 year Climate Forecast 2 Year update at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/07/30-year-climate-forecast-2-year-update.html
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty drops."
It is way past time for someone in the British scientific establishment to forthrightly say to the government that the whole CO2 scare is based on a mass delusion and try to stop Britain's lunatic efforts to control climate by installing windmills.
As an expat Brit I watch with fascinated horror as y'all head lemming like over a cliff. I would be very happy to consult for the Met on this matter- you certainly need to hear a forthright skeptic presentation to reconnect with reality.
Best Regards Norman Page.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Oklahoma Tornadoes and Sandy type Hurricanes reflect Global Cooling not Warming.

 Most climate warming alarmists have recently  realised that it is now counterproductive to attribute every and all extreme weather events ( even cold snowy winters) to global warming and try to project a judicious objectivity by applying the cliche "weather isn't climate"  to both sides of the climate wars. In fact weather is an almost instantaneous slice through the climate space- time phase space and certain  patterns will occur more frequently on a cooling rather than a warming world.Here I will deal in the main with the USA because   each region will interact with the  warming or cooling changes in the great ocean and atmospheric current systems according to its particular topography and geography.
The basic principles are very simple. On a cooler earth the temperature gradient from the tropics to the arctic circle is steeper.This creates instability and the jet stream swings further North and South as opposed to its more West - East path during warmer periods.According to the season ,blocking highs may develop with  colder dryer air penetrating further South and warm moist air reaching further North. There can be enormous temperature and humidity contrasts  in the narrow boundary between these masses  as warm air is sucked in from the Gulf . Conditions alomg such a boundary are ideal for developing the wind shear necessary for the tornado swarm development seen recently in Oklahoma.The blocking highs also push hurricanes to the east so that hurricanes like Sandy are more likely to occur.Note that Sandy was not a powerful Hurricane  in fact it came ashore as a tropical storm. The big storm surge was the result of its long path over open water while a real cooling signal was seen in the development of blizzard conditions in the NW quadrant.This classic weather pattern is shown for today 6/02/13  in Figs 1 and 2 and occurs more often during a  cooling phase of the PDO and is often triggered by an E Pacific La Nina cooling. as seen in the 6/01/13  SST anomaly map  Fig 3
(TOH to The Weather Channel) It is worth noting that the pattern seen in Fig 1  is also  ideal for steering any Atlantic Hurricane which develops this season in a Sandy type direction.
Fig1


Fig2


Fig3





By contrast on a warmer world tropical SSTs are higher  EL Ninos more common and more powerful category 4 and 5 hurricanes  eg Katrina and Gilbert can develop .Their path is more E- W so that they  more frequently hit the Gulf Coast or even Central America.

More generally-  a cooling  earth is a dryer earth because the winds pick up less water vapour from the cooler oceans.In the USA the cool waters off  the West Coast  (fig3) will lead to more generalised droughts in the Center , West  and SW  and when combined with more frequent  late and early frosts and snows food crop production will be  threatened  .What rains do come will paradoxically come  from storms leading to flash flooding further restricting food production.In California itself the south will be dryer with more forest fires while in the North more of the rains will come as snow so that increasing snow pack will ameliorate the overall dryer conditions.
Most of the ideas expressed above were included in the post ""30 Years Climate Forecast"  in June 2010 on my blog at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com. and revisited in June  2012 in the post "30 Year Climate Forecast -2 year update."
There has been no net warming since 1997 with CO2 up over 8%. The SSTs show a cooling trend since 2003.
The problem with the IPCC- MetOffice Climate models is that, apart from the egregious structural errors in the specific models, (assuming that CO2 is the main driver when it clearly follows temperature and adding water vapour as a feedback onto CO2 to increase the sensitivity) climate science is so complex that the modelling approach is inherently incapable of providing useful forecasts for several reasons -for starters the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions with sufficient precision. All the IPCC model projections and the impact studies and government policies which depend on them are a total waste of time and money. The only useful approach is to perform power spectrum and wavelet analysis on the temperature and possible climate driver time series to find patterns of repeating periodicities and project them forward. When this is done it is apparent that the earth entered a cooling phase in 2003-4 which will likely last for 20 more years and perhaps for several hundred years beyond that. For the data and references supporting this conclusion check the post “Climate Forecasting Basics for Britains Seven Alarmist Scientists” and several earlier posts on Climate Forecasting and Global Cooling especially "Global Cooling - Climate and Weather Forecasting" from 11/18/13.
Here is a  summary of the latest forecast based not on the particular  events referred to above but on the data and references linked in the series of posts  on the climatesense-norpag site.

"It is not a great stretch of the imagination to propose that the 20th century warming peaked in about 2003 and that that peak was a peak in both the 60 year and 1000 year cycles.On that basis the conclusions of the posts referred to above were as follows.
1 Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22.
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 - 0.5
6 General Conclusion - by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast
cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder
Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent - with a much more rapid and economically disruptive
cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario"

How confident should one be in these  predictions? The pattern method doesn't lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigour for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up.This is where scientific judgement comes in - some people are better at pattern recognition than others.A past record of successful forecasting is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure - say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that, inevitably ,certainty must drop.