Climate & Climate Change

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”. “A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.” …..”The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.” But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too. […]So psychiatrists are treating a 17-year-old tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers?

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.”

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: “Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . .”

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd’s next campaign slogan?

Continue reading Andrew Bolt’s Herald Sun blog: Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change

“If we are to understand the real state of the world, we need to focus on the fundamentals and we need to look at realities, not myths.” Bjorn Lomborg, 2001

According to geological history the earth has been warming for about 18,000 years and over this period sea levels have risen over 100 metres.

While the overall temperature trend has been one of warming, there have been ups and downs due to natural climatic variations. So, if we consider the last 2,000 years of global temperature anomalies there was the Medieval Warm Period followed by the Little Ice Age and then a period of relative rapid warming during the 20th century, Figure 1.

Figure 1. 2,000 Years of Reconstructed Global Temperature Anomalies. Based on Loehle, C. 2007. Energy & Environment 18(7-8): 1049-1058. Thermometer data was added for 1850 -2007 by Roy W Spencer. From more information see http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

It was not until the development of the thermometer that temperatures could be measured with accuracy.

The Central England Temperature Series is considered the world’s longest series; the monthly mean begins in 1659, during the Little Ice Age.

The Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in conjunction with the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorology Office provide global temperature data going back only as far as 1850. This information is updated on a monthly basis.

It is this data set that is used by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for global temperature trends, Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Global Temperature Anomaly for the period 1850 to 2007.

It is important to realize that Figures 1 and 2 show temperatures anomalies, not actual temperature. An anomaly is something that deviates from what is considered standard, normal or expected. The anomaly in Figure 2 shows the deviation from the mean temperature for the period 1961 to 1990.

We have become familiar with this representation of global temperatures but it is contrived to emphasis difference and in particular the extent to which temperatures have increased from 1850 to the present. When the same data is plotted just showing the actual global mean temperature for the same time period, the trend is no longer evident, Figure 3.

Figure 3. Global Mean Temperature from 1850 – 2007

The data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in conjunction with the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorology Office is generally accepted by those who subscribe to the idea that carbon dioxide is driving dangerous man-made global warming, as well as by the so-called climate skeptics. There are other organisations that collect information on global temperatures including the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in the US which claims to have the world’s largest archive of climate data.

Well known advisor to Al Gore, James Hansen, from NASA’s Goddard Space Institute has developed what is known as a GISS surface temperature analysis. This data set has shown more warming over recent years than the CRU data from the UK Meteorology Office and some argue that this is because the Hansen system overemphasizes temperatures at the North Pole.

There are ongoing arguments over the accuracy of the various data sets and methods of analysis. Ross McKitrick from Canada’s University of Guelph argues that 50 percent of global warming measured by land-based thermometers in the US since 1980 is due to local influences of man-made structures, also known as The Urban Heat Island Effect. When James Hansen recalculated temperatures in 2006 using a corrected algorithm, 1934 rather than 1998 was found to be the hottest in the last 100 years in the US. There have also been issues with the additions and losses of weather stations; for example many weather stations were lost in places like Siberia with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, thermometer temperature data has only been collected in the polar-regions since the 1940s and calculating the mean temperature at the poles is still difficult because of the sparseness of ground-based weather stations and the freezing environment takes its toll on equipment.

Bill Kininmonth, former head of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, has suggested that because of the difficulty of assessing surface temperatures over ice surfaces it is more realistic to consider sea surface temperatures in places like the south pole and exclude areas of seasonal sea ice.

Dr Hansen has explained the general difficulty of measuring surface temperatures, “Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10 ft or 50 ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rainforest), the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50 ft of air either above ground or above the top of the vegetation. To measure SAT (surface air temperature) we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted. Even if the 50 ft standard were adopted, I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50 ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.”

Given these difficulties an alternative is to use temperature data from satellites.

Since 1979, Microwave Sounding Units (MSUs) on orbiting satellites have measured the intensity of upwelling microwave radiation from atmospheric oxygen with the intensity proportional to the temperature of vertical layers of the atmosphere. The research focus has been on getting a broadly representative measure of lower atmosphere temperature.

The satellite record of temperature in Figure 4, is from Roy Spencer at the https://viagragener.com University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and corrects for previous errors including orbital drift. Dr Spencer is the US Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua Satellite.

Figure 4. Monthly globally averaged lower atmospheric temperature anomaly since 1979 as measured by NOAA and NASA satellites. For more information see http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

Figure 4 is another graph showing the temperature anomaly; in this case the deviation for the period 1979 – June 2008 from the mean temperature for the period 1979-1998.

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Figure 3 is based on ‘Certainty clouds the IPCC’ by Sinclair Davidson and Alex Robson, IPA Review, March 2007, from page 7. You can read the article here: http://www.ipa.org.au/publications/898/certainly-clouds-the-ipcc

The Australian media has been concentrating on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) of late. Today is the day that the draft (or should that be daft?) Garnaut Report on Climate Change is released.

ABC News: Garnaut urges emissions trading scheme ‘without delay’

A reminder of how insignificant Australian CO2 emissions and an ETS are:

There are two articles of interest from a climate point of view in this week’s Science magazine. The first is entitled: ‘Large and Rapid Melt-Induced Velocity Changes in the Ablation Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet’ by R. S. W. van de Wal et al.

The Abstract states:

Continuous Global Positioning System observations reveal rapid and large ice velocity fluctuations in the western ablation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Within days, ice velocity reacts to increased meltwater production and increases by a factor of 4. Such a response is much stronger and much faster than previously reported. Over a longer period of 17 years, annual ice velocities have decreased slightly, which suggests that the englacial hydraulic system adjusts constantly to the variable meltwater input, which results in a more or less constant ice flux over the years. The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades.

The report concludes:

Longer observational records with high temporal resolution in other ablation areas of the ice sheet are necessary to test the importance of the positive-feedback mechanism between melt rates and ice velocities. At present, we cannot conclude that this feedback is important. We do see a significant increase of the ablation rate (Fig. 2), which is likely related to climate warming, but it remains to be seen if this is likely to be amplified by increasing annual ice velocities.

Moving on to Perspectives, Oceans: Carbon Emissions and Acidification by Richard E. Zeebe et al:

Much of the scientific and public focus on anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has been on climate impacts. Emission targets have been suggested based primarily on arguments for preventing climate from shifting significantly from its preindustrial state. However, recent studies underline a second major impact of carbon emissions: ocean acidification. Over the past 200 years, the oceans have taken up ~40% of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This uptake slows the rise in atmospheric CO2 considerably, thus alleviating climate change caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. But it also alters ocean chemistry, with potentially serious consequences for marine life.

The authors conclude:

To monitor and quantify future changes in ocean chemistry and biogeochemical fluxes, intensified global-ocean carbon dioxide surveys in combination with carbon-cycle modeling will be necessary. Awareness must be raised among the public and policy-makers of the effects of ocean acidification and the steps required to control it. Ocean chemistry changes, and not only climate effects, should be taken into consideration when determining CO2 emission targets; such consideration is likely to weigh in favor of lower emission targets.

Meanwhile, join the red dots between the dates of James Hansen’s testimony to Congress in June 1988 and June 2008 – see if you can spot a tipping point:

Figure lifted from Climate Audit.

I gather from listening to the BBC 7.00am news on the way to work, that Japan is claiming that the terms of the Kyoto Protocol were loaded against them. The 1990 baseline favoured the likes of the UK and Germany – the Germans closed old, dirty, inefficient industry in the former East Germany, and the UK shut down much of its coal industry. Meanwhile, Japan had made big strides in energy efficiency in the 1980s. The moral of this story is clear – be careful what you sign up to. Even if implemented in full, which it won’t be, the Kyoto Protocol will have no measureable effect on climate. Hence, I now refer to the Kyoto Protocol as the ‘Don Quixote Protocol’ because the ‘fight’ is against an imaginary enemy that turned out to be windmills (wind turbines being the modern equivalent).