Climate & Climate Change

Reported first in The Times:

The UHT route to long-life planet

It’s enough to put the nation off breakfast. Civil servants have suggested that Britons put long-life milk in tea and pour it on their cornflakes to save the planet from global warming.

Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have made a serious proposal that consumers switch to UHT (Ultra-High Temperature or Ultra-Heat Treated) milk to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Officials have calculated that by reducing chiller capacity in supermarkets, convenience stores and corner shops, carbon emissions would be significantly reduced. The move is not against the domestic use of fridges; UHT milk, once opened, must be refrigerated.

and now in Australia:

Save the world: buy UHT milk

BRITONS may be banned from drinking “traditional milk” in favour of the long-life variety in order to save the environment, according to a government strategy.

It was claimed in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ that sea levels could rise by up to 20 feet in the ‘near future’ due to melting ice sheets. Anyone who believed such a claim wouldn’t really be expected to buy a property near San Francisco Bay, would they?

Well, in 2005, Al Gore purchased a multi-million dollar Condominium in the St. Regis Hotel, a 480 foot tower at Third and Mission.

Still, very handy for Apple board meetings, and at 480 feet high there’s little chance of getting your feet wet by the Pacific Ocean!

There’s an interesting story on the BBC website: Arctic muds reveal sea ice record

A new technique to track changes in the extent of Arctic sea ice over the past 1,000 years is being developed by a UK team from the University of Plymouth.

There is little in the way of sea ice records before satellite measurements began in 1979.

Dr Masse said: “Significantly, periods of sea ice cover frequently coincide with dramatic changes to human populations due to famines and illnesses.”

From The Times:

Please, sir – Gore’s got warming wrong

THE tormentors of Al Gore, who last week won a legal victory against his film, An Inconvenient Truth, are to step up their battle by sending British secondary schools a documentary attacking the science of global warming.

and The Independent:

Climate deniers to send film to British schools

Secondary schools across Britain are to be sent copies of the controversial television film The Great Global Warming Swindle, as the polemical battle over climate change heats up in the wake of last week’s Nobel Peace Prize award to former US vice president Al Gore and the UN’s climate change panel.

The main figure behind the move is Viscount Monckton, the journalist and former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, who is likely to couple the Swindle film, made by radical television producer Martin Durkin and aired on Channel 4 in March, in a package with an anti-climate change film of his own entitled Apocalypse No!.

Graph of yearly averaged sunspot numbers 1610 to 2000 and text follows below:

The Maunder Minimum represents the coldest phase of the Little Ice Age, when solar activity was particularly low and there was an almost total absence of sunspots. In a previous blog post I presented evidence for the LIA in Australia, suggesting 17th century global cooling. There was also a slight fall in atmospheric CO2 concentrations for the period between 1550 to 1800.

Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has attempted to explain the Maunder Minimum using a climate model. According to Shindell’s results less strong ultraviolet light was emitted by the sun, which in turn caused less ozone to be formed in the stratosphere. As a result the North Atlantic Oscillation became strongly negative, causing Europe to be unusually cold.

Read the story in more detail here.

Looking at the graph of yearly averaged sunspot numbers, we can discern a rising trend in solar activity following the Maunder Minimum, peaking in the 20th century, and remaining high despite a fall after 1950. Some solar scientists, including NASA’s David Hathaway are predicting a big fall in solar activity in the not too distant future, with an uncertain impact on global temperatures. Another Maunder type minimum on the way? We may not have to wait too long to find out.

Some notes about solar activity/the solar constant:

Measurements of the Nimbus-7 and Solar Maximum Mission satellites reported temporary large decreases of the solar constant of the order of a few tenths of a percent on a time-scale from days to weeks. Investigations show that these decreases were caused by ‘active’ sunspot groups with fast development and complex structure. This connection between the solar constant variation and the appearance of the active groups seems to be clearer in the maximum of the solar activity.

The intensity of the Sun varies along with the 11-year sunspot cycle. When sunspots are numerous the solar constant is high (about 1367 W/m2); when sunspots are scarce the value is low (about 1365 W/m2). Eleven years isn’t the only “beat,” however. The solar constant can fluctuate by ~0.1% over days and weeks as sunspots grow and dissipate. The solar constant also drifts by 0.2% to 0.6% over many centuries.

Samuel Langley and Charles Greeley Abbot of the Smithsonian recorded direct measurements of the solar constant (the level of the Sun’s radiation) over several decades. They concluded that this “constant” varies by about 0.3% on the short-term scale of several days and that on the longer term, the more active Sun is brighter by about 1%. [Hufbauer, 1991]

The proxy relationships observed during solar cycle 21 and the behavior of other sun-like stars [Baliunas and Jastrow, 1990] have been used by Lean et al. [1992] to estimate the solar irradiance during the Maunder Minimum as somewhere between 0.15 and 0.35% lower than the present solar-cycle mean value. An independent estimate by Baliunas and Jastrow [1993] gave a range of 0.1 to 0.7% based purely on observations of solar-like stars, discussed by Lockwood et al. [1992]. The use of other stars to infer solar variability has been questioned by Schatten [1993], however, who has pointed out that the observed irradiance is likely to be a function of the heliographic latitude of the observer, being a minimum near the solar equatorial plane, where the Earth is located. Since other stars are observed at random latitudes relative to their spin axes, the variations observed might not be directly relevant to the local situation.

Baliunas and Jastrow [1993] conclude that a reduction in irradiance of 0.4%, in the middle of their calculated range, would be enough to explain the cold average temperatures of the Little Ice Age, as estimated by Wigley and Kelly [1990]. Hoyt and Schatten [1993] have used a variety of possible proxies for solar irradiance to estimate a value for the Maunder Minimum period that is about 5 W m-2, or about 0.36% below current values, in general agreement with other estimates. Rind and Overpeck [1993] used a general circulation model to estimate the regional temperature changes caused by a decrease of solar irradiance by 0.25%, in the middle of the range estimated by Lean et al. [1992]. They found a global average reduction of 0.45C with no clear latitudinal variation, and with the largest effects over the continental land masses.

We are all aware of a claimed consensus on climate science, although what the consensus actually is and how far it goes has yet to be defined, in my view. That is not the issue raised here. A book authored by Janis, I. L. & Mann, L. (1977) Decision-making: A psychological analysis of conflict, choice, and commitment (New York Free Press), explores the concept of ‘Group Think,’ which shows a remarkable parallel with the way the climate science consensus is operated and protected.

Eight symptoms of Group Think are listed below:

1. Illusion of Invulnerability: Members ignore obvious danger, take extreme risk, and are overly optimistic.

2. Collective Rationalization: Members discredit and explain away warning contrary to group thinking.

3. Illusion of Morality: Members believe their decisions are morally correct, ignoring the ethical consequences of their decisions.

4. Excessive Stereotyping: The group constructs negative stereotypes of rivals outside the group.

5. Pressure for Conformity: Members pressure any in the group who express arguments against the group’s stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, viewing such opposition as disloyalty.

6. Self-Censorship: Members withhold their dissenting views and counter-arguments.

7. Illusion of Unanimity: Members perceive falsely that everyone agrees with the group’s decision; silence is seen as consent.

8. Mind guards: Some members appoint themselves to the role of protecting the group from adverse information that might threaten group complacency.

I can certainly see how ignoring the dangers of concentrating all of our efforts on futile CO2 reduction, ad hominem attacks, personal smears, US State Climatologists losing their jobs, and the likes of RealClimate plus some media outlets as ‘Mind guards’ fits into this framework. No doubt some blog readers will agree and can think of other examples. Others, of course, will disagree.

Thanks to John McLean for alerting me to the concept of ‘Group Think.’