Climate & Climate Change

The Royal Society of New South Wales held a meeting on Saturday in Mittagong on ‘Global Warming and The Cosmos’. Speakers included the director of the Danish National Space Centre, Eigil Friis-Christensen, and Graeme Pearman, former head of the CSIRO Atmospheric Division and now a consultant with GP Consulting Pty Ltd and an advisor to Al Gore and Ross Garnaut.

Graeme Pearman and Eigil Friis-Christensen, Mittagong, April 5, 2008

Dr Pearman spoke first and focused on global warming from carbon dioxide as a “policy driver”. I was offended by the presentation.

Dr Pearman suggested that much of the 0.7 degree Celsius increase in the earth’s temperature over the last 100 years has occurred in the last 10 years. Yet the last really hot year was in 1998 and global temperatures have since plateaued.

Graph and fitted spline curve from 1979 through to February 2008, from Professors John Christy and Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville

Dr Pearman referred to 95 and 99 percentiles as measures of the “proof of an hypothesis” in the same breathe claiming that that there was more than 90 percent proof that global warming is a consequence of greenhouse gas emission. Yet this 90 percent figure, sometimes used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is not from the testing of a falsifiable hypothesis but rather a political expression of the strength of opinion.

Dr Pearman began his presentation by suggesting that the break-up of the Wilkins Ice Shelf was a consequence of global warming. When I questioned him on this issue, he told the audience that Antarctica is warming.

Yet it is generally accepted and uncontroversial that 95 percent of the landmass of Antarctica has cooled over the last 20 years.

Image depicting the heating and cooling trends over and around Antarctica (1982-2003). Blue indicates cooling trends and red indicates warming trends.From NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.Data provided by Larry Stock.

There has been warming at the edge of the continent including where Wilkins Ice Sheet recently collapsed. The collapse could be due to global warming , oceanic volcanoes, and/or from internal stresses associated with the accumulation of ice in the bay.

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I am grateful to John McLean for information on temperatures in the vicinity of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and Joe D’Aleo for other temperature data, and to Bill Kininmonth and Garth Paltridge for information on the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse.

I shall elaborate on the presentation by Dr Christensen in Part 2, to be posted in the next day or two.

On Thursday 3rd April BBC News website’s Richard Black penned an article entitled, ‘No Sun link’ to climate change, based on a flawed paper (not discussed in detail here) in a lesser known journal called Environmental Research Letters, which refers only to Palle/Butler and Marsh/Svensmark (2000), but not Shaviv/Veizer.

The article begins:

Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun’s activity.

The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate “sceptics”, that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature.

The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity.

But Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.

The paper referred to is: ‘Testing the proposed causal link between cosmic rays and cloud cover’

The paper concludes:

In conclusion, no corroboration of the claim of a causal connection between the changes in ionization and low cloud
cover, made in [1, 2], could be found in this investigation. From the distribution of the depth of the dip in solar cycle 22 with geomagnetic latitude (the VRCO) we find that, averaged over the whole Earth, less than 23% of the dip comes from the solar modulation of the cosmic ray intensity, at the 95% confidence level. This implies that, if the dip represents a real correlation, more than 77% of it is caused by a source other than ionization and this source must be correlated with solar activity.

Not exactly, ‘no link.’ and Giles Harrison from Reading University, is quoted as saying that the work was important “as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data”.

Harrison’s own UK study from 2006 concluded,

Changes in diffuse fraction (DF) and the frequency of overcast days represent changes in the weather and the atmospheric energy balance. The decrease in the proportion of direct solar radiation associated with an increase in DF will lead to a local reduction in daytime surface temperature. Further, because the net global effect of cloud is cooling (Hartman 1993), any widespread increase in the overcast days could also reduce temperature. At Reading, the measured sensitivity of daily average temperatures to DF for overcast days is K0.2 K per 0.01 change in DF for 1997–2004). Consequently the inverse relationship between GCR and solar activity will lead to cooling at solar minimum. This might amplify the effect of the small solar cycle variation in total solar irradiance, believed to be underestimated by climate models (Stott et al. 2003), which neglect a cosmic ray effect. In summary, our data analysis confirms the existence of a small, yet statistically robust, cosmic ray effect on clouds, that will emerge on long time scales with less variability than the considerable variability of daily cloudiness.

No mention is made by the BBC of the more favourable 2008 review of the evidence for a cosmic ray-climate link by Usoskin and Kovaltsov, which concluded: “a CR-climate link seems to be a plausible climate driver, as supported by the bulk of statistical studies and existing theoretical models. However, further studies, in particular a clear case study as well as improved model development, are foreseen to improve our understanding of the link between cosmic rays and the climate on Earth.”

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T!

Moving on to the strange happenings surrounding a subsequent 4th April article by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, blogged here, entitled, Global temperatures ‘to decrease’ , which was later changed to, Global warming ‘dips this year, ‘ and then subsequently changed back to Global temperatures ‘to decrease.’ The changes in the text, however, did not revert back to the text in the original article.

The two alternative headings an be viewed on this google search:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBR_enGB245GB248&q=Global+warming+to+dip+this+year

Referring to the forecast a record high temperature within five years, “probably associated with another episode of El Nino” was permanently removed from the re-written article. If the Freedom of Information Act is applicable to the BBC, I shall make a request in order to try and uncover the sequence of events and the reasons behind them.

See also NewsBusters: BBC Changes ‘Temperatures Decrease’ Article to Incite Climate Hysteria

The Committee on Climate Change is being created as a new expert body, to provide independent advice to the UK Government and Devolved Administrations on how the UK can optimally achieve its emissions reductions goals for 2020 and 2050.

Opportunity details:

Board Committee Committee on Climate Change £800 per day

I awoke at 7am on Sunday 6th April and looked out of the bedroom window to see the picturesque scene of a blanket of snow.

Looking out towards the river from the front of our house:

Our cars covered in snow:

Our 12 year old Border Collie during his Sunday morning walk. He likes snow, but hasn’t seen it too often during his lifetime:

Another biscuit please, dad!

Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 due to the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

The World Meteorological Organisation’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

But experts have also forecast a record high temperature within five years, probably associated with another episode of El Nino.

BBC website: Global temperatures ‘to decrease’

UPDATE – The Ministry of Truth have now changed the BBC headline to:

Global warming ‘dips this year’

AND the text has been changed too, including the removal of, “probably associated with another episode of El Nino.”

Climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr, climatologist Tom Wigley, and economist Christopher Green lay out in a commentary article published in Nature why they think that the emission scenarios the IPCC produced nearly a decade ago, which are still widely used, are overly optimistic. They note that most of the IPCC’s ‘business as usual’ emission scenarios assume a certain amount of ‘spontaneous’ technological change. The size of this assumed change is unrealistic, they argue, and deceives policy-makers and the public about the crucial role policy must have in encouraging the development of technologies to prevent dangerous climate change.

Read the Nature News article, ‘Climate challenge underestimated?’ Technology will not automatically come to our aid, experts warn.

The full paper is here (subscription required).

There is also correspondence from Gwyn Prins (of Prins and Rayner):

Radical rethink is needed on climate-change policy

Excerpt:

SIR — The irreconcilable differences
between David S. Reay’s Book Review of
The Hot Topic (Nature 452, 31; 2008) and
mine, expressed in Nature Reports Climate
Change (see www.nature.com/climate/
2008/0804/full/climate.2008.23.html),
go to the heart of why there is now a crisis
in climate policy. Reay seems to believe
that agreement with a normative agenda
precludes the need for rigorous evaluation
of evidence or of proposed policy actions,
and so falls into the same traps as Gabrielle
Walker and David King, the authors
whom he praises.

These authors have no doubt that the
Kyoto Protocol is the road to follow. They
consider that anyone, particularly an
American, who doesn’t agree is wrong —
and perhaps even corrupt.

However, the Kyoto approach is broken……..