GWPF | 23 July 2014
Two of the world’s premiere ocean scientists from Harvard and MIT have addressed the data limitations that currently prevent the oceanographic community from resolving the differences among various estimates of changing ocean heat content. They point out where future data is most needed so these ambiguities do not persist into the next several decades of change. As a by-product of that analysis they 1) determined the deepest oceans are cooling, 2) estimated a much slower rate of ocean warming, 3) highlighted where the greatest uncertainties existed due to the ever changing locations of heating and cooling, and 4) specified concerns with previous methods used to construct changes in ocean heat content. They concluded, “Direct determination of changes in oceanic heat content over the last 20 years are not in conflict with estimates of the radiative forcing, but the uncertainties remain too large to rationalize e.g., the apparent “pause” in warming.” –Jim Steele, Landscapes and Cycles, 21 July 2014
So it remains unclear if and how Trenberth’s “missing heat” has sunk to the deep ocean. The depiction of a dramatic rise in deep ocean heat is highly questionable, even though alarmists have flaunted it as proof of CO2’s power. As Dr. Wunsch had warned earlier, “Convenient assumptions should not be turned prematurely into ‘facts,’ nor uncertainties and ambiguities suppressed.” … “Anyone can write a model: the challenge is to demonstrate its accuracy and precision… Otherwise, the scientific debate is controlled by the most articulate, colorful, or adamant players.” –Jim Steele, Landscapes and Cycles, 21 July 2014
1) Deep Oceans Cooling Amidst A Sea Of Modelling Uncertainty – Landscapes and Cycles, 21 July 2014
2) Britain Won’t Sign New Climate Treaty Unless China, India Agree CO2 Caps – The Times, 22 July 2014
3) David Whitehouse: “Well-Estimated Global Surface Warming” – Global Warming Policy Foundation, 23 July 2014
4) New Paper: No Evidence That Climate Change Is Increasing Disaster Losses – Roger Pielke Jr, 22 July 2014
5) And Finally: 130 Green NGOs Call For End To Capitalism & ‘Green Economy’ – Responding to Climate Change, 22 July 2014
Britain will not sign a global deal on climate change unless it includes commitments from China and India on reducing emissions, the energy and climate change secretary said on the eve of visiting the two countries. In an interview with The Times, Ed Davey said that there was little point in Britain making great efforts to cut emissions if other countries did not. “If I looked around the world and no one was doing anything I would have to ask myself the question: is it worth us doing anything if no one else is?” he said. “We won’t do a deal unless these countries come on board. We need a deal that’s applicable to all — that’s what we didn’t get at Kyoto.” –Ben Webster, The Times, 22 July 2014
This new paper allows great headlines to proclaim that the warming “pause” in global surface temperature is explainable by climate models. As is often the case in climate reporting the details do not back up the headlines. –David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 23 July 2014
A new paper appeared in Climatic Change this week which looks at disasters and climate change. Like other studies and the IPCC assessment, Visser et al. find no trends in normalized disaster loses, looking at several metrics of economic and human losses. They conclude: “The absence of trends in normalized disaster burden indicators appears to be largely consistent with the absence of trends in extreme weather events. This conclusion is more qualitative for the number of people killed. As a consequence, vulnerability is also largely stable over the period of analysis.” In short, those who claim that a signal of human caused-climate change is somehow hidden in the disaster loss record are engaging in a bit of unjustified wishful thinking. The data and evidence says otherwise. —Roger Pielke Jr, 22 July 2014
A UN-backed conference in Venezuela has ended with a declaration to scrap carbon markets and reject the green economy. The Margarita Declaration was issued at the end of a four-day meeting of around 130 green activist groups, which the Venezuelan government hosted in order to raise the volume of civil society demands in UN discussions on climate change. “The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system,” the final declaration said. “To combat climate change it is necessary to change the system.” –Sophie Yeo, Responding to Climate Change, 22 July 2014
1) Deep Oceans Cooling Amidst A Sea Of Modelling Uncertainty
Landscapes and Cycles, 21 July 2014
Jim Steele
Deep oceans exhibit a clear cooling trend for the past 2 decades.
Two of the world’s premiere ocean scientists from Harvard and MIT have addressed the data limitations that currently prevent the oceanographic community from resolving the differences among various estimates of changing ocean heat content (in print but available here).
They point out where future data is most needed so these ambiguities do not persist into the next several decades of change. As a by-product of that analysis they 1) determined the deepest oceans are cooling, 2) estimated a much slower rate of ocean warming, 3) highlighted where the greatest uncertainties existed due to the ever changing locations of heating and cooling, and 4) specified concerns with previous methods used to construct changes in ocean heat content, such as Balmaseda and Trenberth’s re-analysis (see below). They concluded, “Direct determination of changes in oceanic heat content over the last 20 years are not in conflict with estimates of the radiative forcing, but the uncertainties remain too large to rationalize e.g., the apparent “pause” in warming.”
Wunsch and Heimbach (2014) humbly admit that their “results differ in detail and in numerical values from other estimates, but the determining whether any are “correct” is probably not possible with the existing data sets.”
They estimate the changing states of the ocean by synthesizing diverse data sets using models developed by the consortium for Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, ECCO. The ECCO “state estimates” have eliminated deficiencies of previous models and they claim, “unlike most “data assimilation” products, [ECCO] satisfies the model equations without anyartificial sources or sinks or forces. The state estimate is from the free running, but adjusted, model and hence satisfies all of the governing model equations, including those for basic conservation of mass, heat, momentum, vorticity, etc. up to numerical accuracy.”
Their results (Figure 18. below) suggest a flattening or slight cooling in the upper 100 meters since 2004, in agreement with the -0.04 Watts/m2 cooling reported by Lyman (2014). The consensus of previous researchers has been that temperatures in the upper 300 meters have flattened or cooled since 2003, while Wunsch and Heimbach (2014) found the upper 700 meters still warmed up to 2009.
The deep layers contain twice as much heat as the upper 100 meters, and overall exhibit a clear cooling trend for the past 2 decades. Unlike the upper layers, which are dominated by the annual cycle of heating and cooling, they argue that deep ocean trends must be viewed as part of the ocean’s long term memory which is still responding to “meteorological forcing of decades to thousands of years ago”.
If Balmaseda and Trenberth’s model of deep ocean warming was correct, any increase in ocean heat content must have occurred between 700 and 2000 meters, but the mechanisms that would warm that “middle layer” remains elusive.
The detected cooling of the deepest oceans is quite remarkable given geothermal warming from the ocean floor. Wunsch and Heimbach (2014) note, “As with other extant estimates, the present state estimate does not yet account for the geothermal flux at the sea floor whose mean values (Pollack et al., 1993) are of order 0.1 W/m2,” which is small but “not negligible compared to any vertical heat transfer into the abyss. (A note of interest is an increase in heat from the ocean floor has recently been associated with increased basal melt of Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier. ) Since heated waters rise, I find it reasonable to assume that, at least in part, any heating of the “middle layers” likely comes from heat that was stored in the deepest ocean decades to thousands of years ago.
Wunsch and Heimbach (2014) emphasize the many uncertainties involved in attributing the cause of changes in the overall heat content concluding, “As with many climate-related records, the unanswerable question here is whether these changes are truly secular, and/or a response to anthropogenic forcing, or whether they are instead fragments of a general red noise behavior seen over durations much too short to depict the long time-scales of Fig. 6, 7, or the result of sampling and measurement biases, or changes in the temporal data density.”
Given those uncertainties, they concluded that much less heat is being added to the oceans compared to claims in previous studies (seen in the table below). It is interesting to note that compared to Hansen’s study that ended in 2003 before the observed warming pause, subsequent studies also suggest less heat is entering the oceans. Whether those declining trends are a result of improved methodologies, or due to a cooler sun, or both requires more observations. […]
So it remains unclear if and how Trenberth’s “missing heat” has sunk to the deep ocean. The depiction of a dramatic rise in deep ocean heat is highly questionable, even though alarmists have flaunted it as proof of CO2’s power. As Dr. Wunsch had warned earlier, “Convenient assumptions should not be turned prematurely into ‘facts,’ nor uncertainties and ambiguities suppressed.” … “Anyone can write a model: the challenge is to demonstrate its accuracy and precision… Otherwise, the scientific debate is controlled by the most articulate, colorful, or adamant players.”
To reiterate, “the uncertainties remain too large to rationalize e.g., the apparent “pause” in warming.”
2) Britain Won’t Sign New Climate Treaty Unless China, India Agree CO2 Caps
The Times, 22 July 2014
Ben Webster
Britain will not sign a global deal on climate change unless it includes commitments from China and India on reducing emissions, the energy and climate change secretary said on the eve of visiting the two countries.
China is the world’s highest emitter of greenhouse gases and India the third. Neither has agreed any cap on emissions. In an interview with The Times, Ed Davey said that there was little point in Britain making great efforts to cut emissions if other countries did not. “If I looked around the world and no one was doing anything I would have to ask myself the question: is it worth us doing anything if no one else is?” he said.
Speaking before meetings in Beijing and Delhi this week to discuss contributions to a global climate deal due to be signed in Paris next year, Mr Davey said: “We won’t do a deal unless these countries come on board. We need a deal that’s applicable to all — that’s what we didn’t get at Kyoto [the 1997 conference in Japan at which binding targets were set for the emissions of industrialised nations].” Mr Davey said that developing countries should be allowed to carry on increasing their emissions for a few years but at a lower rate and with clear targets for when the level should peak and start declining.
“We expect the rich, developed countries to cut aggressively, emerging economies to peak and then decline and the developing countries and the poorest to increase but hopefully at low rates and have a more sustainable development model than we had.”
On China, he said: “The key for them and the world is when they will peak. The earlier the better. I would like it to be 2025 or earlier. If the Chinese were to say ‘we are not going to commit to a peaking point’, I’m not sure you would get a deal.”
3) David Whitehouse: “Well-Estimated Global Surface Warming”
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 23 July 2014
Risbey et al (2014) in Nature Climate Change is yet another paper suggesting that the global surface temperature hiatus of the last 15-years or so is due to changes in the character of the ENSO. But they go a little further and say that once the observational timing of ENSO changes is included in climate models they do a good job. Unfortunately, whilst an interesting and though-provoking paper, it does not support its own conclusion that “climate models have provided good estimates of the 15-year trends for recent periods.”
Climate models have many uses and are essential tools to discover what is going on and, with major caveats, suggest future possibilities. It is well-known that as a whole the CIMP5 ensemble of models does not represent reality that well with only two models coming anywhere near reflecting the hiatus in global surface temperature seen in the last 15-years or so.
With a climate model ensemble that is mainly unrepresentative of reality there are several possibilities for further action. One is to have faith in the models that over longer timescales realities departure from them is temporary. Another is to select those models that best simulate reality and concentrate on them, and the other is to refine the models. Risbey et al (1014) carry out both the latter options.
They selected 18 out of 32 CIMP5 models choosing the ones that had sea surface temperature as a model output. In itself this introduces a selection effect whose influence on subsequent selections of “suitable” models is unknown. Out of those 18 they selected the four best and four worst. The best included ENSO parameters that are in phase with observations. They argue that when the phase of ENSO is got right climate models do represent reality. Unfortunately the evidence they provide for this is not convincing.
If the ENSO with El Nino dominant is having the effect of flattening the global surface temperature of the past 15 years or so then the converse must also be true. ENSO with La Nina dominant would have contributed to the warming seen since about 1980. Couple this with other decadal factors such as stratospheric water vapour and the Atlantic Oscillation and it is easy to see the implication of judging most of the 1980 – 97 increase to be mostly anthropomorphic. It would be to overestimate future warming, which is precisely what the CIMP5 ensemble does show the recent flatlining.
Our lack of understand of the ENSO process also affects the stated conclusions of this paper. We cannot predict these events with any certainty and we cannot simulate them to any degree of great accuracy. So while there are ENSO components in a climate model, to say that those in the right phase do better could mean nothing. In addition there are other semi-regular changes such as the Atlantic oscillation that might, or might not, be in phase with the observations.
Supplementary information would have helped understand this paper, especially the selection of the models, but unfortunately there are none. This means that given the information in this paper alone it would not be possible to retrace the author’s footsteps.
This paper allows great headlines to be written proclaiming that the “pause” in global surface temperature is explainable by climate models. As is often the case in climate reporting the details do not back up the headlines.
What this paper has really done is to draw attention to the limitations of the climate models. One can select subsets of them and argue that they are better than others but the real test is if the Risbey et al (2014) paper has predictive power. In science looking forward is always more powerful than looking back and adjusting models to fit the data.
Risbey et al (2014) say they expect the observed trend to bounce back. So do many others for different reasons. If it does how will we know who is right?
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4) New Paper: No Evidence That Climate Change Is Increasing Disaster Losses
Roger Pielke Jr, 22 July 2014
A new paper appeared in Climatic Change this week by Visser et al. which looks at disasters and climate change (open access here). Like other studies and the IPCC assessment, Visser et al. find no trends in normalized disaster loses, looking at several metrics of economic and human losses.
They conclude:
The absence of trends in normalized disaster burden indicators appears to be largely consistent with the absence of trends in extreme weather events. This conclusion is more qualitative for the number of people killed. As a consequence, vulnerability is also largely stable over the period of analysis.
The top line conclusion here is not surprising, though it is interesting because it uses independent methods on largely independent data. It is consistent with previous data and analyses (e.g., Bouwer 2011, Neumayer and Bartel 2011, Mohleji and Pielke 2014) as well as with the conclusions of the recent IPCC assessments (SREX and AR5). […]
In short, those who claim that a signal of human caused-climate change is somehow hidden in the disaster loss record are engaging in a bit of unjustified wishful thinking. The data and evidence says otherwise.
The bottom line? Once again, we see further reinforcement for the conclusion that there is no detectable evidence of a role for human-caused climate change in increasing disaster losses. In plain English: Disaster losses have been increasing, but it is not due to climate change.
5) And Finally: 130 Green NGOs Call For End To Capitalism & ‘Green Economy’
Responding to Climate Change, 22 July 2014
Sophie Yeo
UN-backed event ends with unusual call from civil society groups to end capitalism
A UN-backed conference in Venezuela has ended with a declaration to scrap carbon markets and reject the green economy.
The Margarita Declaration was issued at the end of a four-day meeting of around 130 green activist groups, which the Venezuelan government hosted in order to raise the volume of civil society demands in UN discussions on climate change.
“The structural causes of climate change are linked to the current capitalist hegemonic system,” the final declaration said. “To combat climate change it is necessary to change the system.”
The declaration will be handed to environment ministers when they meet ahead of the UN’s main round of talks in Lima this year.
