[ExI] The Climate Science Isn't Settled [was: Re: climategate again]

[Alfio Puglisi]

After writing this email, I find it much longer than I expected. Maybe I got
a bit carried away :-)  If it is too long, feel free to skip over anything
boring.


On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Max More <max at maxmore.com> wrote:


>One example: arctic ice depends not just on temperature but on the ambient
moisture level -- which depends on factors other than temperature.

I must admit I don't remember ambient moisture level discussed for arctic
ice. But isn't this just one of the things I lamented further down? We know
Arctic temperatures are going up - no urban heat effect there. Models
predict arctic warming in excess of the global mean thanks to ice-albedo
feedback. Arctic ice goes down and what's the reaction? maybe temps are
going up and the albedo feedback is kicking in? No, there are other factors
like ambient moisture... then we have to think about something else to
explain the northward migration of ecosystems, and then...

>This is one point on which I'm fairly sure, and sure that you are mistaken

If the point was arctic ice, I would like to see more. If the point was the
sheer number of secondary global warming effects, apart from temperature,
that all point in the same general direction, I'm afraid it will take a
massive amount of evidence.

(btw, if you have references to papers on moisture influences on arctic ice,
I'm interested in them. I think they will just confirm the general picture
but, hey, you never know).


> My understanding is that all, or almost all, the observed warming is due to
> less extreme cold and not to higher temperatures in the warmer places.
>


You are correct. And that's exactly what climate models predict for
greenhouse-caused warming. Cold places warm up more than hot places. Night
temperatures go up more than day temperatures. If, for example, the warming
was caused by increased solar output, we would see the opposite.



>
> Anyway, your first point supports only the point that some warming has
> occurred, which I'm not disputing. (Even so, why do we see even more reports
> of melting ice when there has been no significant warming for 12 years? That
> suggests that either the cause is other than warming, or that reports of ice
> melting etc. are highly selective... and selected. That certainly seems to
> be the case with regard to polar bears.)
>

Glaciers are great integrators of climate. If temperature goes up, a glacier
will go out of equilibrium and start to melt, but the response will not be
instantaneus. Reaching a new equilibrium takes years. The current decade has
been the warmest on record, and ice melts in response. If the last few
decades had been colder than before, you would see glaciers growing even if
the cooling trend stabilized for some years.

About your suggestion that reports of ice mass balance are selected for the
most melting ones... that's a very serious accusation. Have you got any
proof of that kind of selection? Anything?

Go to the world glacier monitoring service: http://www.wgms.ch   See for
example:  http://www.wgms.ch/mbb/mbb10/sum07.html
And you can't select in Arctic sea ice loss, or Greenland mass balance.
There's only one of each.


>
>  2) basic physics tells us that Earth's energy budget must balance. We can
>> easily measure the input (solar), and verify that it's approximately
>> constant.
>>
>
> Have you heard of the Early Faint Sun Paradox? Around 2.5 billion years
> ago, the Sun was 20% to 30% less bright than now. And yet the oceans were
> not frozen. This contradicts your assumption of extreme climate sensitivity.
>

"approximately constant" will do for any period less than many millions of
years. The Sun output is still going up, and it's likely to turn the planet
into a desert in a billion of years or so (and a badly burnt piece of rock
at the end) but I'm not blaming it for the current global warming  :-)

I also heard about Snowball Earth about 600 million years ago, when all the
planet freezed over. We are talking about periods when the continents were
different, oceanic currents had a different pattern, the atmosphere was
completely different (at the time you cite, oxygen would have been scarce!)
and basically unknown: various greenhouse gases, from CO2 to carbonyl
sulfide, have been proposed to solve the faint sun paradox. The very fact
that different atmospheric composition are proposed means that we are not
sure of what kind of atmosphere was present those days.

In short, I think you can't derive any conclusion from that remote past to
today's situation. It was basically a different planet. To estimate climate
sensitivity, the ice age epoch is much better suited: close to our time, and
with ideal cold-hot-cold step responses to study :-)

 On this, see Lindzen's nicely written piece:

> The Climate Science Isn't Settled
>
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870393940457456742391702us5400.html<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html>
>
>
The piece you linked is a concentrate of spin, irrelevant points and
outright errors, or falsehoods. And very easy to spot even for me. I'll
quote some of them:

"the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing."

Well, duh. Who says otherwise?

"Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down"

Look at any plot of the temperature record (1880-present) and tell me if
"sometimes up, sometimes down" is an accurate description. And it's clear,
from the next sentence, that he's talking about long periods.

"and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that
can be discerned.""

Misleading: isolate other dozen years periods in the record (the one that
even Lindzen himself says is warming). Many times, the trend is not that
clear. It's not just the last dozen, but many such dozens where "little can
be discerned", which tells you the last dozen hasn't been much different
than before.

"Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research
Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this
so as to maximize apparent changes."

False. CRU didn't "maximize" any temperature anomaly, and doesn't say so in
any email (their series data comes out nearly identical to GISS, using
publicly available data and code). Some CRU emails did talk equivocally
about tree proxy data, which are used in temperature reconstructions.
Lindzen is confusing the two.

"That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are
water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse
substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances."

Again misleading. Lindzen knows full well that water vapor is a feedback,
and that even if it is carrying most of the natural greenhouse effect on its
shoulders, it can't do anything to change Earth's temperature on its own.

"Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between
incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%"

2% is significant when your planet has an average temperature of 290K. And
he didn't include the feedbacks (but didn't he talk about water vapor a few
lines before? Why not now?)

"The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two
years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a
point of anomalous cold)"

the IPCC talks of "50 years trends", not of 1957. This is like selecting
1998 in other contexts.

"Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of
these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years
was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal
variability."

False. Many models show 10-year scale periods of stable and even cooling
temperatures right in the middle of a longer-term warming trend. Only when
you average a dozen of them a monotonous year-by-year warming appears.
Models do show short-term variability, and El-Nino-like behaviours. They
can't reproduce the exact El-Nino et al. pattern we have on this planet, and
so can't model temperatures on small timescales.

"They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water
vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does."

Ah, ok, so he talks about feedbacks eventually.

"The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is
intuitively implausible,"

Exaggerating. Whoever said that our climate is "dominated" by positive
feedbacks? If that was the case, the first ice age would have been the end
of life, and the first interglacial would have roasted the remains. Earth is
not Venus.

//////////////////////

Ok, enough. On a more constructive tone:


All the talks Lindzen does about feedbacks is invalidated by ice age cores.
Without feedbacks, you can't explain the ice-age / interglacial alternance.
We know that orbital forcings cause ice ages (the timing is just too
perfect), but we also know that they are too weak on their own. Rejecting
something with great explanatory power (feedbacks) with, well, nothing,
isn't going to fly for most scientists.



>  Since we are changing the properties of the output (greenhouse gases will
>> redirect part of the outgoing radiation downward), internal temperature must
>> rise to compensate. It's about as inevitable as putting a coat on, and
>> feeling warmer.
>>
>
> Not at all. See the Lindzen piece.
>

When I say "inevitable", I refer to conservation of energy. Radiation
emitted downward *will* do something. Bodies with radiation imbalances
*will* warm up. Anything me, you or Lindzen thinks is irrelevant.

You may have noticed the low opinion I have of Lindzen. This is because,
because of all the MIT titles you listed above, I really can't accuse him of
ignorance. This leaves less palatable options.



>  4) consideration of the opposite camp
>>
>
> See, this is exactly the kind of thing that bothers me. "The opposite
> camp". Opposite to what?


To most of the science. That's where they have set, by their choice. Almost
all of them don't publish, many actually actively refuse results of
peer-review articles, and have nothing substantial to contribute.



> There are multiple views, not two.


My feeling is that there is one well-developed theory, and then a group of
mutually inconsistent views with little to offer, except "this part is
wrong".



> Lindzen, for instance, does not deny that the planet has warmed modestly
> over the last 100 to 150 years, but he does have considerable doubts about
> the reliability of models and he disputes the extremity of the suggested
> responses. (He's about the closest to my own current views as I've seen.)
>


As for the first part, he can't deny the warming, really. No one would take
him seriously. I'll give him points for publishing, but sloppy articles like
the wsj above don't help.




>
>  This lack of focus gives me the impression that skeptics (really
>> unfortunate word, that. Skepticism is a basic feature of science) are just
>> trying to find something, anything, to avoid confronting reality.
>>
>
> Exactly the same can be said of the anti-skeptic views, so that doesn't
> help in the least.
>

It's not the same. (and what is an "anti-skeptic view"? :-)   Global warming
is a well-developed theory with multiple supporting lines of evidence:
different kind of observations, and physics-based models. I don't see how
one can take only one part (say, the observation of temperature warming) but
not the rest (the explanation of that warming, and it's likely future
consequences). Without an obvious falsification, one would need to produce
an alternative explanation, and the proposed ones (there have been some:
solar, cosmic rays, ice age rebound and surely some other I'm forgetting)
didn't survive investigation.



Alfio
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