Climate & Climate Change

The biggest global warming conference since Kyoto, opened today in Montreal, Canada. The 10,000 experts from 180 nations are to spend the best part of the next 10 days deliberating about how best to “slow the alarming effects of greenhouses gases and global warming”.

I had a look at ‘global temperature’ some weeks ago in my post titled ‘Global Warming for Dummies’, click here. I concluded that globally, 2005 may indeed be the hottest year on record. But I didn’t scrutinize my data source – just accepted the NASA data and methodology.

Not everyone is convinced that it is getting hotter.

At this blog I encourage the contrarian position. To quote David Tribe, “It’s how we treat our contrarians that tells us whether we are living in a truely civil society, for the contrarians are very valuable to us, because they point to the places where ‘conventional wisdom’ may be getting it wrong.”

Global warming skeptic Warwick Hughes has had a good look at the data for Australian capital cities at the NASA site. In the following guest post from Warwick Hughes he disputes the main premise of a recent Bureau of Meterology (BoM) media release titled 2005:Australia’s warmest year on record?.

Warwick writes:

The BoM conclusion is based on their specially adjusted data, they choose a start date 1950 which is a cooler part of the record and they ignore all late 19 Century data which in many stations was as warm as recent decades. Furthermore, it seems premature to make claims about 2005 before the year has ended.

A more realistic view of the relative warmth of 2005 placed in century scale perspective is given by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Surface Temperature Analysis, Station Data, available at,
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/.

GISS is run by Dr James Hansen, who I think it is fair to say, has been a ‘global warming proponent’ since at least 1988. GISS data is built from the USA NOAA group’s global GHCN dataset. Looking at records from the “homogeneity adjusted” data choice of GISS for all the Australian capital cities shows that nowhere can the BoM wish come true.

GISS would have adjusted these urban warming affected city stations taking account of surrounding more rural data. I do not agree with everything GISS does and I comment below where I think fit. However NASA/GISS has vastly more experience than the BoM at evaluating temperature trends from the 19C because their dataset is global and Dr Hansen and his team have published a series of papers on global trends over many years.

Let us look at some Australian examples, city by city, using the NASA/GISS dataset, starting with Perth, view image
(30 kbs).

There is no possibility in Perth that 2005 will be Australia’s warmest year on record. I have people from the WA wheat belt telling me of the worst frost damage to water pipes this year that they have seen for decades.

Adelaide has known many warmer years than 2005. Likewise, if the East Sale record was slid up to compare exactly with Melbourne then it is crystal clear that the BoM will need a very hot couple of months for their proposal to come to pass in south eastern Australia,view image (30 kbs).

It is obvious that 1999, 2000 and 2001 were warmer than 2005 in Hobart so the BoM has no case yet around Hobart that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record, view image(30kbs). Interesting that Maatsuyker Island Lighthouse is showing much less warming than Hobart airport so the adjusted GISS data for Hobart airport may still carry urban warming, further weakening any BoM case.

The best guide for Sydney and Newcastle is to see where 2005 at Williamtown relates to the Newcastle century long data, which is from Nobbies Signal Station, view image (30kbs). From this graph it is obvious that there is no possibility in Sydney and Newcastle that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record. It is equally obvious that the Sydney Airport data, affected as it is by a strong ‘urban heat island’ (UHI) effect, is artificially warming at a rate much faster than Williamtown despite any GISS adjustment.*

Moving north to Brisbane and it is obvious in this region that if the Eagle farm data was ‘merged’ with the old Brisbane Regional Office trend then there is no chance that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record, view image (30kbs).

At this point we have to ask ourselves, “Where in Australia is this unprecedented warming the BoM talking about?”

Checking the circa 125 years of data from Darwin it is obvious that 2005 is a warm year but it was topped by 1998, might equal 1988 and will be topped easily by 1973, view image (30kbs). It is also obvious that if the airport data are merged with the earlier Post Office data then several years 1906 and earlier would have been warmer than 2005. Hence in this area the BoM claim that 2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record, is not borne out by the data. The GISS team do provide on their web page a full Darwin record splicing the post office and airport but in my opinion it is not one of their better efforts and I prefer my own splice. If anyone prefers the GISS Darwin from 1882 then it makes no difference to the above yearly comparisons.

Moving now to Central Australia for our last graphic, that of the circa 125 year long Alice Springs temperature record. In this case, GISS do not provide a circa 125 year long record in their “homogeneity adjusted” data, but if readers make a graph for Alice Springs from the GISS Dataset listed in their “pull down menu” as “after combining sources at same location”, then you will see a graphic very similar to mine below showing that almost a dozen years have been warmer than 2005, view image (30kbs).

So it seems doubtful that Alice Springs data will provide confirmation for the BoM that “2005 has been Australia’s warmest year on record” but the data at years end will tell.

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* Sydney airport is used by the Jones et. al. team at the University of Norwich, to compile the ‘global warming’ trends we all know so well. For my ’20th Anniversary Review’ of the unsound Jones et al 1986 methodologies, see
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cru86/ .

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Warwick Hughes temperature outlook critiques for 2005 are at,
http://www.warwickhughes.com/cool/cool14.htm. Temperature Outlook critiques pre 2005 are at, http://www.warwickhughes.com/climate/cool8.htm.

Three fascinating papers were published in Science (Vol 310, 25th November 2005) last week on climate change and the relationship between carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide levels and temperature over the last 650,000 years.

They report on new findings from the European Project for Ice Coring in the Antartica.

A graph in the ‘perspectives section’ by Brook (pg 1286) summarizes the findings,
view image (70 kbs).

The data tells me that:

1. The greenhouse gases are at higher levels now than they have been over the last 650,000 years.

2. Carbon dioxide levels correlated with temperature and have peak during previous interglacial warm periods just below 300ppm, view image (120 kbs).

3. In the past, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have tended to follow, rather than preceded, rises in temperature.

4. We are currently in an interglacial warm period and these periods tend to be followed by very cold periods.

I find the graphs fascinating.

While atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have clearly fluctuated with temperature in the past, they have tended to lag behind temperature. This doesn’t accord with the current perception – what is understood to be the current consensus which is that carbon dioxide drives temperature?

I find the prospect of another ice age really scary. The graphs suggest to me that one is imminent – like in the next few hundred or thousand years? However, greenhouses gases have never been so high.

It is perhaps interesting to ponder …. If we were able to influence climate in a predictable way, and if we could delay indefinitely the onset of the next ice age, should we?

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Many, many thanks to the reader of this blog who sent me copies of the papers. There has been some discussion of the papers at the Real Climate blog, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=221&lp_lang_view=en .

If there was ever a good reason to be skeptical, it is surely when catholic bishops and government scientists start preaching from the same poster!

Following is the announcement from the catholic climate change conference:

Catholic leaders warn of ‘environmental refugees’ scenario

A statement issued yesterday following the weekend’s national climate change conference, calls for ecological conversion, warning that global warming could create a new wave of dispossessed people.

The warning followed a Position Paper launched by the Catholic Bishops Committee for Justice Development Ecology and Peace, which urged all Australians to cooperate in open dialogue and face the radical changes required to tackle global climate change.

Catholic Earthcare Australia was set up in 2003 by the Australian Bishops’ Conference and is chaired by Bishop Christopher Toohey.

In the keynote address before more than 300 delegates, Bishop Toohey said that human induced accelerated climate change “raises serious moral and spiritual questions, not just for Catholics but for all Australian citizens and leaders, and calls for change in our way of life.

“Scientific research has concluded that humans have caused rapid global climate change by contributing to ever higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, 80 per cent of which comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

“This build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is gradually increasing world temperatures that will lead to higher sea levels as icepacks and glaciers melt. We are also seeing the occurrence of more violent weather events, widespread droughts in some areas and lower food production in others,” Bishop Toohey said.

“If we act now the changes can be slowed and harm can still be minimised.”

Conference organizer and Executive Officer of CEA, Colin Brown, drew attention to United Nations figures released during the conference that revealed a blowout in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“These alarming figures, released ahead of the international climate change conference in Montreal later this month showed that Australia’s emissions have increased by a massive 23 per cent in the past 13 years,” he said. “They expose a decade of lost opportunity in Australia in which things are getting worse, not better.”

All speakers in a packed two-day program that combined theologians of many faiths with scientists warned of the need for urgent and immediate action. (end of quote)

The guys at Real Climate have posted a piece outlining their frustration with the media giving ‘global warming skeptics’ a hearing:

We here at RC continue to be disappointed with the tendency for some journalistic outlets to favor so-called “balance” over accuracy in their treatment of politically-controversial scientific issues such as global climate change. While giving equal coverage to two opposing sides may seem appropriate in political discourse, it is manifestly inappropriate in discussions of science, where objective truths exist. In the case of climate change, a clear consensus exists among mainstream researchers that human influences on climate are already detectable, and that potentially far more substantial changes are likely to take place in the future if we continue to burn fossil fuels at current rates. There are only a handful of “contrarian” climate scientists who continue to dispute that consensus. (end of quote)

I am continually amazed when so called scientists (i.e. the guys who run RC) slip from appealing to an ‘objective truth’ to claiming ‘objective truth’ on the basis of ‘a clear consensus.’

To quote the wonderful maverick contrarian Prof Bob Carter:

To the extent that it is possible for any human endeavour to be so, science is value-free. Science is a way of attempting to understand the world in which we live from a rational point of view, based on observation, experiment and tested theory. Irritatingly, especially for governments, science does not operate by consensus and it is often best progressed by mavericks. (end of quote)

I think history is on Bob’s side – that is historically the best science has been done by mavericks who are often contrarians?

I will provide a recent example from Crikey published on 5 October 2005 and titled ‘How the medical establishment snubbed Australia’s Nobel Prize winners’:

A medical industry insider writes:

As the media, politicians and the Australian medical research sector rush to congratulate our newest Nobel laureates – and to bask in their reflected glory – it is worth reflecting on the truth of the long and, at times, lonely journey Barry Marshall and Robin Warren have taken to reach this point.

Rather than welcoming and supporting the work of “local heroes,” many Australian gastroenterologists were highly critical and disbelieving of Marshall and Warren’s (ultimately) Nobel Prize-winning work, and continued for many years to stubbornly deny that Helicobacter pylori had much, or indeed any, role in the pathogenesis of ulcer disease.

Barry Marshall was made to feel quite uncomfortable when he attended specialist conferences – he was regarded by many as a maverick and even a loony, especially when the story of his drinking “swampwater” in order to infect himself got around. Worse still, this lack of acceptance was often blamed on Marshall’s personality (he has been described as “brash”) or justified as a response to him apparently seeking publicity and glory. It certainly didn’t help that he was not a gastroenterologist by training.

Given Marshall and Warren’s pioneering work, Australia should have been the first place in the western world to accept the full H. pylori story. But, shamefully, it was not. Although a Working Party reported to the 1990 World Congress of Gastroenterology (which incidentally was held in Sydney) that H. pylori was definitely an important cause of ulcer disease, many prominent leaders of the gastroenterology specialty in Australia continued to deny its importance, or to claim that it was a cause of only a small minority of cases of ulcer disease, well into the mid-1990s. As examples:
* In 1991, Parke Davis got scant support from local “opinion leaders” when it brought an international speaker (and member of the Working Party) to Australia to discuss H. pylori eradication as an approach to treating ulcer disease.
*In a drug company-sponsored 4-page educational publication for GPs published in Australia in 1992, only the last two paragraphs mention H. pylori, and only in the context of how this company’s anti-acid drug might one day have a role – in combination with antibiotics – in eradicating the bacterium. It was only 4-5 years later, when such combinations were shown to be effective in eradication, that education and promotion to GPs about the role of H. pylori in ulcer disease really started to pick up momentum.

Marshall’s work was much more readily accepted internationally than locally, and so he spent what may perhaps have been his most productive years as a researcher overseas. Medical journalist Melissa Sweet gave some of the back-story in this article in the SMH in 1997.

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And there is ‘food for thought’ in this comment posted by ‘detribe’ on 23rd September at my piece titled Now Scientific Basis for Climate Change:

Phil,

I like your response a few posts back to my remarks. It’s how we treat our contrarians that tells us whether we are living in a truely civil society, for the contrarians (Michael is one) are very valuable to us, because they point to the places where ‘conventional wisdom’ may be getting it wrong.

My favorite book at the moment is Christopher Hitchens’ letters to a young contrarian, which I have on my desk as I type this. Whatever you think about Hitchens’ opinions, his English style is great, and youve gotta admire someone who is willing to call Mother Theresa a fraud in print.

And as you know, AGW is the Green version of Mother Theresa.

The Courier Mail published a piece by Prof Bob Carter earlier in the week titled Keep a Weather Eye Open in which Bob has a bit of fun at the expense of ‘global warming believers’. Bob writes:

The subject of the report [by the Queensland Government], released last week, was climate change and, given its contents, it carried the unlikely moniker, “Climate Smart”.

In the second paragraph of the ministers’ introductory message we learn that “our climate . . . is changing”. This underwhelming message – for climate has always changed and always will – scarcely seems to justify the expense of distributing such a glossy booklet.

Go on, have a chuckle! I did.

Bob is skeptical about our ability to predict future climate.

I find it fascinating that we seem unable to accurately acknowledge current climate.

Following a documentary on ABC TV last week about the recent drought at Condobolin in central western New South Wales, Perth-based climate skeptic Warwick Hughes had a look at the long term climate record for that region.

While the documentary suggested Condobolin has just experienced the worst drought on record, Warwick shows that there is nothing particularly unique about recent years in terms of rainfall, click here.

Warwick also comments:

The high rainfall years post the 1940’s correspond with a period of cloud seeding experiments in NSW from post WWII to 1974. With cloud seeding “on the nose” due to Green opposition it is thus possible that high rainfall yearsover 650 mm may be rare in the future.

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For more climate related pieces by Warwick, click here.

Full Text from the Courier Mail follows. I have copied it here as the Courier tends not to keep the same URL for it’s opinion pieces.

Keep a weather eye open
Bob Carter
16nov05
Bob Carter can’t find any conviction in the latest climate talk.

If, could, may, might, probably, perhaps, likely, expected, projected . . . wonderful words.

So wonderful, in fact, that Queensland ministers Henry Palaszczuk (Resources) and Desley Boyle (Environment) are unable to resist using them more than 50 times in a 32-page report.

That’s a rate of almost twice a page.

The subject of the report, released last week, was climate change and, given its contents, it carried the unlikely moniker, “Climate Smart”.

In the second paragraph of the ministers’ introductory message we learn that “our climate . . . is changing”. This underwhelming message – for climate has always changed and always will – scarcely seems to justify the expense of distributing such a glossy booklet.

Read on. The next sentence informs us: “The changes observed over the last century cannot be explained by natural influences alone. Human activities are helping to change our climate.”

And then off the ministers go on one of their “could probably” runs, asserting that Queensland’s climate could be more variable and extreme in the future “with more droughts, heatwaves and heavy rainfall” and probably with “maximum temperatures and heavy downpours . . . beyond our current experiences”.

Really? How do the ministers know all this?

Well, read on some more, and on page seven you will be rewarded with the knowledge that “climate change projections are developed from a range of computer-based models of global climate, and scenarios of future global greenhouse gas emissions”. Ahaaah! So we are talking about computer predictions here. No wonder the ministers are in “could probably” mode.

For, as French military expert Pierre Gallois has pointed out: “If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticise it.”

But actually we are not talking about computer predictions at all, but, as the ministers rightly say, with computer scenarios. What a difference that word makes.

The dynamics of climate and its changes are incredibly complex and include abundant non-linear relationships between different factors, such as increasing carbon dioxide and temperature.

As Edward Lorenz, chaos theoretician and discoverer of the “butterfly effect”, knew only too well, tiny changes in marginal factors in such systems can dramatically change the outcome, since non-linear systems are inherently unpredictable.

No matter how clever our scientists or how big and fast we make our computers, it is unlikely that we will ever be able to predict climate accurately 50 years or more in advance. The scientists who produced the “predictions” of future Queensland climate for the ministers understand the non-linear nature of climate full well, which is precisely why they use the term “scenarios” to describe the imaginary futures painted by their advanced computer games.

Indeed, so keen are they to avoid being held legally accountable for their opinions that the CSIRO climate modelling team has inserted the following disclaimer in the report it prepared for the Queensland Government: “This report relates to climate change scenarios based on computer modelling. Models involve simplifications of the real processes that are not fully understood.

“Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted by CSIRO or the Queensland Government for the accuracy of forecasts or predictions inferred from this report or for any person’s interpretations, deductions, conclusions or actions in reliance on this report.”

You “could probably” say that the authors of the climate change scenarios being deployed by the Queensland Government on our behalf, though not for our benefit, seem a teensy-weensy bit lacking in confidence in their projections.

Swedish oceanographer Professor Gosta Wallin got it right when he said: “The Global Climate Models are nothing more than interesting toys to play with. In no other ‘science’ would it be possible to use predictions (from GCMs) with no prediction value – call them scenarios – which is only guess work, and be serious about it.”

But let us leave the last word with one of Australia’s most distinguished climate scientists, a founder member and long-time supporter of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a former chief of the Bureau of Meteorology.

John Zillman said (and he is right) that “the most important question – should global warming proceed as the IPCC reports suggest – is how will warming be manifest at the national, regional and local level, and what would that mean for each of us?” Zillman answered his important question by saying: “I believe this question is, at present, completely unanswerable.”

He is right again, for all competent experts in computer modelling agree with his assessment that regional climate prediction is impossible. How can it be that ministers Palaszczuk and Boyle, and the Queensland Government, know better?

If, could, may, might, probably, perhaps, likely, expected, projected …

Words of conviction? I don’t think so. Words of weaseldom? Let the reader judge.

* Professor Bob Carter carries out research at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University. He studies ancient climate records from deep sea core materials

Other newspaper articles by Bob can be found here: http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm .