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CCNet 07/01/13
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Met Office Forecasts No
Global Temperature Rise
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Global
Warming Standstill May Last For 20
Years
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The UK Met Office
has revised its global temperature predictions as a result of a new version of
its climate model and climate simulations using it. It now believes that global
temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43 deg C above the 1971 -2000
average, with an error of +/- 0.15 deg C. In reality this is a forecast of no
increase in global temperatures above current levels. If the latest Met Office
prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data
than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility. It
will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice
to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong,
and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were
actually on the right track. --David Whitehouse, The
Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013
I argue
that the greenhouse effect does not seem to be as significant as suggested. I
personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming
reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small. And I
certainly feel that there is time and need for research before making major
policy decisions. It seems to me that
if science doesn’t have integrity, it isn’t of much use to people. --Richard Lindzen, MIT
Talk, 27 September 1989
The stupidest
international agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on
New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely
to mourn. In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto
strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s
provisions. British policy, enshrined in the current Energy Bill, is being
driven not by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be
accused of endangering the planet. In reality, a disaster of a different kind
looms: years of chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world
CO2 emissions rise unchecked. Welcome to the British industrial
counter-revolution. --David Rose, Mail
on Sunday, 6 January 2013
Not that anyone has noticed,
but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with carbon emissions up by 58%
over 1990 levels – instead the 5% cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss
for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of
climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the
hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for
change that’s not going to happen. --Fraser Nelson, The
Spectator, 6 January 2013
Did you know that the Earth
is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the
amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades.
This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation,
overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction. --Matt Ridley, The
Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013
1) David
Whitehouse: Met Office Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise - The
Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013
2) Richard
Lindzen’s 23-Year Old Forecast - Fabius
Maximus, 7 January 2013
3) David Rose: Welcome To The
British Industrial Counter-Revolution - Mail
on Sunday, 6 January 2013
4) How Oliver Letwin Lost His Kyoto
Bet With Nigel Lawson - The
Spectator, 6 January 2013
5) Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels
Have Greened The Planet - The
Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013
6) And Finally: The Handy
All Weather Is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192 - Bishop
Hill, 6 January 2013
1) David Whitehouse: Met Office
Forecasts No Global Temperature Rise
The
Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 January 2013
The UK Met
Office has revised its global
temperature predictions as a result of a new version of its
climate model and climate simulations using it. It now believes that global
temperatures up to 2017 will most likely be 0.43 deg C above the 1971 -2000
average, with an error of +/- 0.15 deg C. In reality this is a forecast of no
increase in global temperatures above current levels.
The new forecast produced
by the UK Met Office for the next five years is a considerable change from forecasts
given in the past few years. An excellent comparison between the new and
older forecasts can be found here.
It is worth comparing the
current forecast with that made just five years ago. In 2007
The Met Office Hadley Centre reported to the UK Government that it had
pioneered a new system to predict the climate a decade ahead. It said that the
system simulated both the human-driven climate change and the evolution of slow
natural variations already locked into the system. “We are now using the system
to predict changes out to 2014. By the end of this period, the global average
temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 °C compared to 2004, and
half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record
hot year, 1998.”
Given that we have data for three of the five years of
that period and all show no
departure from a constant temperature when analysed statistically, this is a
prediction that will probably be totally wrong. In any case it is completely at
odds with the new forecast. We were also told that the recent temperature
standstill was unimportant and that the underlying rate of global temperature
increase continued at a constant 0.2 deg C per decade. This, as we pointed out,
is only true if one considered decadal
averages. If one considers 5-year averages then one arrives at a very
different conclusion.
The new prediction challenges that assertion that
the underlying rate of change of global warming is unchanged. According to the
IPCC and the Met Office the unchanging 0.2 deg C underlying rate of global
warming should have resulted in a 0.4 deg C rise in global temperature between
1997 -2017. That this has not happened is because of a global cooling offset
that has precisely kept pace with the greenhouse gas forcing that wants to raise
the Earth’s temperature every year. We have pointed out that this equivalence of
the warming and cooling factors, and their associated feedbacks, is not just an
average but also a year on year balancing act. This behaviour is scientifically
suspicious.
That the global temperature standstill (observed from 1997 to
the present) could continue to at least 2017 would mean a 20-year period of no
statistically significant change in global temperatures. Such a period of no
increase coming at a time when greenhouse gas forcing is rising will pose
fundamental problems for climate models.
If the latest Met Office
prediction is correct, and it accords far more closely with the observed data
than previous predictions, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility. It
will show that the previous predictions that were given so confidently as advice
to the UK government and so unquestioningly accepted by the media, were wrong,
and that the so-called sceptics who were derided for questioning them were
actually on the right track.
Feedback: mailto:david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
2)
Richard Lindzen’s 23-Year Old Forecast
Fabius
Maximus, 7 January 2013
We’ve looked at plenty of false (or
at least temporarily not proven) forecasts by American experts about wars and
climate. The rule seems to be that political correctness is rewarded,
irrespective of accuracy. Today we look at a speech made 23 years ago by a MIT
professor. It looks good today, still accurate despite the advances in climate
science. Furthermore his forecast of no warming larger than natural variability
during the next century has proven accurate so far — after 23 years have
elapsed.
(1) Contempt for science
One
of the great oddities of the debate about climate science is the contempt for
scientists displayed by the lay cheerleaders on both sides. Scientists are
authorities, unless they disagree with the true dogma — then they’re fools and
charlatans. Previous posts looked at forecasts that have proved false, or not
correct so far.
Today we look at a speech made 23 years ago by a MIT
professor. It looks good today, still accurate despite the advances in climate
science. Furthermore his forecast of no warming larger than natural variability
during the next century has proven accurate so far — after 23 years have
elapsed.
Speech by Richard Lindzen
In M.I.T. Tech Talk of 27 September 1989 Eugene F. Mallove
describes a presentation by Richard Lindzen (Prof of the Department of Earth,
Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT) to an audience of 250 scientists at the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Colloquium.
(a) Key Points
“I argue
that the greenhouse effect does not seem to be as significant as
suggested.”
“I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century
of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability
seems small.”
“And I certainly feel that there is time and need for
research before making major policy decisions.”
The science of global
warming is “a region in which the uncertainty is vast.”
“The trouble with
many of these {temperature} records is that the corrections are of the order of
the effects, and most of us know that when we’re in that boat we need a long
series and great care to derive a meaningful signal.”
(b) About the
natural variability of climate
“Climate inherently has a natural
variability that is often attributed to possible variations in solar output,
volcanic dust, etc. The point we have to keep in mind is that without any of
this at all our climate would wander — at least within limits. The reason is
that we don’t have a closed system.
“Even if the Sun’s output were fixed,
even if the radiative input were absolutely constant, even if there were no
change in the absorbing gases, the ocean itself can take up and store heat and
release it. It has a stable layer that normally does not communicate with lower
levels, but every so often there is upwelling that suddenly presents the
atmosphere and the surface world with an erratic energy source.”
(c)
About Water
“Water is terrifically absorptive. We see the bumps [in the
absorption spectrum] from CO2 and ozone and methane only because they occur in a
window of the water vapor absorption spectrum. Water vapor is far and away the
most important greenhouse gas, except for one form which isn’t a greenhouse gas:
clouds. Clouds themselves as liquid water are as important to the infrared
budget as water vapor. Both swamp by orders of magnitude all the others. With
CO2 one is talking about three watts per square meter at most, compared to a
hundred or more watts per square meter for water.
“… Upper level humidity
— especially above 5 kilometers–is rather important and the models are lousy at
handling this. In the models, most warming comes from the increase in water that
accompanies the warming. Whether such an increase in water vapor above 5
kilometers actually accompanies warming is doubtful.
“We don’t know how
to calculate cloudiness. Some studies have found that the dominant radiative
effect of clouds is cooling. Only a few percent change in cloud cover will more
than swamp the estimated CO2 effect, he suggested. In the current models, for
reasons that puzzle almost everyone, the cloud feedbacks are positive rather
than negative. That is, they increase the temperature.
“There are other
tricky things that no one has explored. One example: the feedback through albedo
— the reflectivity of the Earth such as can be affected by snow cover. In the
models this feedback is positive, but it could as well be negative in certain
ranges of temperature. On the planet the most wonderful constituent is water
with its remarkable thermodynamic properties. It’s the obvious candidate for the
thermostat of our system, and yet in most of these models, all water-related
feedbacks are positive. I don’t think we would have existed if that were
true.”
(d) About political use of science
Comparing the
greenhouse warming debate to an earlier controversy, in his 1988 book Infinite
in All Directions Freeman Dyson (Wikipedia bio) wrote:
As a scientist I want to rip
the theory of nuclear winter apart, but as a human being I want to believe it.
This is one of the rare instances of a genuine conflict between the demands of
science and the demands of humanity. As a scientist, I judge the nuclear winter
theory to be a sloppy piece of work, full of gaps and unjustified assumptions.
As a human being, I hope fervently that it is right. Here is a real and
uncomfortable dilemma. What does a scientist do when science and humanity pull
in opposite directions?
Lindzen said about this:
“It seems to
me that if science doesn’t have integrity, it isn’t of much use to
people.”
Full
story
3) David Rose: Welcome To The British
Industrial Counter-Revolution
Mail
on Sunday, 6 January 2013
The stupidest international
agreement since the Treaty of Versailles expired at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Fifteen years after its launch, the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change died a miserable failure. Few are likely to
mourn.
According to Kyoto’s authors, it should by now have
triggered a five per cent fall in the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. In fact,
they have risen by 58 per cent because the world’s faster-growing economies
never ratified Kyoto at all, nor the drastic cuts in the use of fossil fuel it
prescribed.
China, America, Brazil and India simply ignored it, while
Canada, New Zealand and Russia, although initially committed, later cast it
aside.
In Britain, however, the Government remains wedded to a post-Kyoto
strategy, and along with the rest of the EU has agreed to ‘extend’ the treaty’s
provisions. One consequence of this is the new Energy Bill, which by 2020 will
triple the subsidies paid by taxpayers and consumers to ‘renewable’ energy
suppliers to £7.6 billion a year.
The bungs paid to operate offshore wind
turbines – the most expensive form of energy ever devised – will rise 16-fold to
an annual £4.2 billion. The hated onshore turbines will also get huge new
subsidies, at least doubling their number to about 6,500.
Even this
underestimates the Bill’s full burden, which is closer to £110 billion. Among
its enormous further costs are those which will be incurred by the inconvenient
fact that wind turbines make electricity for only a third of the
time.
Replacing coal or ageing nuclear stations with wind requires new
back-up capacity powered by gas at the same time – though this itself will be
uneconomic because when the wind is blowing it will have to be switched
off.
Meanwhile, as Oxford University’s Professor Dieter Helm points out
in his recent book, The Carbon Crunch, Britain’s claim to stand as a shining
example of emissions rectitude is bogus.
Yes, the UK’s own production of
CO2 fell by 15 per cent between 1990 and 2005, but this was achieved only by
exporting British industries to countries such as China, where on average two
new power stations fuelled by coal – by far the dirtiest type – come on stream
each week.
Taking this into account, writes Prof Helm, means the
emissions caused by UK economic activity rose by 19 per cent. It doesn’t matter
whether one is a global warming sceptic, or an alarmist: considered either as an
effective means of cutting world CO2 emissions, or as a way to restart growth,
Britain’s energy strategy is self-defeating.
And however much subsidy
existing renewable technology gets, it will never be enough.
[....]
British policy, enshrined in the current Bill, is being driven not
by evidence but by irrational dogma, and to question it is to be accused of
endangering the planet. Only this explains the ferocity of opposition to
fracking.
In reality, a disaster of a different kind looms: years of
chronic impoverishment while competitors roar ahead and world CO2 emissions rise
unchecked.
Welcome to the British industrial
counter-revolution.
Full
story
4) How Oliver Letwin Lost His Kyoto Bet With Nigel
Lawson
The
Spectator, 6 January 2013
Fraser Nelson
“Shall I send a cheque to the House of Lords?” Letwin
asked Lawson
Not that anyone has
noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with carbon emissions
up by 58% over 1990 levels – instead the 5% cut the signatories envisaged. All
that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era
of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted,
the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for
change that’s not going to happen. No point taxing the poor out of the sky (or
off the roads) if it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the trajectory
of global warming. To be sure, countries responsible for 15pc of emissions have
signed an extension of Kyoto. But the main players have drawn a veil over this
rather hysterical chapter in the great energy debate.
Even David Cameron
has gone cold on warming. In 2006, the Prime Minister captured the mood with
his husky
dog trip to Svalbard and advised people
to “vote blue and go green”. Nigel Lawson, ex-editor of The Spectator,
told Cameron’s policy chief Oliver Letwin that this mania would pass – and,
crucially, that Kyoto would expire without any successor. In his
column in this week’s magazine, Martin Vander Weyer reveals a conversation
he had with Lord Lawson over Christmas where the ex-Chancellor revealed that
he:-
…bet Oliver Letwin — now David Cameron’s policy co-ordinator —
that the Kyoto Protocol on carbon reduction would reach its expiry date on 31
December 2012 without a substantial successor treaty being signed to enforce
binding cutbacks in emissions. ‘There has been no new agreement, let alone a
“substantial” one,’ declares Lawson, brandishing an email from Letwin that
concludes: ‘Shall I send a cheque to the House of Lords?’
The irony
is that the rich countries are anyway modifying their behaviour, as greener
shale gas becomes more widely available. As we said in the
leading article of the Christmas double issue:
While the rich
world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel
consumption in those countries fell by
4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to
do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more
efficient cars and factories.
So there is no more talk from the
government about “leading a new green revolution in Britain.” Instead we have
the much more sensible Osborne
doctrine, revealed in the 2011 Tory conference. The central tenet is very
clear:-
“Let’s at the very least resolve that we’re going to cut our
carbon emissions no slower but also no faster than our fellow countries in
Europe.”
Under the Climate Change Act, as it is currently
structured, the government is legally bound to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by
34 per cent by the end of this decade. The rest of the EU, on the other hand,
has only committed to 20 per cent. So the Climate Change Act needs
revision.
Kyoto shows that all this pious summitry succeeds in nothing
more than raising new taxes (which usually hit the poorest hardest). America
shows that new technology and greater efficiency is the best way of dealing with
the energy problem. It may pain the environmentalists to admit it, but fracking
may yet do more to stem carbon emissions than Kyoto ever
did.
5) Matt Ridley: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened The
Planet
The
Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2013
Did you know that the
Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that
the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three
decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about
deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction.
This
possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist whose
meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii first
alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. Mr. Keeling’s famous curve showed not only a year-by-year increase
in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the
concentration.
John
S. Dykes
Satellites show that the amount of green vegetation has been
increasing or three decades straight.
During summers in the
Northern Hemisphere, the Earth breathes in carbon dioxide as green plants (most
of which are north of the equator) absorb the gas and turn it into carbohydrate.
In the northern winter, the Earth breathes the gas out again, as the summer’s
leaves rot.
Mr. Keeling and colleagues noticed that the depth of the
breathing had increased in Hawaii by 20% since the 1960s: The Earth was taking
in more carbon dioxide each northern summer and giving out more each winter.
Since the inhalation is done by green leaves, they reasoned, the amount of
greenery on the planet must be growing larger. In the 1980s forest biologists
started to report striking increases in the growth rates of trees and the
density of forests: in Douglas firs in British Columbia, Scots pines in Finland,
bristlecone pines in Colorado and even tropical rain forests.
Around the
same time, a NASA scientist named Compton Tucker found that he could map global
vegetation changes by calculating a “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index”
(NDVI) from the data produced by a satellite sensor. The data confirmed Mr.
Keeling’s suspicion: Greenery was on the increase. At first, this was thought to
be a northern phenomenon, caused by faster growth in the great spruce and birch
forests of Siberia and Canada, but the satellites showed it was happening all
over the world and especially strongly in the Amazon and African rain
forests.
Using the NDVI, one team this year reported that “over the last
few decades of the 20th century, terrestrial ecosystems acted as net carbon
sinks,” i.e., they absorbed more carbon than they were emitting, and “net
greening was reported in all biomes,” though the effect had slowed down in
recent years.
The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet
to be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga
Myneni of Boston University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now
been going on for 30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world’s
vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no
change.
What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer causes crops
to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There are essentially
two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer, wetter weather
should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming, an increase in
carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants. CO2 is a scarce
resource that plants have trouble scavenging from the air, and plants grow
faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale.
Dr. Myneni reckons that it is
now possible to distinguish between these two effects in the satellite data, and
he concludes that 50% is due to “relaxation of climate constraints,” i.e.,
warming or rainfall, and roughly 50% is due to carbon dioxide fertilization
itself. In practice, the two interact. A series of experiments has found that
plants tolerate heat better when CO2 levels are higher.
The inescapable
if unfashionable conclusion is that the human use of fossil fuels has been
causing the greening of the planet in three separate ways: first, by displacing
firewood as a fuel; second, by warming the climate; and third, by raising carbon
dioxide levels, which raise plant growth rates.
6) And
Finally: The Handy All Weather Is Extreme Climate Barometer -
Josh 192
Bishop
Hill, 6 January 2013
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