Leaked IPCC report: 90% confidence in AGW is now 95% -- and sea level will rise!

[sleestak]

Reading these Climate Change threads is a little bit amusing and a little bit frustrating as they always turn into the Gigobuster show. Amusing because it always happens, frustrating because Gigo always does the same thing, posts links to Skeptical Science and accuses anyone who dares question anything of being a denier. Oh a religous denier, which is rather funny considering the guy who founded Skeptical Science is a believer and specifically founded Sks because:

I’m a Christian and find myself strongly challenged by passages in the Bible like Amos 5 and Matthew 25

Anyway, on to the actual science.

There are some things we know. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We don’t know what the mutliplier of CO2 is. We have a guess but that range could very well be high. Like seven times too high. Warning pdf. Link.

The money shot:

The values for the global climate sensitivity published by the IPCC [3] cover a range from 2.1˚C – 4.4˚C with an average value of 3.2˚C, which is seven times larger than that predicted here.

Note, that paper was presented at the European Geosciences Union.

And another:

Our results are incompatibly lower (P < 0.05) than recent pre-industrial empirical estimates of ~40 p.p.m.v. CO2 per °C (refs 6, 7), and correspondingly suggest ~80% less potential amplification of ongoing global warming.

Link to paper. Note the paper was published in Nature.

So, when someone tells you they know the multiplier of CO2, well, they don’t. There are serious questions about the value even though the Sks folks will pretend otherwise.

Next, we don’t know how cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere and how they affect could formation. It now appears that the theory of could formation is incorrect and that cosmic rays play a much larger role than expected.

The result boosts our theory that cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy are directly involved in the Earth’s weather and climate,” says Henrik Svensmark, lead author of the new report. “In experiments over many years, we have shown that ionizing rays help to form small molecular clusters. Critics have argued that the clusters cannot grow large enough to affect cloud formation significantly. But our current research, of which the reported SKY2 experiment forms just one part, contradicts their conventional view. Now we want to close in on the details of the unexpected chemistry occurring in the air, at the end of the long journey that brought the cosmic rays here from exploded stars.

Link

Then there is the solar effect. Some folks found a surprise energy transfer from the sun and, as far as I can tell, climate scientist went ‘Denier!!!’ and ignored the research. Link.

The money shot:

It’s like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun. This discovery is like finding it got hotter when the sun went down," said Larry Lyons, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and a co-author of the research, which is in press in two companion papers in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Then there is the climate science culture. Apparently, anyone who dares to question the present climate change dogma is consider a heretic and pushed out. Hereis an excellent essay on the situation from an insider, Judith Curry who is the Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The money shot:

Last year, I encountered a stark example of this. One of my colleagues was thinking about publishing a paper that challenges the IPCC interpretation of the previous pause during the 1940s to 1970′s. My colleague sent a .ppt presentation on this topic to three colleagues, each of whom is a very respected senior scientist and none of whom have been particularly vocal advocates on the subject of climate change (names are withheld to protect the guilty/innocent). Each of these scientists strongly encouraged my colleague NOT to publish this paper, since it would only provide fodder for the skeptics.

So, a respected climate scientist is reporting that scientists who go against the climate change dogma are being ‘strongly encouraged’ to NOT publish. That is not a healthy environment in which to do science. To quote Richard Feynman:

One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

Then there is the math. Instead of listing the horrid math mistakes that climate scientists have made, I’ll just link to a report on the uncertainty methods used by the IPCC.

The money shot:

The forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and the US National Climate Assessment Report will not adequately address this issue. Worse still, prevailing techniques for quantifying the uncertainties that are inherent in observed climate trends and projections of climate change are out of date by well over a decade. Modern statistical methods and models could improve this situation dramatically.

Linkto paper published in Nature Climate Change.

I will probably post more later, it is getting late and I have a real job I need to get to in the morning. However, a last link regarding the climate and the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation).

Link to graphfrom paper.

This papers conclusion:

The rise in global average temperature over the last century has halted since roughly the year 2000, despite the fact that the release of CO2 into the atmosphere is still increasing. It is suggested here that this interruption has been caused by the suspension of the near linear (+ 0.5 °C/100 years or 0.05 °C/10 years) temperature increase over the last two centuries, due to recovery from the Little Ice Age, by a superposed multi-decadal oscillation of a 0.2 °C amplitude and a 50~60 year period, which reached its positive peak in about the year 2000—a halting similar to those that occurred around 1880 and 1940. Because both the near linear change and the multi-decadal oscillation are likely to be natural changes (the recovery from the Little Ice Age (LIA) and an oscillation related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), respectively), they must be carefully subtracted from temperature data before estimating the effects of CO2.

The paper can be found here.

The climate is a hugely complex thing. Pretending that we fully know what is happening with the climate is a joke. There are huge questions that need to be answered and there are more things we don’t know that we don’t know out there to find.

Of course, anyone who questions the Climate Scientists is a denier.

Oh, and the artic ice, which was supposed to be gone by 2012is now growing at a record pace. Link

Slee

P.S Gigo, did you note how I posted links to actual research instead of one website?