Climate & Climate Change

Hi Jennifer,

Some photographs of last Wednesday’s snow storm in the Tinderries.

This is the second one in two weeks and both were widespread in the Queanbeyan River/Badga/Murrumbidgee Catchments.

The weather charts suggest some more precipitation over the weekend.

Long time locals say that this has similarities to the late fifties, early sixties when they managed to leave the district a few times through each winter due to snow.

Might have to invest in a skidoo!

Cheers,
Allan
Upper Murrumbidgee
Australia

Kevin Trenberth is head of the large US National Centre for Atmospheric Research and one of the advisory high priests of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A New Zealander by birth, Trenberth has had a distinguished career as a climate scientist with interests in the use of computer General Circulation Models (GCMs), the basis for most of the public alarm about dangerous global warming.

When such a person gives an opinion about the scientific value of GCMs as predictive tools, it is obviously wise to pay attention.

In a remarkable contribution to Nature magazine’s Climate Feedback blog, Trenberth concedes GCMs cannot predict future climate and claims the IPCC is not in the business of climate prediction. This might be news to some people.

Among other things, Trenberth asserts “. . . there are no (climate) predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been”. Instead, there are only “what if” projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios.

According to Trenberth, GCMs “. . . do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents”.

“None of the models used by IPCC is initialised to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate.

“The state of the oceans, sea ice and soil moisture has no relationship to the observed state at any recent time in any of the IPCC models.

“There is neither an El Nino sequence nor any Pacific Decadal Oscillation that replicates the recent past; yet these are critical modes of variability that affect Pacific rim countries and beyond . . . the starting climate state in several of the models may depart significantly from the real climate owing to model errors” and “regional climate change is impossible to deal with properly unless the models are initialised”.

GCMs “assume linearity” which “works for global forced variations, but it cannot work for many aspects of climate, especially those related to the water cycle . . . the science is not done because we do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate”.

Strange that. I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that the science was supposed to be settled.

One wonders whether anyone has told CSIRO that their much-vaunted regional climate models are worthless predictive tools. Perhaps someone will ask the CSIRO to refund the swingeing amounts state governments and others have paid for useless regional “climate forecasts”?

Trenberth’s statements are a direct admission of the validity of similar criticisms that have been made of GCMs and the IPCC by climate rationalists for many years.

Of course, his tail-covering assertion that the IPCC doesn’t make climate predictions or forecasts anyway has to be taken with a grain of salt. In a paper being presented at the 27th International Symposium on Forecasting in New York this week, Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green audit the relevant chapter in the IPCC’s latest report. They find that “in apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides ‘projections’ and not ‘forecasts’, the word ‘forecast’ and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and ‘predict’ and its derivatives occur 90 times” in the chapter.

Strange that the public has this misimpression that the IPCC predicts future climate, isn’t it?

Having analysed the IPCC’s approach in detail, Armstrong and Kesten conclude that “because the forecasting processes . . . overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific”.

Like Trenberth’s advice, this also may well be news to some people.

In a third devastating blow to the credibility of climate forecasting, a lead author of the IPCC Working Group 1 science report, Jim Renwick, recently admitted “climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well”.

Renwick was responding to an audit showing the climate forecasts issued by New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmosphere were accurate only 48 per cent of the time.

In other words, one can do just as well by tossing a coin.

These various criticisms of climate modelling can be summed up in the following statement – there is no predictive value in the current generation of computer GCMs and therefore the alarmist IPCC statements about human-caused global warming are unjustified. Yet Australia has an Opposition and a Government that profess to set their climate policies on the basis of IPCC advice. Both also seem determined to impose an inefficient, ineffective and costly carbon trading or taxation system on the economy, for the aspirational absurdity of “stopping climate change”.

Perhaps someone should tell Prime Minister John Howard that dangerous global warming has been called off.

Professor Bob Carter is a James Cook University geologist who studies ancient environments and climate. His website is at: http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm

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First published in The Courier Mail. Republished with permission.

“Ravaged by the harshest water restrictions in Australia, Goulburn, NSW, residents spent last night preparing for floods and possible evacuations.

“A huge downpour soaked the region yesterday, with Canberra receiving 44mm of rain.

“That has brought the total rainfall for the month to 83mm, but well above the June average of 38mm.

“At Goulburn, which has been struggling under Stage5 water restrictions, the Sooley Dam overflowed and the larger Pejar Dam rose to 21pc of capacity for the first time since 2002.

“But elation quickly turned to apprehension as emergency services went on a door-knock mission late last night to warn residents of a possible evacuation.

“Local farmer David Decorte … said, “We’ve gone from one extreme to another.”

Read the complete Farm Online article here: http://www.farmonline.com.au/news_daily.asp?ag_id=43403

And what else would you expect in Australia – a land of drought and flooding rains?

In 1998 Timothy Patterson from the Department of Earth Sciences at Carlton University, Canada, was funded to determine if there were regular cycles in West Coast fish productivity. The government was looking to establish appropriate fishing quotas including for species of anchovies, herring known to have “wide swings” in populations abundance.

Patterson writes in an article for the Financial Post entitled ‘Read the Sunspots’:

“In one season there would be abundant stock and broad harvesting would be acceptable; the very next year the fisheries would collapse. No one really knew why or how to predict the future health of this crucially important resource.”

He goes on to explain how in a search for a predictor of climate over thousands of years as a predictor of fish abundance his research team began collect and analyze core samples from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords.

The subtitle of the article is “solar output drives climate change – and we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling.”

I really like the opening paragraph:

“Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that “the science is settled.” At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.”

And midway through the piece there is a list of the two dozen or so article in the series on the ‘Deniers’ : The National Post’s series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science.

Read more here: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/comment/story.html?id=597d0677-2a05-47b4-b34f-b84068db11f4&p=4