Climate & Climate Change

There has been some interesting discussion on policy solutions for ‘climate change’ at the thread following Part 2 of this series.

David Tribe mades the comment:

Focusing on policy realism is what is needed. We’ve heard too much about model uncertainties and physics.

Ian Castles responded with a suggestion from Indur Goklany’s submission to House of Lords Economic Committee Inquiry:

“Over the next few decades the focus of climate policy should be to

(a) broadly advance sustainable development, particularly in developing countries since that would generally enhance their adaptive capacity to cope with the many urgent problems they currently face, including many that are climate sensitive;

(b) specifically reduce vulnerabilities to climate-sensitive problems that are urgent today and might be exacerbated by future climate change; and

(c) implement ‘no-regret’ emissions reduction measures; while

(d) concurrently striving to expand the universe of no-regret options through research and development to increase the variety and cost-effectiveness of available mitigation options”.

Ian then made comment that:

In the light of this and other submissions, the House of Lords Economic Committee unanimously concluded that ‘The important issue is to wean the international negotiators away from excessive reliance on the ‘targets and penalties’ approach embodied in Kyoto.

Hence there should be urgent progress towards thinking about wholly different, and more promising, approaches based on a careful analysis of the incentives that countries have to agree to any measures adopted’ (Report, para. 184).

The objections to Kyoto go deep. To quote a few from Aynsley Kellow’s paper for ASSA:

a) the Protocol ‘lacks adequate enforcement mechanisms;

b)it allows paper reductions in emissions to be offset against future real increases;

c)and it is overly sanguine about the ability to create the institutions (especially measurement and verification measures) which will permit the establishment of effective emissions trading regimes.’

… A major element in the Castles and Henderson critique of the IPCC approach is precisely that the Panel is excessively confident of its ability to make long-term projections of emissions, i.e., of socio-economic conditions and technological possibilities. The concluding statements you [Ender] quote from the Econbrowser blog summarise precisely why basing policies on very long-term projections of emissions is wrong-headed.

But the emissions scenarios do need to be constrained by what is logically possible, and they do need to be based on sound concepts. For example, it would be a nonsense (a) to assume that average incomes per head in Africa will increase 15-fold by the middle of the century (as the IPCC scenarios with both the highest and lowest emissions profiles do); (b) to base projections of emissions of GHGs on this assumption; but then (c) conclude that climate change will lead to large increases in the numbers at risk of hunger on the continent. Yet this is what is done in the most widely-cited impact study using the IPCC scenarios.

In his submission to the Lords Committee, Julian Morris of the University of Buckingham made the point that, if Bangladesh and the United States prove to have similar levels of output per head by the end of the century, as the IPCC high emissions scenarios assume, this outcome could only have come about because either (a) Bangladesh has found a highly cost-effective way of coping with the adverse effects of climate change or (b) it would not have suffered these effects. He concludes that ‘Either way there appears to be a contradiction between the economic scenarios that underpin the IPCC’s climate forecasts and the scary stories that the IPCC tells on the back of these forecasts.’

This blog post follows on from my comments last night under the title Which Climate Change Consensus?, click here. The following information was sent to me by Ian Castles, Visiting Fellow, Asia Pacific School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University.

“One of the most serious problems that has dogged the climate debate at the science-policy interface and confused the public and political discussion of future climate, since greenhouse warming became an issue in the 1980s, has been the issue of terminology. The unfortunate reality is that, whenever scientists, who speak in the language of the IPCC, and policy people, who speak in the language of the FCCC, refer to climate change, they are usually talking about different things. I firmly believe that a great deal of the public and political confusion about climate change in the world today is the direct result of each community having attached its own interpretation and connotations to statements about climate change made by the other.”

… said Dr. John Zillman in a speech titled Our Changing Climate given on World Meteorological Day in 2003. Dr. Zillman headed the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for 25 years, was President of the World Meteorological Organization from 1995 to 2003, and is President of the Australian Academy of the Technological Sciences and Engineering.

In the 2003 speech, Zillman continued,

“In the IPCC community climate change means change on all timescales, irrespective of the cause, and it thus includes both natural variability and any change that may result from human interference with the working of the climate system. Regrettably, in my view, those who negotiated the FCCC chose to define climate change as only that part that is due to human activity.

Thus, when an IPCC scientist says there is unambiguous evidence of climate change, the Convention people (and, of course, the media) hear, and usually promulgate, an unambiguous conclusion that humans have changed the climate.”

In his contribution to a policy paper published by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) in February 2005 titled Uncertainty and Climate Change: The Challenge for Policy, Dr. Zillman said that,

“We do not yet understand the natural variability of climate well enough to predict the natural component of change”

and that,

“We do not yet have a sufficient basis for knowing how greenhouse gas emissions will change in the future to enable us to estimate the greenhouse component of the change.”

In February 2004 the leading peer-reviewed journal Ecological Modelling published Climate change: detection and attribution of trends from long-term geologic data (Vol. 171, No. 4: pgs 433-50) by Dr. Craig Loehle of the US National Council for Air and Stream Improvement (NCASI), who has over 100 published papers in applied mathematics and ecology on topics that include statistical models, optimization, simulation, artificial intelligence, fractals, and wavelets.

The abstract of this paper reads as follows:

Two questions about climate change remain open: detection and attribution. Detection of change for a complex phenomenon like climate is far from simple, because of the necessary averaging and correcting of the various data sources. Given that change over some period is detected, how do we attribute that change to natural versus anthropogenic causes? Historical data may provide key insights in these critical areas. If historical climate data exhibit regularities such as cycles, then these cycles may be considered to be the “normal” behavior of the system, in which case deviations from the “normal” pattern would be evidence for anthropogenic effects on climate. This study uses this approach to examine the global warming question. Two 3000-year temperature series with minimal dating error were analyzed. A total of seven time-series models were fit to the two temperature series and to an average of the two series. None of these models used 20th Century data. In all cases, a good to excellent fit was obtained. Of the seven models, six show a warming trend over the 20th Century similar in timing and magnitude to the Northern Hemisphere instrumental series. One of the models passes right through the 20th Century data. These results suggest that 20th Century warming trends are plausibly a continuation of past climate patterns. Results are not precise enough to solve the attribution problem by partitioning warming into natural versus human-induced components. However, anywhere from a major portion to all of the warming of the 20th Century could plausibly result from natural causes according to these results. Six of the models project a cooling trend (in the absence of other forcings) over the next 200 years of 0.2-1.4 degrees C.

With the above information from Ian Castles was a note recommending that Phil Done and others spend less time studying the realclimate website and more time reading some peer-reviewed literature instead.

Ian suggested readers of this blog could start with the John Zillman paper for ASSA, and also the contributions of economist Warwick McKibbin and political scientist Aynsley Kellow which are published in the same Policy Paper. It is available on the ASSA website at http://www.assa.edu.au/publications/op.asp .

Ian suggests we then move on to the paper by Roger Pielke Jr. which can be found at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-479-2004.10.pdf .

Dear Jennifer,

I have just posted updated temperature anomaly maps for 2005 from CRU (Jones) and satellite data from UAH (Christy) and both disagree with the Australian Bureau of Meterology (BOM) in that they indicate 1998 was warmer than 2005 for Australia, click here and also here.

Best wishes,

Warwick Hughes

……..

Thanks Warwick.

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I have previously posted on the BOM claim 2005 was hottest, click here.

I have not yet ‘digested’ Warwick’s findings. Have the CRU and UAH adjusted for the ‘heat island effect’ and should they?

I find ‘global warming’ a fascinating subject, terribly complex but so interesting and so potentially important. It is the big issue of our day and more than any other issue it has the potential to impact on how we live.

By “how we live” I don’t mean that there are necessarily going to be more hurricanes or droughts, though there may, or that planet earth will become too hot for habitation, though James Lovelock suggests this will be the case. What I do mean is that it is going to impact on energy policy and this will impact on our quality of life.

The obvious solution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the cause of ‘global warming’, is the phasing out of fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil. There are already alternatives, hybrid cars and nuclear power stations. But how much are we prepared to pay for our electricity and our cars? Some argue governments should force us to pay more, or take away our cars and coal fired power stations altogether.

If we banned cars and coal fired power stations right across the globe, we would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and stop ‘global warming’ – in so much as global warming is defined as an increase in temperature as a result of an increase in greenhouse gases from anthropogenic (human) sources. As scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany recently explained, methane emissions from plants are natural and could thus not contribute to ‘global warming’.

This approach is consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (IPCC)(UNFCCC) which defines ‘climate change’ as that which is attributable directly or indirectly to human activity, click here.

So, ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have been defined exclusively in terms of human impact.

I am a biologist with a double major in entomology and botany. I also dabbled in some evolutionary biology particularly as a post graduate. It is generally accepted that evolution has been driven by natural selection and that this has occurred against a backdrop of continual climate change.

But, as a biologist, how do I reconcile the idea that there has been natural climate change with the IPCC UNFCCC definition of climate change?*

I used to laugh at the notion that a group of scientists could come together under something called the IPCC UNFCCC and redefine climate change. Make it such a political phenomenon with man at the centre of it all!

I am not a climate scientist, but I reckon the official definition of ‘climate change’ used by a consensus of climate scientists is baloney.

It does mean that people like Ian Lowe, an emeritus professor at several universities and President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, can write a book pondering that “it is now indisputable that the global climate is changing”.

Natural climate change is not something I have ever much heard disputed. But with the new definition of ‘climate change’ well, it is very unclear how much last year’s temperature rise was due to greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels versus natural processes.

Some biologists, and many geologists, tend to focus on natural processes and may, as a consequence appear to trivialize the relatively recent human influence on climate from carbon emissions. Perhaps as a consequence some of us are labeled climate skeptics. It doesn’t mean we are wrong or that we don’t care, as John Quiggin suggested at his blog this morning. It might just mean we see things differently.

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Post script

Just yesterday I received an email with information about a new book titled, Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming consisting of ten essays on global warming by Sallie L. Baliunas, Robert C. Balling Jr., Randall S. Cerveny, John Christy, Robert E. Davis, Oliver W.
Frauenfeld, Ross McKitrick, Patrick J. Michaels, Eric S. Posmentier and Willie Soon.

And a note from David Douglass Professor of Physics, University of Rochester, commenting: “The beauty of science is that truth is determined by observation and not by consensus. The seemly endless press releases, commentary and resolutions claiming a consensus for the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis is scientifically meaningless. The consensus claims, however, must be answered.”

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UPDATE: 9am, 25th January 2006

* The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports to the UNFCCC.

A week or so ago I explained how researchers had discovered that plants are a source of methane: that a new study led by Frank Keppler of the Max Planck Institute in Germany calculates that all the world’s living vegetation (forests included) emit between 62 and 236 million tonnes of methane per year. This is apparently equivalent to between 10 and 30 per cent of annual global methane emissions.

Now the same researchers are claiming that their findings have been misinterpreted:

The most frequent misinterpretation we find in the media is that emissions of methane from plants are responsible for global warming. As those emissions from plants are a natural source, they have existed long before man’s influence started to impact upon the composition of the atmosphere. It is the anthropogenic emissions which are responsible for the well-documented increasing atmospheric concentrations of methane since pre-industrial times. Emissions from plants thus contribute to the natural greenhouse effect and not to the recent temperature increase known as ‘global warming’. Even if land use practices have altered plant methane emissions, which we did not demonstrate, this would also count as an anthropogenic source, and the plants themselves cannot be deemed responsible.

I guess this approach is consistent with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which defines ‘climate change’ as that which is attributable directly or indirectly to human activity, click here.

So according to Keppler et al. plants are not responsible for what they emit. I guess this means that they are not responsible either for sequesting carbon dioxide. However, we do count carbon sequestration (post 1990) in national greenhouse inventories, so shouldn’t we also count methane emitted from the same plants in the inventory?

Interestingly, in the Nature paper, Keppler et al. state:

In pre-industrial times, that is, without anthropogenic emissions, the relative contribution of methane to the atmosphere by direct plant emissions may have been even larger than today. This could have far reaching implications for the interpretation of atmospheric methane levels and climate signals in the past.

I was really impressed by this picture when I first saw it. It is from the NASA website and shows the extent of warming in the Arctic relative to the rest of the globe.

An American newspaper included comment that:

A University of Alabama scientist says global warming is not nearly as global as some people think. …Temperatures in 2005 followed a general pattern seen since 1978, with the most significant warming seen in the northernmost third of the planet. Large regions of slightly warmer than normal temperatures covered much of the globe.
The Arctic atmosphere, however, has warmed more than seven times faster than that over the southern two-thirds of the globe.

And there was comment at Tim Blair’s popular blog along the lines:

The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is distributed pretty evenly around the globe and not concentrated in the Arctic, so it doesn’t look like we can blame greenhouse gases for the overwhelming bulk of the Northern Hemisphere warming over the past 27 years

Vincent Gray has written that:

The models predict increased warming, equally, at both the North and South Poles. The measurements show that the two poles are completely different. The North Pole is warming the South Pole is cooling.

The models predict much greater warming than is observed, and the only way they can get out of it is to assume a large cooling influence of clouds and aerosols, Since these are concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, there should be greater net warming in the South than in the North. The observations show the opposite.

But, according to Cecilia Bitz writing for Real Climate the models can, and do, account for lots of warming at the Arctic and not much at the Antarctic:

Manabe and Stouffer (1980) first popularized the phrase “polar amplification” to describe the amplified rate of surface warming at the poles compared to the rest of the globe in their climate model’s response to increasing greenhouse gas levels.

Their early climate model had a simple ocean component that only represented the mixed layer of the water. Their model had roughly symmetric poleward amplification in the two hemispheres, except over the Antarctic continent, where they argued the ice is too thick and cold to melt back.

…Observed polar climate change from the instrumental record is not symmetric. Except along the Antarctic Peninsula , most evidence of significant warming is from the Arctic. In addition, total sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean has had no significant trend since satellites began taking data in 1979 (Cavalieri et al 2003). Newer climate models generally also have very modest or no polar amplification over the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in hindcasts of the last century. The presence of a deep and circulating ocean component is key because ocean heat uptake increases most in the Southern Ocean as the climate warms (see Gregory 2000). The asymmetry at the poles does not however result from a difference in feedback strength associated with the ice or atmosphere. In fact, when these same climate models are run to equilibrium (in the same way that Manabe and Stouffer ran their model so that ocean heat uptake is not a factor) the hemispheres have nearly equal polar amplification.

David Jones at the Australian Bureau of Meterology explains:

The failure of the Antarctic to warm is pretty well understood. It is linked to the marked strengthening which has occurred in the southern annular mode. The “southern annular mode” is a fancy name for the strength of the Antarctic low pressure trough and westerly winds (the roaring forties, furious fifties, screaming sixties).

… Over the last 30 years we have seen a very marked intensification of the trough – most of this happened in a short period of time from around 1970 to 1990. This is believed to be due to the loss of ozone in the polar stratosphere which caused a very strong cooling of the stratosphere and upper troposphere over the Antarctic. This cooling lead to a strong increase in the temperature gradient between the equator and poles, which through the dynamics must strengthen the westerly winds (this is summarised in a fairly basic dynamical equation called the “thermal wind” relationship).

The strengthened westerlies has a number of effects. These include enhanced warming on the northern side of the trough (the trough typically being near 65S). This explains the spectacular warming over the Antarctic Peninsula (which is occurring much faster than one might expect from the simple greenhouse effect). On the southern side, the reverse happens; i.e. cooling.

For the last 20 years of so, this cooling has been sufficient to offset the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is a great example of the thermodynamics (temperature changes) and dynamics (winds etc) operating in different directions. Another effect of the stronger westerlies is that the increase the equatorwards drift of sea ice (through a process called Ekman drift) which probably explains why sea ice in the southern hemisphere appears to have retreated extensively from around 1900 to 1970 and stabilised and infact expanded subsequently.

There is a real cautionary tale here about non-linearities in climate change.

There is, in my view, also a real cautionary tale in the new paper by Keppler et al. in science journal Nature as summarized in the Editorial:

The unexpectedly high levels of the green-house gas methane over tropical forests, and the recent decline in the atmospheric growth rate of methane concentrations, cannot be readily explained with the accepted global methane budget. Now a genuinely surprising discovery provides a possible explanation for these phenomena, and may have implications for modelling past and future climates. It was thought that methane formed naturally only in anaerobic conditions, in marshes for instance. In fact living plants, as well as plant litter, emit methane to the atmosphere under oxic conditions. This additional source of methane could account for 10-30 percent of the annual methane source strength and has been overlooked in previous studies.

Vincent Gray has remarked with respect to this new finding that:

The answer to the fact that climate models cannot simulate actual global temperature change may be due to a fact I have been emphasizing for many years. The models all assume that greenhouse gases are “well-mixed”, however, they are not “well-mixed”, so that temperatures cannot be adequately calculated by using average greenhouse gas concentrations. You should use actual concentrations over the particular region.

… Of course, average methane concentrations in the atmosphere have apparently stabilised, so this present scare does not add any extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It does cast into serious doubt current models supposedly relating emissions of methane to atmospheric concentrations, though.

This discovery will certainly change attitudes to “climate change”, for it now appears that in order to reduce “global warming” you should not only cut carbon dioxide emissions, but you should also cut down forests, reduce agriculture, drain wetlands and cover the world with concrete.

Rather than “cover the world with concrete” as concrete is also a source of greenhouse gases, there is perhaps reason at this time in our history for both global warming skeptics and global warming believers to be a bit humble. There is so much we just don’t understand.

But someone, tell me how important is it really, as Vincent suggests, that we “use actual concentrations over the particular region”?