pages tagged climate

brickell warming

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:45:00 +0000

A little note on a geologist's global warming claim

Ok, so I was taking an astronomy tour with this really nice old guy in Kaotunu, near Whitianga in the Coromandel. He's got a sweet telescope set up for observing the night sky and for a cheap $40 each, me and my girlfriend got a nice tour of various sky features, including nebulae, carbon stars, star-forming clusters and more. It was a really lovely evening and we all had a lovely discussion over tea and cake. I highly recommend it.

Anyway later in the evening, after we'd had a few conversations we got to the subject of Ken Ring (what was I thinking?). "I disagree with everything the man says," he starts, "apart from Global Warming".

Uh-oh. He proceeds to show me a paper he had published in the New Zealand Geological Society newsletter. He took me through a few points, many of which are covered by the rebuttal by NIWA working scientists in the next issue of the newsletter. Of course he didn't mention his paper was rebutted.

He made a series of points, and armed with much knowledge on the matter I was able to knock most of them back immediately - with the exception of a comment about UV sun output covered here. He tried to tell me that CO₂ increases followed warming, not preceded it; I both pointed out how that was a known consequence of the consensus understanding of past warming and also a false dilemma. He showed me the graph showing temperature correlating with Sunspots. While not precisely the same, you can apply the rebuttal from Crock of the Week (skip to 7:08) to it; because the graph stops at 1980 or so. He talked about Antarctica gaining Ice Mass, and I was able to say, "that's no longer the case, GRACE data shows Antarctica is losing overall Ice Mass"

But best of all, in our parting moments, he said, "you have to be able to keep an open mind, and change your opinion".

My response?

"I already have."

act fails

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:00:00 +0000

You fail at Science

Comment to Act's Dump the ETS release.

There is no evidence that CO2 drives climate or that industrialisation is warming the world.

Incorrect, the case for this has been built up since 1859, and the science has been tested against all of the best available evidence since then. Go look at the history. A statement like this betrays a complete ignorance of the facts.

When I started out as an environmentalist the fear was global cooling.

Well, that was a bit of a temporary fad with a few people that gained popular support in the 1970s. The scientists behind this notion - Kukla etc, never said that they expected the next ice age to happen very soon. They just said that it might happen tomorrow, or in >1,000 years.

Ice-core samples show that CO2 levels lag temperature by 800 years

Correct. CO2 and temperatures exist in a feedback system, so increased temperatures increase CO2 and increased CO2 increases temperatures. Either variable can be forced and it affects the feedback system. This is part of the reason why the Ice Cores strongly support the CO2 climate forcing hypothesis.

And the increase in temperature in the past 150 years has been at the Earth's surface - not the troposphere, as the theory of CO2-induced temperature change predicts.

There's a good essay on the AIP site about simple models of climate. It explains why it is that global warming means increased temperatures on the surface, and decreased temperatures in the troposphere. In a single sentence, the heat radiated from the surface is trapped at lower levels of the atmosphere because there is more CO2 there.

The only thing going for the man-made global warming theory is the computer models - but they're just a direct result of the assumptions fed into them. Their predictions are the result of what's fed in, and the evidence doesn't back the models' predictions.

This is a common argument against the Climate Change models, however it is an absurd rejection of the scientific process. F=mv² or E=mc² are also both models of reality, but you don't question those. A "hypothesis", "Model" and "Formula" are basically the same thing, we just use the term "Model" when it turns into a dynamic system. There is a huge amount of work that has gone into refining the first model calculated by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 - a pen and pencil effort of several months - to take more real world factors into account.

You cannot simply claim that there being a model represents a problem; you must explain what part of the model is at fault.

The science is weak.

Clearly, you have not read enough of it.

skeptics anonymous

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:00:00 +0100

Hi, I'm Sam, and I'm a Global Warming Skeptic

*cue applause*

Many that have talked with me about Climate Change, will be familiar with my position as a skeptic. Initially, like everyone else, accepting "happily" that climate change was real, at some point I got indoctrinated into the field of skeptics. I listened to a lot of arguments to see the holes in the theory.

And I'm still skeptical.

However, my skepticism has been narrowed down over the time I've investigated the topic. Almost all of these supposed "open questions", I've found, do have clear answers. The science is actually a lot more in depth than many sources I read give it credit for - especially places like the Climate Science Coalition's website.

It's clear that there's an information war being fought about this topic. It's like a Usenet flame war, except it's global, and it's still 1992 so people don't know about trolls yet, and we don't have a good measure yet of Godwin's Law for the Blogosphere as a whole.

So, I find myself still skeptical, but leaning towards the consensus position that indeed Human CO₂ emissions are a serious problem. However if I can't find satisfactory answers to my remaining areas of skepticism I'll have to return to deviating from that!

The key resources that swayed me

In particular, IMHO above many, these resources are worth watching, reading and knowing of:

Scam of the Great Global Warming Swindle (~43min) - a very accessible video that both shows the flaws in many of the arguments, and the argument style. highly recommended.
Spencer and Weart essays, especially the first recommended essay, the history of Climate Change science (these are long reads, so put aside an hour or two for each, but definitely worth it). I also read several other essays that covered areas which I was also very curious about, such as Solar variation and Climate modeling, but that essay alone would give you plenty of ammo to tear down most arguments.
Skeptical Science has a ranked list of skeptic arguments, with the consensus scientific position listed. An excellent handy reference, but best used after reading one or two of the above essays.

My open questions

The only questions I've really got left, are very specific like:

How can we be confident in the trends in surface temperature measurements?
How is the climate sensitivity figure (which specifies how much of an effect a doubling of CO₂ would have on global temperature) of 0.75 ± 0.25 °K W¯¹m¯² arrived at?

Skepticism area 1: Surface Temperature record

Sites like SurfaceStations.org point out the poor positioning of some of the sensors. On WattsUpWithThat (now the most highly read blog on wordpress!), Anthony Watts is journalling extensively the problems with a series of articles with titles such as "How not to measure temperature, part 67". In addition, with a mathematician Steve McIntyre they are independently auditing NASA's post-processing of the data using their own computer programs written in the mathematical language "R". They seem to have identified instances where the post-processing leads to dubious results.

Update 2: the answer to this lies in the method by which the "urban heat island" effect is removed from the data. Various corrections are made by comparing the differences between the urban stations and nearby rural stations, and deriving a "bias" for each station. A repeated analysis using only the "Class 1 and 2" stations listed on SurfaceStations.org confirmed the effectiveness of this, but its result should be considered preliminary (I can find only comment references to it; but was produced by OpenTemp, a project hoping to build an open reproduction of the results). It's certainly possible to find cases where the data needs excluding or adjusting, though. Hopefully the feedback from SurfaceStations and Watts will make it back in via these projects or even GISS itself.

Skepticism area 2: Climate Sensitivity

The Climate Sensitivity Figure is currently the topic of big debate. The figure directly affects the prediction of the warming models.

First, one editor of a sub-group within the the American Physical Society, the group called "Forum on Physics and Society" (FPS), called for papers skeptical of the IPCC consensus.

And so, a Viscount Monckton of Brenchley gladly submitted a paper. The presence of this quickly excited the skeptic community, with headlines such as Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate.

The APS then quickly clarified that the FPS did not speak for the entire society; currently on their home page is the message:

APS Climate Change Statement

APS Position Remains Unchanged

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:
"Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that "Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum." This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

They also plastered this notice on the actual paper:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

(colour choice theirs)

On the other hand, Lord Monckton assures us that indeed he did have to clean up the paper at the request of "an eminent physicist" on behalf of the FPS, and that this constituted peer review. Well, that's probably a bit of a storm in a teacup - as in, it's passed FPS peer review but not the overall peer review of APS. Update 4: this is priceless

I even went as far as commenting on the affair, eliciting a response from the Viscount. I did a very simple search for responses and rebuttals to prior work of Lord Monckton's. I've really hit my limit on this - I'm way out of my depth, so here's a braindump of what I've found;

Telegraph on Sunday article by Christopher Monckton, November, 2006.

This article seems to have attracted responses from:

Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.: Which was in turn followed up by a rebuttal by the Science and Public Policy Institutue (SPPI), called Chuck it, Schmidt!. This rebuttal includes a long list of apparently supportive papers, which I have not had the chance to review yet: mostly in support of the esistence of the Mediæval Warm Period. I previously looked into this with respect to Willie Soon and found that the data was far from conclusive. So, this might be an example of "cherry picking" selected supportive results, but there are a large number of papers cited.
Stephen Harrison: The journal allowed a right of reply, which was taken up by Monckton
George Monbiot, a science journalist for the Guardian, also weighed in
Several others listed on the RealClimate wiki, including Al Gore.

And of course the current paper

This one seems to make the same point as the earlier paper, except focus on the Climate Sensitivity thing. My own assessment is that it just seems wrong that he could just make an argument in a handful of pages that the sensitivity figure, which I believe is arrived at through extensive climate modeling, is off. A lot of atmospheric physics goes into arriving at that result!

This follow-up comment by David Hagen lists a series of supportive papers:

For much greater detail on climate modeling and the energy conservation assumptions and local thermal equilibrium that Global Warming Models do not make or satisfy see:
* Ferene M. Miskolczi, Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres” IDŐJÁRÁS, Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service, Vol. 111, No. 1, January-March 2007, pp. 1-40
* Ferene M. Miskolczi, Physics of the Planetary Greenhouse Effect, 2008 International Conference on Global Warming, New York March 2-4, 2008, Audio or Powerpoint
* Miklós Zágoni, Some paleoclimatic consequences of Dr. Miskolczi’s new greenhouse theory, (2008), 2008 International Conference on Global Warming, New York March 2-4, 2008 Audio & PowerPoint presentation (PDF format)
* Miklós Zágoni Developments in greenhouse theory 2008
While there are questions on some of Miskolczi’s steps, his work challenges the very foundations of climate modeling, going into greater detail than Monckton.

Update 4: and Monckton's paper is full of holes. Looks like Monckton's work is based on unreviewed papers, which he further confounds by misreading them. Hat tip: comment from Joel Shore

I can certainly concur with Schmidt's finding that Monckton appears to have "obviously too much time on his hands", as he seems to really go to extreme efforts to get the forums to issue retractions from his articles, and makes a lot of fuss about things like off-hand remarks made by and certainly the amount of effort gone into his follow-up on SPPI indicate a lot of time put into the argument over the case.

Update 1: added list from David Hagen's post.

Update 3: I see now that Roy Spencer has also come forward in support of Monckton. I wondered if I'd seen his face before - and I have! He appears at 26:38 into "Scam of the Great Global Warming Swindle", above.

george kukla

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:00:00 +0100

Wikipedia Climate Science Consensus dissident list investigation: George Kukla [3 of 3]

Well, the third roll of this die (no doubt my critics will use the fact I'm using a 41-sided die in concert with symmetry theory to prove I'm a flatlander), I get 17. Looks like I lucked out somewhat - that's landed in the "Believe global warming is primarily caused by natural processes" section again.

This time, it's actually a climatologist, what luck!

(image credit: BigCityLib, though it seems to have been stolen from the Gelf Magazine article without credit, for the vacuous post by BCL)

George Kukla, retired Professor of Climatology at Columbia University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), said in an interview: "What I think is this: Man is responsible for a PART of global warming. MOST of it is still natural."
-- From An Unrepentant Prognosticator Krueger, Mari Gelf Magazine, April 2007

Now this guy has been around for a while. In 1977 he was mentioned in a Time article (Time++ for having such an old article available online) denying that recent signs of cooling were signs of an impending Ice Age.

The article goes on to talk about Alfred Wegener, who was involved in the discovery of continental drift. Kukla's institution, the LDEO was involved in the related work of plate techtonics. Wegener "championed" the (I believe reasonably well established) idea that the driver of the major ice ages is changes in the Earth's rotational angle and so on - aka the Milankovitch Cycles. This may be one of mankind's saving graces against global warming (I mean, if it were true of course); the natural tendency at the moment according to some should be one of cooling. Of course this is all way before Kukla's time.

Anyway, moving on, there's this article from 2000 which points out that this Holocene era (that's a term for the recent warm times, since the last Ice Age) is not unusual; "evidence suggests that the pendulum-swing to an ice age-type climate may already be underway, Kukla said".

Well, look at that. An about turn in under 23 years. Well, I guess there was a lot of studies and science done in all that time. Let's not hold the man to account for this difference in opinion over the length of his career.

He suggests that a better indicator of climate is the difference in temperature between the poles and the equator, the larger it being, the closer we are heading to an Ice Age (and the lower sea levels will fall).

Actually, it seems that Gelf magazine inquired as to this difference in opinion, him being one of the few people still around from that era. Initially, the article paints him not as a skeptic or a denier, but more of an anti-worryist. He still is sticking to his guns about global cooling (emphasis mine);

What is happening is very similar to the time 115,000 years ago, when the last glaciation started. It is difficult to comprehend, but it is really so: The last glacial was accompanied by the increase of a really averaged global mean surface temperature, alias global warming. What happened then was that the shifting sun warmed the tropics and cooled the Arctic and Antarctic. Because the tropics are so much larger than the poles, the area-weighted global mean temperature was increasing. But also increasing was the temperature difference between the oceans and the poles, the basic condition of polar ice growth. Believe it or not, the last glacial started with "global warming"!

He brings up the clouds issue (the effect of clouds is largely fudged in even modern climate models, at least according to one article on climate change skepticism I read); (emphasis mine):

The CO2 certainly has an influence. For instance, it appears that already now, with still relatively low concentrations, it may have a significant warming impact on the night [temperature] minima. And because the usual way to determine the daily mean is as the average of the daily minimum and maximum, here we go! But it is difficult to be sure: more clouds can do the same.

Kukla has a paper from 2005, I think in the area of paleontology (I've probably got that wrong - the study of deep sea sediment).

I've tried a few searches, but I just can't find a well reasoned rebuttal to this guy's work. He seems to be making a legit statement, within his field. And in hindsight, his position seems remarkably well explained and difficult to fault. Even the cronies on realclimate.org have nothing to say.

However.

His prediction is rather long-term. The chances of the Yellowstone caldera erupting and causing super-rapid cooling the like we haven't seen in perhaps 700,000 years are also on the same radar as his work.

So anyway, it looks like out of the three random people I chose to investigate, one seems to have a flawed study. One wasn't even a scientist, and the last one is just saying "don't worry, the world might plunge into an Ice Age any day now (or in the next 10,000 years or so)."

I think that's enough to call it inconclusive. I'd love to see other people go through a similar exercise and see what they can find. However, the people really should be chosen at random, and the task should be undertaken by someone who believes themselves to be neither a denier nor an alarmist. If someone does this, I'd be delighted to link to their findings.

pat michaels

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:00:00 +0100

Wikipedia Climate Science Consensus dissident list investigation: Patrick Michaels [2 of 3]

The second roll was 41 - is this die weighted? This time we're in the "warming will be beneficial to humanity" section of the list.

Patrick Michaels, part-time research professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: "scientists know quite precisely how much the planet will warm in the foreseeable future, a modest three-quarters of a degree (Celsius), plus or minus a mere quarter-degree...a modest warming is a likely benefit."
-- from Posturing and Reality on Warming, CATO Institute, October 2006

Ok, so to critically analyse that - he states a fact with certainty one that I believe to have a much larger uncertainty than he acknowledges. But fundamentally I do not take issue with his statement, particularly with respect to various studies I've seen which show temperatures higher during the various warm periods of the last 3000 years or so.

However, Michael's stance is no doubt why Dr James Hansen of NASA was not interested in fronting up to a debate with him.

This article from 1995 has a lot of detail on his history. The article claims he was paid over $114k over four years by solid fuel industries. So, if any claim can be made about his integrity, being non-partisan can't form a part of that argument. He has links to the Cato Institute, although given this institute's many criticisms of the Bush administration on various fronts I wouldn't be so quick as to count them out of hand as evil. He's the Chief Editor of World Climate Report, a blog claiming to exist in the “mainstream skeptic” point of view, which apparently started life as a quarterly newsletter funded by Western Fuels. I took a brief look at one or two articles on this site and I don't see anything startlingly bad, but that's hardly conclusive. It doesn't seem to be interesting enough for people to comment on it.

One scientist wrote of him, "He has published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science."

I read his list of papers and somewhat agreed, seemed inconsequential. But then someone might well think that of my achievements as a programmer too - who knows?

I'm actually tending towards not trusting this guy, for two reasons - lack of comments on the blog even though it's a contentious topic means that the users have been driven away (as opposed to my blog, which is simply not interesting enough for people to visit, let alone comment on). That and he seems to be a tool. And a third reason. The smile.

But that's all a very non-scientific judgement, and I present this article he writes for consideration on objective terms; Tibet's temperature story. It references a paper by a Chinese scientist that reckons that the hottest period in the last 700 years in Tibet was the 1490's, based on tree rings. Coincidentally, a result that concurs with the previous post!

Ok, so perhaps it's debatable whether this guy is a scientist, given he hasn't had a paper published in recent history and instead seems to make his living off his books and other sources. So while I won't directly discredit his opinion, or the sample article, he doesn't seem to be a "scientist". Some might see this as a black mark, but I'm not inclined to mark him darker than #666.

So, onto the last episode of this saga.

(image: from his entry on climatecriminals.blogspot.com)

willie soon

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:00:00 +0100

Wikipedia Climate Science Consensus dissident list investigation: Willie Soon [1 of 3]

Over at Hot Topic, I was challenged to:

Pick three of the “dissidents” from that list at random (roll a dice or summat). Read who they are - is this really an expert on the climate? Then read what they say. Read it carefully and critically, and if they give numbers cross-check them, and then check for rebuttals. If you tackle any of their work with the level of skepticism you’ve shown here you’ll find it illuminating.

So, I picked up a 41-sided die, rolled and the first number was 26.

26th on the list is in the section of people who "Believe global warming is primarily caused by natural processes", right after Fred Singer:

(image: from a Hardvard article going through the controversy of the report)

Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]here's increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed."
-- from Global warming is not so hot: 1003 was worse, researchers find - Harvard University Gazette, April 2003

Ok, so it seems that this little known researcher hit the big news when his paper was attempted to be included, by the Bush administration, in an EPA report. The report seems to be meta-research; research of research. It purports to have examined around 200 different studies and shows that they all point towards warmer periods in the past. Indeed we can find the Center for Astrophysics press release, where the stated approach of this study was admirable;

Soon, Baliunas and colleagues analyzed numerous climate indicators including: borehole data; cultural data; glacier advances or retreats; geomorphology; isotopic analysis from lake sediments or ice cores, tree or peat celluloses (carbohydrates), corals, stalagmite or biological fossils; net ice accumulation rate, including dust or chemical counts; lake fossils and sediments; river sediments; melt layers in ice cores; phenological (recurring natural phenomena in relation to climate) and paleontological fossils; pollen; seafloor sediments; luminescent analysis; tree ring growth, including either ring width or maximum late-wood density; and shifting tree line positions plus tree stumps in lakes, marshes and streams.

"Like forensic detectives, we assembled these series of clues in order to answer a specific question about local and regional climate change: Is there evidence for notable climatic anomalies during particular time periods over the past 1000 years?" Soon says. "The cumulative evidence showed that such anomalies did exist."

Sounds good! This is actually a position I'm quite sympathetic with; reference to the periods of data which extend before the Renaissance, before modern scientists were there to make properly objective measurements. Times when vikings were crowing crops in Greenland, that sort of thing.

Anyway. Again there is much fuss made about some 5% funding of the research from the American Petroleum Institute. The other 95% came from the US government. Again we see claims that these people have been hired by the petroleum industry to consult. But then, so what. I've been paid by JP Morgan and KPMG before.

It seems after the paper hit the limelight the publisher of the journal disowned it, saying that "the reviewers failed to detect methodological flaws". A skeptic's favourite taunt, the hockey stick man Michael Mann said "this study was considered not even worthy of a response" (a funny thing to say of a $1m study collating so much research), while he does make reference to the study actually being torn down. So, perhaps we can find that.

Ok. So, according to this article by Richard Monastersky, there were 13 scientists who got together to rebutt it, and that the primary grounds for concern were;

They first took issue with how Mr. Soon and Ms. Baliunas defined evidence for a Medieval Warm Period: as any 50-year period of warmth, wetness, or drought between the years 800 and 1300.

Also;

Under their method, warmth in China in 850, drought in Africa in 1000, and wet conditions in England in 1200 all would qualify as part of the Medieval Warm Period, even though they happened centuries apart.

Indeed. On page 10 of the paper, you'll see (emphasis mine):

Areas which had a 50-year or longer period which might possibly have been warmer than the myopic results they revealed for the 20th century, if you squinted at the right angle. Or something like that.

Was there a 50-year or longer period of sustained colder, wetter, or drier than average climate during the 1300 - 1900 period known as the Little Ice Age?
Was there a 50-year or longer period of sustained warmer, drier, or wetter than average climate during the 800 - 1300 period known as the Medieval Warm Period?
Is there a 50-year period in the proxy record that is warmer than the 20th century?

And this allows them to write on page 12:

One hundred twelve studies contained information about the Medieval Warm Period. Of these, 103 showed evidence for the Medieval Warm Period, 2 did not, and 7 had equivocal answers. Looking just at the Southern Hemisphere, we found 22 studies, 21 of which showed evidence of a Medieval Warm Period and one which did not.

I'm strangely inclined to agree with Mann on the quality of the paper. It boggles why they simply didn't alter the criteria to be more restrictive, so that the result could be credible. It's a shame, because I think that a possibly interesting result in there - that 83 of 102 studies showed that there were 50-year or longer periods which were hotter than present day - can be ignored as well, especially given their definition. Mind you, for the timescales and accuracies of the proxy data they are using to reconstruct this history, you'd wonder whether this result was actually anything more than just noise. And the "warmer than the 20th Century" bit is really just a bit sloppy.

And what an interesting related find: historical context of the report, showing the vast amount of funding from ExxonMobil that was going into reports such as this. I try not to find people guilty by association, but ... wow, what a lot of money those guys were pumping into the industry at that time.

Ok. I'll cede that this paper is complete rubbish. That's one black mark for the list. Now, proceed to the next.