GWPF | 5 Jan 2015
Tropical Rainforests Grow Faster Than Thought
Dr Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), said this latest research adds further proof to the unpredictability of the supposed effects of global warming. He said: “The Antarctic is actually growing and all the evidence in the last few months suggests many assumptions about the poles were wrong. Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted. Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not. This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.” –Levi Winchester, Daily Express, 25 December 2015
1) Happy New Year! Polar Ice Caps More Stable Than Predicted, New Observations Show – Daily Express, 25 December 2015
2) Tropical Rainforests Grow Faster Than Thought – Daily Mail, 31 December 2014
3) Global Sea Ice Well Above Average For Most Of 2014 – Not A Lot Of People Know That, 1 January 2015
4) World Leaders Deny Climate Dangers, Attenborough Laments – The Independent, 1 January 2015
5) S. Fred Singer: Cause Of Pause In Global Warming – American Thinker, 29 December 2014
6) Climate Sceptics Are From Mars And Warmists Are From Venus – A Chemist in Langley, 4 January 2015
Tropical forests are growing faster than scientists thought due to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A Nasa-led study has found that tropical forests are absorbing 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year as they photosynthesise and grow. And this is far more than is absorbed by the vast areas of boreal forest that encircle the Arctic. –Richard Gray, Daily Mail, 31 December 2014
Global sea ice extent finished the year at 1.69 million sq km above the 1981-2010 average. This equates to 8.2% above normal. During 2014, sea ice extent has been above normal for 245 days, at an average of 295,000 sq km. Antarctic ice continues to blow away all records, beating the previous end of December level set in 2007 by 233,000 sq km. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 1 January 2015
Sir David Attenborough is calling on global leaders to step-up their actions to curb climate change, saying that they are in denial about the dangers it poses despite the overwhelming evidence about its risks. The TV naturalist said those who wield power need to use it: “Wherever you look there are huge risks. The awful thing is that people in authority and power deny that, when the evidence is overwhelming and they deny it because it’s easier to deny it – much easier to deny it’s a problem and say ‘we don’t care’,” Sir David said. –Tom Bawden, The Independent, 1 January 2015
There has been essentially no global warming since 1998. Some would choose 1997, others would more conservatively use 2002 as the proper starting date, based on satellite data. Of course, this is quite unexpected, since CO2 — a leading GHG, which climate models presume to cause anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — has been increasing rapidly in the 21st century. Even if we cannot readily find the cause for the “pause” — as it is sometimes called — we can be absolutely sure that it was not predicted by any of the dozens of the UN-IPCC’s General Circulation Models (GCMs). Therefore, logically, such non-validated GCMs cannot, and should not, be used to predict the future climate — or as a basis for policy decisions. –S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, 29 December 2014
So where are we today? In 1990′s parlance, skeptics are from Mars and warmists are from Venus. Like in the book, the two sides are not speaking to each other but rather are speaking past each other. Until the two communities can learn to speak each other’s language and acknowledge the underlying differences, but ultimate validity, in both world views, we are not going to advance the discussion. The frustrating part, from someone who has worked on both sides of this intellectual chasm, is that neither side is “wrong”. Each lives in a world where risk avoidance decisions are made and feel their approach is “right”. We need to develop a “consensus” that acknowledges that both sides have legitimate concerns and that any acceptable compromise has to recognize the validity of differing points of view. —A Chemist in Langley, 4 January 2015
1) Happy New Year! Polar Ice Caps More Stable Than Predicted, New Observations Show
Daily Express, 25 December 2015
Levi Winchester
For years, scientists have suggested that both poles are melting at an alarming rate because of warming temperatures – dangerously raising the Earth’s sea levels while threatening the homes of Arctic and Antarctic animals.
But the uncertainty surrounding climate change and the polar ice caps reached a new level this month when research suggested the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing.
And there could even be evidence to suggest the polar bear population is not under threat.
Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, conducted a study in which he sent an underwater robot into the depths of the Antarctic sea to measure the ice.
His results contradicted previous assumptions made by scientists and showed that the ice is actually much thicker than has been predicted over the last 20 years.
He said: “The Antarctic is actually growing and all the evidence in the last few months suggests many assumptions about the poles were wrong.
“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted.”
He added: “Most people think the poles are melting… they’re not. This is a huge inconvenience that reality is now catching up with climate alarmists, who were predicting that the poles would be melting fairly soon.”
According to this research, Arctic sea ice volumes in October and November this year averaged at 10,200 cubic kilometres.
This figure is only slightly down on the 2013 average of 10,900 cubic kilometres, yet massively up on the 2011 low of 4,275 cubic kilometres and the 6,000 cubic kilometres recorded in 2012.
Dr Peiser, who believes the threat of global warming has been overstated by climate scientists, described this occurrence as “some kind of rebound” adding that no-one knows what will continue to happen to the poles.
He added: “This depends on whether or not we have further warming to come… and this is not certain.
“We do not know what the climate will be in 10, 20 years.”
Full story
2) Happy New Year! Tropical Rainforests Grow Faster Than Thought
Daily Mail, 31 December 2014
Richard Gray
Tropical forests are growing faster than scientists thought due to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A Nasa-led study has found that tropical forests are absorbing 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year as they photosynthesise and grow. And this is far more than is absorbed by the vast areas of boreal forest that encircle the Arctic.
The researchers claim their findings show that rainforests like the Amazon are essential for soaking up excess greenhouse gases, and play a far greater role than had been previously realised.
Dr David Schimel, a researcher at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who led the study, said: ‘This is good news, because uptake in boreal forests is already slowing, while tropical forests may continue to take up carbon for many years.’
Deforestation in the world’s biggest rainforest, the Amazon, dropped by 18 per cent over the past year.
3) Global Sea Ice Well Above Average For Most Of 2014
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 1 January 2015
Paul Homewood
Global sea ice extent finished the year at 1.69 million sq km above the 1981-2010 average. This equates to 8.2% above normal. During 2014, sea ice extent has been above normal for 245 days, at an average of 295,000 sq km.
Antarctic ice continues to blow away all records, beating the previous end of December level set in 2007 by 233,000 sq km. This is particularly significant from an albedo point of view, as it is mid summer down under at this time of year.
In contrast, ice extent in the Arctic has changed very little in the last decade as far as December is concerned.
4) World Leaders Deny Climate Dangers, Attenborough Laments
The Independent, 1 January 2015
Tom Bawden
Sir David Attenborough is calling on global leaders to step-up their actions to curb climate change, saying that they are in denial about the dangers it poses despite the overwhelming evidence about its risks.
The TV naturalist said those who wield power need to use it: “Wherever you look there are huge risks. The awful thing is that people in authority and power deny that, when the evidence is overwhelming and they deny it because it’s easier to deny it – much easier to deny it’s a problem and say ‘we don’t care’,” Sir David said.
In terms of climate change, “we won’t do enough and no one can do enough, because it’s a very major, serious problem facing humanity; but at the same time it would be silly to minimise the size of the problem,” he told Sky News.
Later this year a crucial UN climate summit will be held, at which world leaders have pledged to agree to tough cuts in their carbon emissions, to ensure the increase in global warming does not exceed 2°C – beyond which its consequences become increasingly devastating.
Although that meeting is not scheduled to take place until December, the scale of the task ahead is huge and world leaders are already working towards the summit.
However Sir David is concerned that, despite the increasingly obvious scale of the threat climate change poses, leaders are not taking the matter as seriously as they should.
5) S. Fred Singer: Cause Of Pause In Global Warming
American Thinker, 29 December 2014
There has been essentially no global warming since 1998. Some would choose 1997, others would more conservatively use 2002 as the proper starting date, based on satellite data. Of course, this is quite unexpected, since CO2 — a leading GHG, which climate models presume to cause anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — has been increasing rapidly in the 21st century.
Even if we cannot readily find the cause for the “pause” — as it is sometimes called — we can be absolutely sure that it was not predicted by any of the dozens of the UN-IPCC’s General Circulation Models (GCMs). Therefore, logically, such non-validated GCMs cannot, and should not, be used to predict the future climate — or as a basis for policy decisions.
Here I would like to discuss some of the possible causes for the GW “hiatus.” Its existence is creating a scientific challenge for climate skeptics — and a real crisis for alarmists; it can no longer be ignored by any who consider themselves to be scientists — nor, indeed, by responsible politicians.
One possibility, of course, may be that the pause is simply a statistical fluctuation, like tossing a coin, with 15 to 18 heads in a row. Such an explanation cannot be dismissed out of hand, even though it has a very low probability — which becomes even smaller with each passing year of no GW. Obviously, climate alarmists like this possibility — although the number of such ‘true believers’ is shrinking. Most have started to look for a physical cause for the pause — an explanation of why current GCMs are failing to match observations.
Internal and external causes
When we look at possible causes, we should first of all distinguish between internal and external ones that might offset the expected GW from CO2. Internal causes rely on negative feedbacks from either water vapor (WV) or clouds; they act to decrease the warming that should be attributed to increasing CO2. The problem with internal effects is they can never fully eliminate the primary cause — almost by definition. So even if they diminish the CO2 effect somewhat, there should still be a remaining warming trend, though small.
It is quite important to obtain empirical evidence for a negative feedback. In the case of water vapor, one would look to see if the cold upper troposphere (UT) was dry or moist. If moist, as assumed implicitly in current IPCC-GCMs, one gets a positive feedback — i.e., an amplification of the CO2-caused warming. On the other hand, if the upper troposphere is dry, then most emissions into space take place from WV in the warm boundary layer in the lower troposphere. This leaves less energy available to be emitted into space from the surface through the atmospheric ‘window,’ and therefore produces a cooler surface.
[NB: To avoid the vexing issue of the effects of the down-welling infrared radiation, it is easiest to think of long-term zero energy imbalance, as measured by satellites at the top of the atmosphere — after the underlying atmosphere adjusts. Imbalance = incoming less reflected solar radiant energy minus the heat energy from surface and atmosphere escaping to space.]
The physical model I have in mind for this negative WV feedback is based on a proposal of Prof. William Gray (Colorado State University), who pictured cumulus clouds carrying moisture into the UT, but occupying only a small area; the remaining (and much larger) area experiences descending air (“subsidence”) — hence drying. In principle, it should be possible to measure this difficult-to-explain effect fairly easily, using available satellite data.
Negative feedback from increased cloudiness is easier to describe but more difficult to measure. The idea is simply that a slight increase in sea-surface (SST) temperature (from the GH effect of a rising CO2) also increases evaporation (according to the well-known “Clausius-Clapeyron” relation), and that this increased atmospheric moisture can also increase cloudiness. The net effect is a greater (reflecting) albedo, less sunlight reaching the surface, and therefore a negative feedback that reduces the original warming from increasing CO2.
Unfortunately, establishing the reality of this cloud feedback requires a measurement of global cloudiness with an accuracy of a small fraction of a percent — a very difficult problem.
We now turn to external effects that might explain the existence of a global warming pause; the principal ones are volcanism and solar activity. The problem here is one of balancing; the amount of cooling by volcanism, for example, has to be just right to offset the warming from CO2 during the entire duration of the pause. It is difficult to picture why exactly this might be happening; the probabilities seem rather small. Still, the burden is on the proponents to demonstrate various kinds of evidence in support of such an explanation.
Similarly, atmospheric aerosols, generally human-caused, can increase albedo and cool the planet — especially if they also increase cloudiness by providing condensation nuclei for WV.
6) Climate Sceptics Are From Mars And Warmists Are From Venus
A Chemist in Langley, 4 January 2015
Type I and Type II error avoidance and its possible role in the climate change debate
As I mention in my “about me” section, I have been reading the climate change literature since the early 1990′s. In doing so I have developed my personal views on the topic that are loosely defined as those of a “lukewarmer”. It has been pointed out to me that my definition may miss a large community of lukewarmers but that is the source material for a whole new post. Instead, having worked both in the academic sector and the private sector (for both communities so to speak) I would like to write today about the divide between the skeptical community (mostly made up of engineers and non-academic scientists) and the warmists (primarily made up of academic scientists). I am deliberately not addressing activists for either side as their motivations are not cogent to this discussion. In this post I will consider whether cultural tendencies associated with efforts to avoid Type I versus Type II errors might be a consideration in this inability to communicate effectively.
For those of you who are not familiar with the language, science identifies two major potential types of errors (okay there are at least three types but I will not go that deep today). A Type I error, which represents a false positive, involves claiming that an observed hypothesis is correct, when in reality it is false. A Type II error, which represents a false negative, involves claiming that an observed hypothesis is incorrect when it is actually correct. In my opinion, the best visualization of the difference between the two is this graphic: (which I have seen in numerous locations and whose origin I have been unable to confirm although I believe it comes from the “Effect Size FAQ“)
In the academic community a Type I error is a very big deal. Making an incorrect claim is the sort of thing that gets academics in very hot water. A Type I error leads to retractions of academic papers and a significant loss of prestige. As a consequence, the academic community has developed an extremely detailed process to avoid Type I errors involving confidence limits, acceptable p-values, peer review etc.. In the academic community a Type II error is by far less an important concern. Since science is theoretically a collegial affair (many colleagues are working on similar problems at the same time) all a Type II error represents is that you didn’t identify the effect “this time” which means you still have another shot tomorrow, no mess no worry. […]
So why is this difference important? Well as discussed, the vast majority of the warmist community have a worldview that stresses Type I error avoidance while most skeptics work in a community that stresses Type II error avoidance. Skeptics look at the global climate models and note that the models have a real difficulty in making accurate predictions. To explain, global climate models are complex computer programs filled with calculations based on science’s best understanding of climate processes (geochemistry, global circulation patterns etc) with best guesses used to address holes in the knowledge base. The models are “trained” by looking at historical data and seeing whether they can replicate what has occurred in the past. In a simplistic description they are trained to interpolate data and once they get good enough at interpolating data they are then used to extrapolate future conditions. Since the global climate models are works in progress they still do not do a great job at extrapolating, yet. In particular, these models have failed to predict the “pause” in the surface temperature data that has lasted for (depending with whom you talk) somewhere around 15 – 18 years. Essentially the model predictions and the measured temperatures have diverged.
Skeptics see the poor extrapolations and suggest a need to refine the models to address the divergence. From a Type II error avoidance viewpoint, given the relatively poor quality of the model predictions, putting limited resources into addressing potentially faulty predictions seems like a poor choice. Instead, resources should be allocated to improving the models and any additional monies spent on other “demonstrably real” problems out in the world. Warmists, on the other hand, point out that the models are the best tools we have to date and to ignore their predictions, just because they are imperfect, is a big mistake. Warmists point out there is a real risk that a lack of action now could result in a low-probability, high-cost outcome (a fat tail on the uncertainty distribution of the outcomes). So monies should be spent on avoidance immediately while we continue to refine the models.
So where are we today? In 1990′s parlance, skeptics are from Mars and warmists are from Venus. Like in the book, the two sides are not speaking to each other but rather are speaking past each other. Until the two communities can learn to speak each other’s language and acknowledge the underlying differences, but ultimate validity, in both world views, we are not going to advance the discussion. The frustrating part, from someone who has worked on both sides of this intellectual chasm, is that neither side is “wrong”. Each lives in a world where risk avoidance decisions are made and feel their approach is “right”. We need to develop a “consensus” that acknowledges that both sides have legitimate concerns and that any acceptable compromise has to recognize the validity of differing points of view.
