Guys What is your take on the climate change deal situation

[Sam_Stone]

Cloud Feedbacks in the Climate System: A Critical Review, American Meteorological Society Journal of Climate. Graeme L. Stephens, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado

From the abstract:

The paper provides a brief overview of the effects of clouds on the radiation budget of the earth–atmosphere system and a review of cloud feedbacks as they have been defined in simple systems, one being a system in radiative–convective equilibrium (RCE) and others relating to simple feedback ideas that regulate tropical SSTs. The systems perspective is reviewed as it has served as the basis for most feedback analyses. What emerges is the importance of being clear about the definition of the system. It is shown how different assumptions about the system produce very different conclusions about the magnitude and sign of feedbacks. Much more diligence is called for in terms of defining the system and justifying assumptions. In principle, there is also neither any theoretical basis to justify the system that defines feedbacks in terms of global–time-mean changes in surface temperature nor is there any compelling empirical evidence to do so. The lack of maturity of feedback analysis methods also suggests that progress in understanding climate feedback will require development of alternative methods of analysis.
…
While GCM climate and NWP models represent the most complete description of all the interactions between the processes that presumably establish the main cloud feedbacks, the weak link in the use of these models lies in the cloud parameterization imbedded in them. Aspects of these parameterizations remain worrisome, containing levels of empiricism and assumptions that are hard to evaluate with current global observations. Clearly observationally based methods for evaluating cloud parameterizations are an important element in the road map to progress.

Although progress in understanding the cloud feedback problem has been slow and confused by past analysis, there are legitimate reasons outlined in the paper that give hope for real progress in the future.

[jshore]

@Sam_Stone

Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration, Journal of Climate, Feb 2008:

I think you need to put this paper in some perspective:

(1) There are thousands of papers on climate science published each year and Spencer is really one of the only scientists who one can cite as producing serious skeptical hypotheses that are not extremely flawed on the face of it.

(2) Spencer’s track record is not particularly good and shows a tendency toward mistakes in one direction. His and Christy’s analysis of the satellite temperature record was used for many years to argue that the warming seen at the surface was not being seen in the lower and mid troposphere by the satellites. However, it turned out that they made a variety of errors and that correction of those errors (along with a longer record) gradually turned their small cooling trend into a small warming trend and finally into a robust warming trend that is, at least on a global scale, no longer in conflict with the surface temperature record.

(3) Spencer has shown some poor scientific judgement. One was writing a column at Tech Central Station in which he made the argument that “intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.” And, we’re not talking about making such statements in an off-the-cuff private e-mail exchange…We are talking about doing so very publicly. He has also questioned whether the rise in CO2 levels itself is predominately due anthropogenic causes, which is pretty far out there, and has done so using some very poor analysis that he ought to have been able to realize himself was seriously flawed.

All this is not an argument that Spencer is necessarily wrong in his view on cloud feedbacks…or that the scientific questions he raises should not be addressed by other scientists in the field. But I think it would be rather foolhardy to base public policy on the hope that someone like Spencer is right and the vast majority of the rest of the climate science community is wrong. It just seems like a bet with pretty poor odds. (It is also worth noting that the existence of a strong negative feedback in the climate system would mean that we would have to revise not just our current understanding of how we are effecting the climate system but also our whole understanding of past climatic changes, such as the glacial–interglacial cycles, which do not seem to be compatible with a low climate sensitivity.)

[Magiver]

The entire global warming phenomenon as viewed with a political lens has nothing to do with temperature. There is no talk of applying science to the task of cooling temperatures. Instead it is entirely a function of reducing Co2 in a bizarre transfer of wealth.

The longer this nonsense is put off the greater the chance that real science will prevail.

[matt]

@jshore

Matt,

I don’t strongly disagree with most of what you have written in terms of the current uncertainties and such but I do think that the above statement is incorrect…or at least irrelevant.

Irrelevant, I can buy. Future forcings cannot be predicted precisely anyway, especially pesky things like volcanos. But I agree absolutely with Trenberth - “natural variation” is just hand-waving away the question as to where all the energy is actually ending up. I’d like to think the climate models do more with energy flows than just in/out at TOA.

[Sam_Stone]

@jshore

I think you need to put this paper in some perspective:

(1) There are thousands of papers on climate science published each year and Spencer is really one of the only scientists who one can cite as producing serious skeptical hypotheses that are not extremely flawed on the face of it.

(2) Spencer’s track record is not particularly good and shows a tendency toward mistakes in one direction. His and Christy’s analysis of the satellite temperature record was used for many years to argue that the warming seen at the surface was not being seen in the lower and mid troposphere by the satellites. However, it turned out that they made a variety of errors and that correction of those errors (along with a longer record) gradually turned their small cooling trend into a small warming trend and finally into a robust warming trend that is, at least on a global scale, no longer in conflict with the surface temperature record.

(3) Spencer has shown some poor scientific judgement. One was writing a column at Tech Central Station in which he made the argument that “intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.” And, we’re not talking about making such statements in an off-the-cuff private e-mail exchange…We are talking about doing so very publicly. He has also questioned whether the rise in CO2 levels itself is predominately due anthropogenic causes, which is pretty far out there, and has done so using some very poor analysis that he ought to have been able to realize himself was seriously flawed.

All this is not an argument that Spencer is necessarily wrong in his view on cloud feedbacks…or that the scientific questions he raises should not be addressed by other scientists in the field. But I think it would be rather foolhardy to base public policy on the hope that someone like Spencer is right and the vast majority of the rest of the climate science community is wrong. It just seems like a bet with pretty poor odds. (It is also worth noting that the existence of a strong negative feedback in the climate system would mean that we would have to revise not just our current understanding of how we are effecting the climate system but also our whole understanding of past climatic changes, such as the glacial–interglacial cycles, which do not seem to be compatible with a low climate sensitivity.)

These are all valid points, and I wouldn’t hold up a single paper as an example of a complete refutation of positive cloud feedback. But there are an awful lot of such papers, by a variety of authors, in peer reviewed journals. They just don’t seem to get cited a lot or move into the mainstream of climate science. On the other hand, a new paper that comes out which suggests effects will last for 1000 years and temps will go over 7 degrees in the next century, is instantly accepted as the cutting edge of climate science - at least by the more political groups surrounding the scientific core of global warming. This suggests to me that there may be a little confirmation bias at work here.

As I’ve said before, the IPCC scientific reports are actually quite good, and they are a lot less alarmist than the material being presented directly too the public. On the effect of clouds, the IPCC won’t even venture a percentage, saying that the science isn’t good enough for even a ballpark guess.

[XT]

My take is that the science seems fairly good that the earth is warming, and that humans are probably a factor in that warming. I think the science is a bit less solid than some of the pro-AGW folks on this board seem to think it is, but I’d have to say that, based on the discussions on this board and what I’ve read, it seems to be the consensus that it’s happening.

However, I think that, while the science behind the human caused climate change is relatively solid, I think that this doesn’t translate into equally solid solutions being proposed to ‘fix’ the problem. In fact, I’m more and more inclined to the stance that mainly this IS a boon doggle being foisted on us by folks who have an agenda…a very costly agenda, with solutions that are based more on ideology than on solid science (OR engineering, or economics…on anything reality based).

The battle cry seems to be ‘well, we need to do SOMETHING!’…and I think we are being pressured into doing ‘something’ right now by folks who are using scare tactics in order to push through an agenda that really isn’t about climate change, but instead is about their world views on technology, a green lifestyle, economics and ‘fairness’. It’s fairly clear that the majority of the ‘fixing’ of the problem is aimed at the US and Europe, after all…‘developing’ countries like China (who is now the number 1 producer of CO2) are being given a pass, mostly.

At any rate, that’s my current take on this issue.

-XT

[GIGObuster]

@matt

Irrelevant, I can buy. Future forcings cannot be predicted precisely anyway, especially pesky things like volcanos. But I agree absolutely with Trenberth - “natural variation” is just hand-waving away the question as to where all the energy is actually ending up. I’d like to think the climate models do more with energy flows than just in/out at TOA.

Good to see you agreeing with Trenberth

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/recent_contributors/kevin_trenberth/

Over the past 500,000 years or so, temperatures, carbon dioxide and methane have gone up and down more or less in tandem through the major ice ages and interglacial periods, as shown in ice cores. As detailed in a Real Climate blog post on this topic, in the absence of human intervention, these changes happen over time, but not at the rate at which CO2 is currently increasing in the atmosphere. Scientists know that carbon dioxide and methane changes follow rather than cause these changes in temperature between glacial periods, but they also know that these changes in greenhouse gases amplify a relatively weak forcing to help drive temperature change. To suggest otherwise, as Akasofu does, is misleading at best.

Akasofu then trots out the mistaken view that the “hockey stick” curve of temperatures over the past 1000 years showing an upward bend at the end has been discredited. In fact, it has been reinforced in the latest IPCC report, although it is given less emphasis as it is now backed up and confirmed by evidence from multiple independent studies.

He further claims that natural climate variations have been forgotten and attributes recent warming to the “rebounding effect from the little ice age”, but fails to realize that natural climate variability also has a cause. While it is true that we do not have the measurements to show what was happening in the ocean during this time, for instance, we have good reason to believe that natural internal variability played a role. To the extent that the “Little Ice Age” and “Medieval Warm Period” can be meaningfully defined, there has been much work showing that the main variations can be explained in terms of the response of the climate system to natural variability in solar and volcanic events that would have influenced surface temperature. And warm periods in the past, such as the warming in the Greenland region in the mid-twentieth century, were not global in contrast to recent warming, which is.

Climate models are not perfect, but they are useful tools for quantifying the effects of various climate processes and drivers of climate change. Akasofu decries the confused state of climatology, but it is he who is really confused, and his article only serves to confuse the general public. It is sad that a once distinguished newspaper published such misleading half-truths without verifying them.

Kevin Trenberth

More recently:

http://mediamatters.org/print/research/200911230052

Wired reports Trenberth’s response to leaked email: “**loggers are missing the point he’s making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it.” Wired’s Threat Level blog reported on Trenberth’s response to the leaked email:

But Trenberth, who acknowledged the e-mail is genuine, says bloggers are missing the point he's making in the e-mail by not reading the article cited in it. That article - An Imperative for Climate Change Planning (.pdf) - actually says that **global warming is continuing, despite random temperature variations that would seem to suggest otherwise.**

**
“It says we don’t have an observing system adequate to track it, but there are all other kinds of signs aside from global mean temperatures - including melting of Arctic sea ice and rising sea levels and a lot of other indicators - that global warming is continuing,” he says.**

…

Trenberth article indeed referred to what he called an “incomplete explanation” of short-term climate variations, and maintained that “global warming is unequivocally happening.” In the article to which Trenberth referred in Wired, “An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy,” he wrote:

The global mean temperature in 2008 was the lowest since about 2000 (Fig. 1). Given that there is continual heating of the planet, referred to as radiative forcing, by accelerating increases of carbon dioxide (Fig. 1) and other greenhouses due to human activities, why isn’t the temperature continuing to go up? The stock answer is that natural variability plays a key role and there was a major La Niña event early in 2008 that led to the month of January having the lowest anomaly in global temperature since 2000. While this is true, it is an incomplete explanation.

[...]

**Given that global warming is unequivocally happening and there has so far been a failure to outline, let alone implement, global plans to mitigate the warming, then adapting to the climate change is an imperative. We will of course adapt to climate change. The question is the extent to which the adaptation is planned and orderly with minimal disruption and loss of life, or whether it is unplanned? To plan for and cope with effects of climate change requires information on what is happening and why, whether observed changes are likely to continue or are a transient, how they affect regional climates and the possible impacts. Further, to the extent that the global community is able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the climate change, then information is required on how effective it is. This article addresses vital information needs to help understand climate change.

It is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year is due to natural variability. Similarly, common arguments of skeptics that the late 20th century warming is a recovery from the Little Ice Age or has other natural origins are inadequate as they do not provide the physical mechanisms involved. There must be a physical explanation, whether natural or anthropogenic. If surface warming occurs while the deep ocean becomes cooler, then we should be able to see the evidence. It may be that there is insufficient data to prove one way or the other, as is often the case in the deep past. However, since 1979 there have been instruments in space tracking the total solar irradiance (TSI)3,4, and so we know it is not the sun that has brought about warming in the past 30 years5. Hence a key issue is the extent to which we can track energy in the climate system.**

[ralph124c]

There is NO good evidence that human activity is causing global warming. Any human effects are probably a small percentage of the natural, cyclical climate changes.
Moreover, even if the developed world were to reduce CO2 emissions to ZERO, the net effect (according to the computer models) would be only a minor reduction in temperature increase.
It would be much better to spend the money on preparing for climate change, and (of course) subsitituting nuclear electric generation (for coal and oil generation)-but this will not happen, because the tree huggers are fanatically opposed to nuclear power.
Instead, we will have this insane system of “carbon credits”-which will be expensive, impossible to monitor, and next to impossible to enforce. This will spawn an “industry” that will suck biliions of $ out of the economy, while returning nothing of value.:dubious:

[GIGObuster]

@ralph124c

There is NO good evidence that human activity is causing global warming. Any human effects are probably a small percentage of the natural, cyclical climate changes.

Cite? As mentioned there should be good evidence that the current warming is mostly natural.

@ralph124c

Moreover, even if the developed world were to reduce CO2 emissions to ZERO, the net effect (according to the computer models) would be only a minor reduction in temperature increase.
It would be much better to spend the money on preparing for climate change, and (of course) subsitituting nuclear electric generation (for coal and oil generation)-but this will not happen, because the tree huggers are fanatically opposed to nuclear power.

Good thing I’m in favor of nuclear power. The computer models BTW are one reason why scientists say that we can limit the increase, not doing anything will make future generations spend even more for those preparations.

@ralph124c

Instead, we will have this insane system of “carbon credits”-which will be expensive, impossible to monitor, and next to impossible to enforce. This will spawn an “industry” that will suck biliions of $ out of the economy, while returning nothing of value.:dubious:

AFAIK the other option was to tax it, but carbon credits are considered an option.

Carbon offsets and credits

Credits versus taxes

Carbon credits and carbon taxes each have their advantages. Credits were chosen by the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol as an alternative to Carbon taxes. A criticism of tax-raising schemes is that they are frequently not hypothecated, and so some or all of the taxation raised by a government may be applied inefficiently or not used to benefit the environment.

By treating emissions as a market commodity it becomes easier for business to understand and manage their activities, while economists and traders can attempt to predict future pricing using well understood market theories. Thus the main advantages of a tradable carbon credit over a carbon tax are:

* the price is more likely to be perceived as fair by those paying it.[9]. Investors in credits have more control over their own costs.[citation needed]
* the flexible mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol ensure that all investment goes into genuine sustainable carbon reduction schemes, through its internationally-agreed validation process.
* if correctly implemented a target level of emission reductions is achieved with certainty, while under a tax the actual emissions would vary over time.
* it provides a framework for rewarding people or companies who plant trees or otherwise sequester carbon.

The advantages of a carbon tax are:

* possibly less complex, expensive, and time-consuming to implement. This advantage is especially great when applied to markets like gasoline or home heating oil.
* perhaps some reduced risk of certain types of cheating, though under both credits and taxes, emissions must be verified.
* reduced incentives for companies to delay efficiency improvements prior to the establishment of the baseline if credits are distributed in proportion to past emissions.
* when credits are grandfathered, this puts new or growing companies at a disadvantage relative to more established companies.
* It is clear what effect the policy has on the price of energy.[10]

[Rune]

I’m for most of the initiatives taken to limit co2, not because I’m particular worried about global warming, but because coal and oil have so many other negative consequences. However the climate summit lost my backing when it turned into a massive money transfer scheme by certain countries.

Also I can’t help but wonder if the cold weather in Copenhagen (coldest day in 8 years on the final day of COP15) with degrees down to -15 and locally even lower, and enough snow that the military had to be set in some places to rescue stranded people. If that didn’t have some psychological dampening effect on the participants. I bet some of the people from southern countries unused to such weather and without adequate clothes have felt rather miserable. Some of the attendants from Africa had to seek medical help, when they though they were dying and their lungs were freezing. Hard to relate to global warming when it feels like you are freezing to death and your greatest concern is if you’ll ever find your pecker again. What on Earth beset them to have a conference on global warming in December in Copenhagen?

[Lumpy]

My take on climate change:[ul][li]The Earth is definitely warming.[]It probably is due to man-made CO2 emissions.[]The “ecosocialist” measures many are demanding- that in effect economic activity and personal consumption be artificially constrained to limit carbon emissions- is politically impossible and has no chance in Hell whatsover of ever being imposed.[]In the long run, CO2 emissions will become self-limiting: first as petroleum becomes too expensive for vehicle fuel and is replaced with carbon-free or carbon-neutral alternatives; and second as improved technology eventually eliminates the use of coal for generating electricity.[]In the midterm, climate change will just have to be endured. It will be ecologically tough on cold-cllimate species, but probably little more so than human encroachment is already. It will also not be an absolute unmitigated loss; increased average temperature wil be a boon for some species, locations and industries.[]If human activity has reached the point where it has a non-neglibable effect on the Earth’s climate, then humanity will eventually have to actively engineer the planet’s average temperature, by means probably including altering the Earth’s albedo.[]We’ll be lucky if in the next century a regional nuclear war doesn’t make global warming a non-issue for the following 10-20 years.[/li][/ul]

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Rune

Also I can’t help but wonder if the cold weather in Copenhagen (coldest day in 8 years on the final day of COP15) with degrees down to -15 and locally even lower, and enough snow that the military had to be set in some places to rescue stranded people. If that didn’t have some psychological dampening effect on the participants. I bet some of the people from southern countries unused to such weather and without adequate clothes have felt rather miserable. Some of the attendants from Africa had to seek medical help, when they though they were dying and their lungs were freezing. Hard to relate to global warming when it feels like you are freezing to death and your greatest concern is if you’ll ever find your pecker again. What on Earth beset them to have a conference on global warming in December in Copenhagen?

I still can’t understand the marketing blunder on this one. Yes, it’s easy to mock people for mistakenly sneering about global warming every time it gets ludicrously cold – but if the stuff had just been called “climate change” from the beginning, that mistake wouldn’t get made in the first place. It gets hot? Climate change. It gets cold? Climate change. I mean, sure, a decade-long plateau might hypothetically give the other side ammunition – but that’s also not warming, so you’d be losing 'em at that point anyway.

Instead, you’d have the photo op of Obama leaving Copenhagen on the coldest day in 8 years to return to a snow emergency back in DC – all directly helping the cause instead of provoking an immediate snicker from people who now aren’t listening to a long explanation of why this is supposed to count as evidence of warming. Of course it’s evidence of change; why didn’t it get pitched like that back when?

[Sam_Stone]

@ralph124c

There is NO good evidence that human activity is causing global warming. Any human effects are probably a small percentage of the natural, cyclical climate changes.

I think that’s going too far. The basic chemistry behind CO2 based radiative forcing is pretty straightforward. I don’t think you’ll find many knowledgeable people on either side of the climate debate arguing that man is having NO effect.

If you assume no feedbacks and just look at how the extra CO2 would translate into a temperature rise, you’re probably look at an extra .5-1 degree of warming in the next century, over and above any natural warming that would occur. Very few, if any, scientists would disagree with this basic fact.

The area of uncertainties around climate change predictions have to do with past temperature levels, positive feedback mechanisms, and estimates of future CO2 generation.

For example, one of the controversies right now involves the use of various proxies to determine temperatures in the distant past before we had thermometer measurements. This is important, because if temperatures were much warmer than they are today in the recent past, it would suggest that there may not be the kind of positive feedbacks to warming that the more extreme predictions of temperature rise require.

For example, It was long believed that the earth underwent a ‘medieval warm period’ between 800 and 1300 AD. There is plenty of evidence that parts of the earth were significantly warmer than they are today. For example, Vikings had a thriving agricultural economy going in Greenland. Tree ring samples and mineralogical evidence shows that New Zealand was significantly warmer during this period.

Following the medieval warm period there was a ‘little ice age’, in which temperatures plummeted throughout Europe and elsewhere. This picture of past temperature shows it to be quite variable, irrespective of CO2 forcings. It puts today’s temperature increase within the range of natural variability.

This is what the ‘traditional’ view of the Past 1000 years of temperature looked like: Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.

When Mann released his ‘Hockey Stick’ graph, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age vanished. You can see the chart here. Since then, various scientists have worked to explain away the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. The view now is that while they did occur, they were localized phenomenon caused by lack of volcanos, La Nina’ effects, and other temporary but local climate changes. They claim that overall global temperatures were much lower. But there are still papers being released which dispute this and provide other evidence. The science on this is not closed, in my opinion.

The next controversy has to do with the various proxies used to measure temperature in the past. One in particular, Keith Briffa’s Yamal series tree ring data, comes under fire for two reasons - one is that his sample set is extremely small - 12 trees in total. The accusation is that these trees were cherry-picked because they gave the result he wanted, but there’s really no evidence of this. Still there are plenty of other trees in that region that do not show the same temperature patterns that Briffa’s do. He may have had good reason for excluding them, but critics have seized on this as an example of how the books may have been cooked.

A more serious problem is that when he calibrated his tree ring data against real measured temperatures, they only tracked temperature up to 1960, at which point they show declining temperatures when the thermometer record shows rising temperature. Some scientists argue that this means his tree ring proxies are simply no good - if they fail the coherence test after 1960, what confidence do we have that they accurately represent the temperature from before thermometer measurements? We found one discontinuity we don’t understand, so why couldn’t there be others?

The post-1960 decline in the tree-ring data is the decline in the ‘hide the decline’ E-mails. What Mann did to hide the fact that this proxy series shows declining temperatures after 1960 is to simply cut it off after 1960 and splice in real, measured temperatures. This is pretty dishonest, as it implies that there is a correlation between proxy data and measured temperature that just doesn’t exist.

If you look at this graph: Proxy Temperature Reconstruction, you’ll see that the green line (Briffa’s Tree Ring Proxies) takes a sharp downward turn around 1950. Note that the other proxies don’t look like they’re tracking the sharp increase in measured temperatures either.

But here’s the graph published with the ‘Nature Trick’ used to hide the decline: New ‘modified’ graph. This graph makes it look like all the proxies are in total agreement with measured temperatures, which makes the proxy data look absolutely rock-solid. But in fact, it’s a lie. This is a dishonest graph. Does it mean warming isn’t occurring? Of course not. But it does mean that some scientists are willing to play fast and loose with statistics and visuals aimed at the public in order to make the case appear stronger than it is.

RealClimate and others have tried to explain this away and come up with lots of justifications for it, but in my opinion there is never a justification for producing a graph like this. If you think the tree ring data is no good after 1960, you simply annotate the graph as such. You don’t splice completely different data on the same trend line to make it appear that there is a conformance that does not exist.

Again, this doesn’t mean global warming doesn’t exist - it does mean that the work of some of these scientists needs to be scrutinized carefully - especially the stuff the are releasing for public consumption as opposed to what they’re putting in peer-reviewed journals.

The next source of uncertainty in current warming models is the raw temperature data. It is extraordinarily hard to get accurate global temperatures, even when you have thermometers scattered all over the globe. You have issues of calibration, changes in the way measurements are made, hardware changes over time, elevation differences, environmental differences such as the addition of a paved parking lot near a measuring station which may cause local warming, etc.

This is an area where confirmation bias could be a factor. If you want to believe there’s warming, then you may be likely to consider a station that’s reporting slightly colder temperatures to be anomalous, and start looking for reasons to adjust the temperature upwards. And even if you find them and they are legitimate and you can justify them, the fact may be that you didn’t look quite as hard for reasons to adjust overly-warm temperatures downward.

It seems to me that if the types of errors that require adjustment are not common-mode errors, then you should find an equal number of downward adjustments as upwards adjustments. And yet, the adjusted data is markedly warmer than the raw data on average. And the common-mode errors that seem likely to me would be the kinds of errors that should cause the raw values to be adjusted downwards - for example, increasing urbanization causing heat island effects. So I think there is some room here to revisit this and have some scientists not affiliated with CRU or the other main warming proponents to re-evaluate.

A related issue is how the raw data is treated in some models. Rather than attempting to hand-adjust every station by examining its history, the CRU model apparently attempts to simply smooth the data by comparing anomalous results to surrounding stations. This is not a bad idea, and wouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of confirmation bias, but it could be open to all kinds of statistical error. If the stations are too far apart, interpolating temperatures may not be valid. The algorithms could be biased towards accepting warmer stations, either knowingly or through flaws in the math.

There could be compound errors because the models first have to align the stations on a grid to apply the math, and the ‘gridding’ process appears to be somewhat haphazard. Finally, the CRU E-mails indicate that the databases the models use are in pretty poor shape, with stations appearing in the data that do not exist in real life, etc. My experience with government databases is that they are often rife with errors. Companies like Jeppeson spend a lot of money cleaning up the raw government databases for aviation use. I’ve tried using the raw aviation databases myself for some navigation software I was writing, and decided they were so error-prone they were unusable. So I don’t implicitly trust the raw data like some people do.

Finally, the weakest area of climate prediction revolves around our understanding of long-term feedback processes and the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. If CO2 emitted today is completely scrubbed from the atmosphere within 50 years instead of 200 years, that makes a gigantic difference in the rate of CO2 accumulation. And yet, my survey of the literature suggests that this number is not known with much precision, with most papers giving a 50-200 year spread in their estimates. And other feedbacks, such as vegetation response to additional CO2, algae blooms, and cloud response are very poorly understood - so much that they either aren’t included in the models at all, or they are very weakly coupled. The IPCC won’t even venture one of their “Very Likely - Very Unlikely” ranges to cloud cover models, because they say the science isn’t even good enough to give us a ballpark estimate. Yet the potential range of negative feedback from clouds could almost completely eradicate CO2-forced warming.

Aside from the physics of global warming, the other major source of uncertainty is our prediction of how much CO2 will be released in the future. Economic modeling is damned hard. And yet, predicting temperatures out to 2100 requires modeling the CO2 production of the planet for the next 90 years. The truth is, we don’t have the foggiest notion. If solar, wind, and nuclear continue to improve, we could hit a discontinuity in ten years where fossil fuels are more expensive than their alternatives, and there will be a rapid, market-driven flight aware from CO2 producing energy. If ‘Peak Oil’ is true, then oil will in the near future rapidly rise in price and be priced out of the market.

As an example of how weak these forecasts are, forecasts in the IPCC’s 2007 4th assessment report did not predict the worldwide recession that hit just one year later, and which caused a major reduction in CO2 output. China is the major emitter of CO2, and there are signs that its economy is not on a sustainable path. If China goes into a major recession, it will have a bigger effect on CO2 emissions than any of the proposed treaties would have had.

All of this put together means there is far more uncertainty surrounding global warming than the proponents want to admit. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening, or that it’s not a potentially large problem for the future. It just means we really don’t know as much as we think we do, and the evidence for future warming needs to be surrounded with very large error bars.

This means that what we should be focusing on right now is trying to shrink those error bars so we can make better decisions. Hell, maybe they’ll show that the problem is even worse than we think it is - there’s uncertainty that could make it much worse than predicted (we don’t really understand how the ice caps are responding to warming - some theories show increased precipitation and thicker ice caps, others show the opposite).

Also, given that the public is not on board, there should be an extreme effort to open up the science, make it understandable, remove any possible bias, etc. There should be commissions set up to re-evaluate the evidence, made up of legitimate scientists from both the ‘skeptic’ and ‘believer’ camps. All the data and interim papers should be public. All the modeling software should be open-source and extremely well documented.

There’s no way in hell the fate of the world and trillions of dollars should be put in the hands of a couple dozen scientists who guard their data and refuse to release their methodologies and who feel it’s their right to massage graphics and ‘hide the decline’ in order to strengthen their case, even if they’ve convinced themselves that it’s scientifically defensible to do so. Bias is an insidious thing, and one thing that’s abundantly clear in the CRU E-mails is that the scientists doing the work already believe they know the conclusion and spend a lot of time trying to justify it. That can lead to bad science, even if it’s not intentional.

[GIGObuster]

Good post there at the beginning but then whoppers galore:

@Sam_Stone

The next controversy has to do with the various proxies used to measure temperature in the past. One in particular, Keith Briffa’s Yamal series tree ring data, comes under fire for two reasons - one is that his sample set is extremely small - 12 trees in total. The accusation is that these trees were cherry-picked because they gave the result he wanted, but there’s really no evidence of this. Still there are plenty of other trees in that region that do not show the same temperature patterns that Briffa’s do. He may have had good reason for excluding them, but critics have seized on this as an example of how the books may have been cooked.

After looking at their complaints, it is clear that the critics are the reckless accusers here.

Climate “auditor” Steve McIntyre: Yamal like “crack cocaine”

@Sam_Stone

A more serious problem is that when he calibrated his tree ring data against real measured temperatures, they only tracked temperature up to 1960, at which point they show declining temperatures when the thermometer record shows rising temperature. Some scientists argue that this means his tree ring proxies are simply no good - if they fail the coherence test after 1960, what confidence do we have that they accurately represent the temperature from before thermometer measurements? We found one discontinuity we don’t understand, so why couldn’t there be others?

Because they measured and compared the temperatures in the rings and found that so far the divergence problem appears in the 60’s on.

Now if one can find good evidence that trees rings used earlier than the 1960’s are less reliable by all means bring it in.

It is important to notice though that outfits like Fox news are saying that the climate scientists were hiding the decline of temperature, now here you can notice the deception, the temperature mentioned are the proxy temperatures obtained from tree rings that after the 1960’s are not reliable, so scientists dismissed them for more reliable actual temperature records. If this was not done it would indeed be deceiving, it would be like telling the public that tree rings after 1960 are more reliable than the actual temperature measured with more precise devices.

And yet this, is what Fox and others are doing. They confuse on purpose proxy temperatures with actual temperatures. (after all the evidence that is out there there can not be other explanation)

@Sam_Stone

The post-1960 decline in the tree-ring data is the decline in the ‘hide the decline’ E-mails. What Mann did to hide the fact that this proxy series shows declining temperatures after 1960 is to simply cut it off after 1960 and splice in real, measured temperatures. This is pretty dishonest, as it implies that there is a correlation between proxy data and measured temperature that just doesn’t exist.

RealClimate: The CRU hack

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

@Sam_Stone

RealClimate and others have tried to explain this away and come up with lots of justifications for it, but in my opinion there is never a justification for producing a graph like this. If you think the tree ring data is no good after 1960, you simply annotate the graph as such. You don’t splice completely different data on the same trend line to make it appear that there is a conformance that does not exist.

Yeah, otherwise contrarians will drop the notes about the authors advising about the divergence problem in the same papers… :rolleyes:

Really, it is not common to go adding all possible annotations in the graphs in papers when the authors already mentioned the issues in the content of the paper or in previous papers.

@Sam_Stone

It seems to me that if the types of errors that require adjustment are not common-mode errors, then you should find an equal number of downward adjustments as upwards adjustments. And yet, the adjusted data is markedly warmer than the raw data on average. And the common-mode errors that seem likely to me would be the kinds of errors that should cause the raw values to be adjusted downwards - for example, increasing urbanization causing heat island effects. So I think there is some room here to revisit this and have some scientists not affiliated with CRU or the other main warming proponents to re-evaluate.

This was already done, the contrarians then grabbed the NOAA graphs making notice of the adjustments to claim that the adjustments should not have been done. You just can not win with some contrarians.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11834579&postcount=142

…

@Sam_Stone

Also, given that the public is not on board, there should be an extreme effort to open up the science, make it understandable, remove any possible bias, etc. There should be commissions set up to re-evaluate the evidence, made up of legitimate scientists from both the ‘skeptic’ and ‘believer’ camps. All the data and interim papers should be public. All the modeling software should be open-source and extremely well documented.

There’s no way in hell the fate of the world and trillions of dollars should be put in the hands of a couple dozen scientists who guard their data and refuse to release their methodologies and who feel it’s their right to massage graphics and ‘hide the decline’ in order to strengthen their case, even if they’ve convinced themselves that it’s scientifically defensible to do so. Bias is an insidious thing, and one thing that’s abundantly clear in the CRU E-mails is that the scientists doing the work already believe they know the conclusion and spend a lot of time trying to justify it. That can lead to bad science, even if it’s not intentional.

There you go again trusting the say so of the denier media, all the research is not in the hands of a couple of dozen scientists. And it is beyond silly to claim that they refuse to release their methodologies.

RealClimate: Where’s the data?

RealClimate: Data Sources

[matt]

@Sam Stone

scientists argue that this means his tree ring proxies are simply no good - if they fail the coherence test after 1960, what confidence do we have that they accurately represent the temperature from before thermometer measurements? We found one discontinuity we don’t understand, so why couldn’t there be others?

@GIGObuster

Because they measured and compared the temperatures in the rings and found that so far the divergence problem appears in the 60’s on.

I think you’re missing the point. The tree rings are used to reconstruct temperatures over 1000 years or more. We only have direct instrumental measurements for the past 200 years or so. So if the tree rings correlate with the thermometer record from 1800-1960 and then “diverge”, how do we know there aren’t other “divergencies from 1000-1800?” In particular, if the tree rings fail to capture the late 20th century elevated temperatures, instead showing the now-notorious “decline”, how do we know high temperature excursions inthe past have similarly failed to be reflected in these tree rings? It seems to me to be a good argument for not using those particular tree rings as proxies.

[mswas]

I know I don’t know shit about this topic.

Wake me up when it gets as warm as the Medieval Warm Period.

Until then, color me non-plussed by drastic measures predicated on a paucity of data. Come on, we’ve only really been measuring this stuff for less than a century. Climate change is a very long process.

But…I do think that localized pollution is an important issue, and if cleaning that up means less CO2 output then I consider it a win/win. Overall I think that the Global Warming debate distracts from the real and important work of environmentalism and conservationism.

People might be right that there is MMGW, but I don’t trust that they know enough to come up with a real fix. And condemning people to poverty and famine is a high price to pay for being wrong. So from a Game Theory perspective, wide and sweeping changes make no sense, but small, but widespread incremental changes that also have localized benefits make lots of sense.

[mswas]

And while we’re at it, I’d like to add my support for the ‘Hugo Chavez is a tool, and anyone who gives him a standing ovation has a credibility problem.’

I know it’s an ad hominem but whatever.

He’s a douchebag who is wrecking his country and blaming one of his primary sources of income for all of his domestic problems.

I agree, socialist grab for power, Green is an useful idiot for Red.

[ralph124c]

@Sam_Stone

I think that’s going too far. The basic chemistry behind CO2 based radiative forcing is pretty straightforward. I don’t think you’ll find many knowledgeable people on either side of the climate debate arguing that man is having NO effect.

If you assume no feedbacks and just look at how the extra CO2 would translate into a temperature rise, you’re probably look at an extra .5-1 degree of warming in the next century, over and above any natural warming that would occur. Very few, if any, scientists would disagree with this basic fact.

The area of uncertainties around climate change predictions have to do with past temperature levels, positive feedback mechanisms, and estimates of future CO2 generation.

For example, one of the controversies right now involves the use of various proxies to determine temperatures in the distant past before we had thermometer measurements. This is important, because if temperatures were much warmer than they are today in the recent past, it would suggest that there may not be the kind of positive feedbacks to warming that the more extreme predictions of temperature rise require.

For example, It was long believed that the earth underwent a ‘medieval warm period’ between 800 and 1300 AD. There is plenty of evidence that parts of the earth were significantly warmer than they are today. For example, Vikings had a thriving agricultural economy going in Greenland. Tree ring samples and mineralogical evidence shows that New Zealand was significantly warmer during this period.
Exactly! he fact is, Viking cairns have been found on the northern shore of Ellesmere Island (today the coast of the island is icebound). This suggests that the Canadian Archipelego was free of sea ice, in the 11th century.
Greenland remained habitable until about AD 1400-by that point, the island was locked in sea ice.
Much has been made of the melting of the Alpine glaciers-but during the “Little Ice Age”-people had to abandon their villages, as the glaciers overwhelmed them.
All of this took place without human-generated CO2.
Following the medieval warm period there was a ‘little ice age’, in which temperatures plummeted throughout Europe and elsewhere. This picture of past temperature shows it to be quite variable, irrespective of CO2 forcings. It puts today’s temperature increase within the range of natural variability.

This is what the ‘traditional’ view of the Past 1000 years of temperature looked like: Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.

When Mann released his ‘Hockey Stick’ graph, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age vanished. You can see the chart here. Since then, various scientists have worked to explain away the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. The view now is that while they did occur, they were localized phenomenon caused by lack of volcanos, La Nina’ effects, and other temporary but local climate changes. They claim that overall global temperatures were much lower. But there are still papers being released which dispute this and provide other evidence. The science on this is not closed, in my opinion.

The next controversy has to do with the various proxies used to measure temperature in the past. One in particular, Keith Briffa’s Yamal series tree ring data, comes under fire for two reasons - one is that his sample set is extremely small - 12 trees in total. The accusation is that these trees were cherry-picked because they gave the result he wanted, but there’s really no evidence of this. Still there are plenty of other trees in that region that do not show the same temperature patterns that Briffa’s do. He may have had good reason for excluding them, but critics have seized on this as an example of how the books may have been cooked.

A more serious problem is that when he calibrated his tree ring data against real measured temperatures, they only tracked temperature up to 1960, at which point they show declining temperatures when the thermometer record shows rising temperature. Some scientists argue that this means his tree ring proxies are simply no good - if they fail the coherence test after 1960, what confidence do we have that they accurately represent the temperature from before thermometer measurements? We found one discontinuity we don’t understand, so why couldn’t there be others?

The post-1960 decline in the tree-ring data is the decline in the ‘hide the decline’ E-mails. What Mann did to hide the fact that this proxy series shows declining temperatures after 1960 is to simply cut it off after 1960 and splice in real, measured temperatures. This is pretty dishonest, as it implies that there is a correlation between proxy data and measured temperature that just doesn’t exist.

If you look at this graph: Proxy Temperature Reconstruction, you’ll see that the green line (Briffa’s Tree Ring Proxies) takes a sharp downward turn around 1950. Note that the other proxies don’t look like they’re tracking the sharp increase in measured temperatures either.

But here’s the graph published with the ‘Nature Trick’ used to hide the decline: New ‘modified’ graph. This graph makes it look like all the proxies are in total agreement with measured temperatures, which makes the proxy data look absolutely rock-solid. But in fact, it’s a lie. This is a dishonest graph. Does it mean warming isn’t occurring? Of course not. But it does mean that some scientists are willing to play fast and loose with statistics and visuals aimed at the public in order to make the case appear stronger than it is.

RealClimate and others have tried to explain this away and come up with lots of justifications for it, but in my opinion there is never a justification for producing a graph like this. If you think the tree ring data is no good after 1960, you simply annotate the graph as such. You don’t splice completely different data on the same trend line to make it appear that there is a conformance that does not exist.

Again, this doesn’t mean global warming doesn’t exist - it does mean that the work of some of these scientists needs to be scrutinized carefully - especially the stuff the are releasing for public consumption as opposed to what they’re putting in peer-reviewed journals.

The next source of uncertainty in current warming models is the raw temperature data. It is extraordinarily hard to get accurate global temperatures, even when you have thermometers scattered all over the globe. You have issues of calibration, changes in the way measurements are made, hardware changes over time, elevation differences, environmental differences such as the addition of a paved parking lot near a measuring station which may cause local warming, etc.

This is an area where confirmation bias could be a factor. If you want to believe there’s warming, then you may be likely to consider a station that’s reporting slightly colder temperatures to be anomalous, and start looking for reasons to adjust the temperature upwards. And even if you find them and they are legitimate and you can justify them, the fact may be that you didn’t look quite as hard for reasons to adjust overly-warm temperatures downward.

It seems to me that if the types of errors that require adjustment are not common-mode errors, then you should find an equal number of downward adjustments as upwards adjustments. And yet, the adjusted data is markedly warmer than the raw data on average. And the common-mode errors that seem likely to me would be the kinds of errors that should cause the raw values to be adjusted downwards - for example, increasing urbanization causing heat island effects. So I think there is some room here to revisit this and have some scientists not affiliated with CRU or the other main warming proponents to re-evaluate.

A related issue is how the raw data is treated in some models. Rather than attempting to hand-adjust every station by examining its history, the CRU model apparently attempts to simply smooth the data by comparing anomalous results to surrounding stations. This is not a bad idea, and wouldn’t be subject to the same kinds of confirmation bias, but it could be open to all kinds of statistical error. If the stations are too far apart, interpolating temperatures may not be valid. The algorithms could be biased towards accepting warmer stations, either knowingly or through flaws in the math.

There could be compound errors because the models first have to align the stations on a grid to apply the math, and the ‘gridding’ process appears to be somewhat haphazard. Finally, the CRU E-mails indicate that the databases the models use are in pretty poor shape, with stations appearing in the data that do not exist in real life, etc. My experience with government databases is that they are often rife with errors. Companies like Jeppeson spend a lot of money cleaning up the raw government databases for aviation use. I’ve tried using the raw aviation databases myself for some navigation software I was writing, and decided they were so error-prone they were unusable. So I don’t implicitly trust the raw data like some people do.

Finally, the weakest area of climate prediction revolves around our understanding of long-term feedback processes and the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. If CO2 emitted today is completely scrubbed from the atmosphere within 50 years instead of 200 years, that makes a gigantic difference in the rate of CO2 accumulation. And yet, my survey of the literature suggests that this number is not known with much precision, with most papers giving a 50-200 year spread in their estimates. And other feedbacks, such as vegetation response to additional CO2, algae blooms, and cloud response are very poorly understood - so much that they either aren’t included in the models at all, or they are very weakly coupled. The IPCC won’t even venture one of their “Very Likely - Very Unlikely” ranges to cloud cover models, because they say the science isn’t even good enough to give us a ballpark estimate. Yet the potential range of negative feedback from clouds could almost completely eradicate CO2-forced warming.

Aside from the physics of global warming, the other major source of uncertainty is our prediction of how much CO2 will be released in the future. Economic modeling is damned hard. And yet, predicting temperatures out to 2100 requires modeling the CO2 production of the planet for the next 90 years. The truth is, we don’t have the foggiest notion. If solar, wind, and nuclear continue to improve, we could hit a discontinuity in ten years where fossil fuels are more expensive than their alternatives, and there will be a rapid, market-driven flight aware from CO2 producing energy. If ‘Peak Oil’ is true, then oil will in the near future rapidly rise in price and be priced out of the market.

As an example of how weak these forecasts are, forecasts in the IPCC’s 2007 4th assessment report did not predict the worldwide recession that hit just one year later, and which caused a major reduction in CO2 output. China is the major emitter of CO2, and there are signs that its economy is not on a sustainable path. If China goes into a major recession, it will have a bigger effect on CO2 emissions than any of the proposed treaties would have had.

All of this put together means there is far more uncertainty surrounding global warming than the proponents want to admit. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening, or that it’s not a potentially large problem for the future. It just means we really don’t know as much as we think we do, and the evidence for future warming needs to be surrounded with very large error bars.

This means that what we should be focusing on right now is trying to shrink those error bars so we can make better decisions. Hell, maybe they’ll show that the problem is even worse than we think it is - there’s uncertainty that could make it much worse than predicted (we don’t really understand how the ice caps are responding to warming - some theories show increased precipitation and thicker ice caps, others show the opposite).

Also, given that the public is not on board, there should be an extreme effort to open up the science, make it understandable, remove any possible bias, etc. There should be commissions set up to re-evaluate the evidence, made up of legitimate scientists from both the ‘skeptic’ and ‘believer’ camps. All the data and interim papers should be public. All the modeling software should be open-source and extremely well documented.

There’s no way in hell the fate of the world and trillions of dollars should be put in the hands of a couple dozen scientists who guard their data and refuse to release their methodologies and who feel it’s their right to massage graphics and ‘hide the decline’ in order to strengthen their case, even if they’ve convinced themselves that it’s scientifically defensible to do so. Bias is an insidious thing, and one thing that’s abundantly clear in the CRU E-mails is that the scientists doing the work already believe they know the conclusion and spend a lot of time trying to justify it. That can lead to bad science, even if it’s not intentional.

I totally agree-we need to do more and better research, before we throw trillions of $ away!

[matt]

@GIGObuster

After looking at their complaints, it is clear that the critics are the reckless accusers here.

Climate “auditor” Steve McIntyre: Yamal like “crack cocaine” | Deep Climate

Maybe they are, but your cite is just one person’s commentary on the story, from their own rather slanted point of view. Better to have the story from the horses mouths, so to speak. Keith Briffa put up a number of responses on the CRU website when McIntyre raised his issues, but unfortunately the CRU site has been down since 14th December and I can’t find WaybackWhen or Googlecache archives of them.

One of Briffa’s responses was duplicated at wattsupwiththat and can be read here:

Response from Briffa on the Yamal tree ring affair – plus rebuttal • Watts Up...

McIntyre’s own version of the story can be found at Climateaudit, of course:

Response from Briffa on the Yamal tree ring affair – plus rebuttal • Watts Up...

He quotes one of Briffa’s responses as including this:
“Subsequent reports of McIntyre’s blog (e.g. in The Telegraph, The Register and The Spectator) amount to hysterical, even defamatory misrepresentations, not only of our work but also of the content of the original McIntyre blog, by using words such as ’scam’, ’scandal’, ‘lie’, and ‘fraudulent’ with respect to our work.” However, the response including this statement is currently inaccessible at CRU so we can’t see the exact context.

An email from the CRU leak/hack has some commentary which is relevant.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1039&filename=1254756944.txt

[mswas]

One other thing.

Nanotechnology that can seperate and sequester the hydrogen and carbon from hydrocarbons already exists. As Carbon is one of the primary constituent molecules in nanotechnology, there will be an emerging market that will boom within the next couple of decades. The hydrogen can be used in fuel cells and the process of separating them creates energy that can be converted to electricity.

Creating market controls in order to suit a hypothetical, and partially understood process could be devastating to the economy in ways that we don’t yet know.