Climate Change Science

Quiet Storm of Lucidity

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Lucidity refers to insight: an understanding that arrives in a flash, like lightning or a light bulb overcoming the darkness. It involves seeing things as they are, (not how they should or might be) and how those things fit together into a coherent whole. Socrates and other great teachers down through history saw that lucidity is the coming together of knowledge that is already within but not yet realized.

Turning to our understanding of the climate, we have to ask this question:

Is that light the end of the tunnel or an oncoming train?

In the run up to Paris climate conference, skeptics and the general public are looking into an oncoming train of pressure and propaganda. But lately there are voices pointing to light shining through the fog of consensus climate science. They are not very loud yet compared to the amplified mass media fear-mongering, but it is more pronounced than in the past.  Consider some of the recent media events.

Honest Talk Regarding the Models’ Uncertainties

David Roberts writing here:

Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.

Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.

There is a school of thought that says the whole exercise of IAMs, at least as an attempt to model how things will develop in the far future, is futile. There are so many assumptions, and the outcomes are so sensitive to those assumptions, that what they produce is little better than wild-ass guesses. And the faux-precision of the exercise, all those clean, clear lines on graphs, only serves to mislead policymakers into thinking we have a grasp on it. It makes them think we know exactly how much slack we have, how much we can push before bad things happen, when in fact we have almost no idea.

In the view of these researchers, the quest to predict what climate change (or climate change mitigation) will cost through 2100 ought to be abandoned. It is impossible, computationally intractable, and the IAMs that pretend to do it only serve to distract and confuse.

More CO2 is Good for the Planet

London 12 October: In an important new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, former IPCC delegate Dr Indur Goklany calls for a reassessment of carbon dioxide, which he says has many benefits for the natural world and for humankind.

Dr Goklany said: “Carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%. This has not only been good for humankind but for the natural world too, because an acre of land that is not used for crops is an acre of land that is left for nature”.

In the Forward (here), world-renowned physicist Freeman Dyson says this:

“To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.”

Dyson also makes this lucid comment:

The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. Those of my scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany’s evidence convincing. . .That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?

Prominent French Weatherman and Mathematicians Speak Out

Recently France’s best-known TV weatherman, Philippe Verdier, was sacked for publishing a book debunking consensus climate science. And now people wonder what punishment will be visited upon the prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation), which recently issued a detailed 195-page White Paper that presents a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of the global warming. Synopsis is blunt and extremely well documented.

Here are extracts from the opening statements of the first three chapters of the SCM White Paper:

Chapter 1: The crusade is absurd
There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world‘s climate is in any way ‘disturbed.’ It is variable, as it has always been, but rather less so now than during certain periods or geological eras. Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet‘s global temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable. Concentrations of CO2 vary, as they always have done; the figures that are being released are biased and dishonest. Rising sea levels are a normal phenomenon linked to upthrust buoyancy; they are nothing to do with so-called global warming. As for extreme weather events — they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past. We ourselves have processed the raw data on hurricanes….

Chapter 2: The crusade is costly
Direct aid for industries that are completely unviable (such as photovoltaics and wind turbines) but presented as ‘virtuous’ runs into billions of euros, according to recent reports published by the Cour des Comptes (French Audit Office) in 2013. But the highest cost lies in the principle of ‘energy saving,’ which is presented as especially virtuous. Since no civilization can develop when it is saving energy, ours has stopped developing: France now has more than three million people unemployed — it is the price we have to pay for our virtue….

Chapter 3: The crusade is pointless
Human beings cannot, in any event, change the climate. If we in France were to stop all industrial activity (let’s not talk about our intellectual activity, which ceased long ago), if we were to eradicate all trace of animal life, the composition of the atmosphere would not alter in any measurable, perceptible way. To explain this, let us make a comparison with the rotation of the planet: it is slowing down. To address that, we might be tempted to ask the entire population of China to run in an easterly direction. But, no matter how big China and its population are, this would have no measurable impact on the Earth‘s rotation.

Additional discussion and links are here.

Push Back on the Climate Policy Proposals

Eric Worrall expresses a burst of clarity here:

It’s difficult to know what impact Putin’s overt skepticism will have on the Paris climate meeting. The meeting is reportedly already in a lot of trouble, because even our economically illiterate leaders seem to be balking at the prospect of borrowing money from China, so they can gift the principle they just borrowed back to China as climate development assistance, then repay the loan back to China a second time, with interest.

A Lucid Summary of IPCC Climate Policy:
Borrowing money we don’t have
to pay countries having other pressing needs
for a solution that won’t work
to solve a problem that doesn’t exist
while asserting imaginary legal authority.

Conclusion

Switching metaphors, maybe we are starting to see some damage to the Good Ship Climate Alarm:

Final Word to Charles Mackay

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

― Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Greenland Is Melting! Really?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The media blitz ahead of the Paris climate conference is well underway and you can expect sources like the New York Times to publish many stories along these lines. This one evokes the WWII headline, Paris is Burning, and it happens now to be all over Facebook.

Greenland Is Melting Away (link)

What you get is not science, but a compelling human interest story with great photos about a team of researchers working to study rivers on the ice sheet, and then an appeal to share in their fears. A scientific report would at least provide some snippets of findings, and then provide contextual facts for people to interpret the significance of observations.

Instead of that, the story makes an incredible claim:

The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield groundbreaking information on the rate at which the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland’s ice sheet could increase sea levels by about 20 feet.

Not only is there no evidence presented, the article is silent about the contextual facts that contradict that claim.

Here is what you need to know, and what they should be telling you:

1.The Greenland ice sheet is massive and has persisted for millennia.

Doing the numbers: Greenland area 2.1 10^6 km2 80% ice cover, 1500 m thick in average- That is 2.5 Million Gton. Simplified to 1 km3 = 1 Gton

200 Gton is 0.008 % of that mass.
Annual snowfall: From the Lost Squadron, we know at that particular spot, the ice increase since 1942 – 1990 was 1.5 m/year ( Planes were found 75 m below surface)
Assume that yearly precipitation is 100 mm / year over the entire surface.
That is 168000 Gton. Yes, Greenland is Big!
Inflow = 168,000Gton. Outflow is 168,200 Gton.

So if that 200 Gton rate continued, an assumption not warranted by observations below, that ice loss would result in a 1% loss of Greenland ice in 800 years. (H/t Bengt Abelsson)

2. The melting and refreezing depend on multiple factors, principally the runoff rate (which these scientists are studying) and the snow accumulation which is poorly understood and not yet predictable.

That’s not surprising since the ice sheet rebuilds during wintertime, the harshest time of year. Because of the difficulty of doing polar research, the emphasis is understandably on the summer observations. But we should also not make the mistake of the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp because the light is better.

For an ice sheet that neither grows or shrinks, there is at all points averaged over the year a balance between

the amount of snow that falls and is compressed to ice
the amount of snow and ice that melts or evaporates (sublimates) and
the amount of ice that flows away due to the ice motion
The two first contributions make up the surface mass balance. For the ice sheet as a whole, there is a balance between the surface mass balance and the amount of ice that calves into the ocean as icebergs.

3.Greenland ice is the most stable land ice in the world despite its location in the lower latitudes. Greenland ice sits in a bowl with a ring of mountainous edges constraining the runoff and is unlikely to ever completely melt. That is why it is preferred as a site for ice core sampling to study paleoclimates.

Topographic map of Greenland bedrock

4.The changing of Greenland ice mass waxes and wanes over years, decades and centuries. The fastest rates of melting recently were in the 1930s and 40s. Discoveries were made of Medieval Viking settlements showing when it was much warmer than now.

The resumption of melting recently is reported by GRACE, a new technology that is promising, but researchers caution against trusting it until calibrations are completed and the longer record is built.

DMI has been studying Greenland for a long time and they report this:
smb_combine_sm_day_en

Greenland’s ice sheet has seen variable growth and losses over the years.  And mass gains and losses fluctuate also during each year.  So far this year is close to the mean growth for 1981 to 2010.

5. Sea levels do rise from melting ice in warm periods such as the Roman era, but this comes mostly from land glaciers not the polar ice caps. For example, Ephesus was a port on the Aegean Sea in biblical times, but is now several kms inland. Many other such examples exist in times when it was much warmer than now and when Greenland ice was still massive.

6.The Danes know and care the most about the Greenland ice sheet, and they are not alarmed.

The Danes originally colonized the place and still subsidize the national government there.  Their scientists have studied the issue and have this to say:

Scientists have long believed that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting with increasing speed and that this will result in considerable rises in water levels in the world’s oceans over the next 100 years.

But the foundation for this view now appears to be completely wrong.

Greenland’s ice mass shrinks periodically. The ice mass around and on Greenland shrinks because of two effects:  Ice melting and the amount of precipitation – these two factors give a negative net result which means Greenland’s ice mass shrinks.
Ice that flows out to sea and calving – ice that breaks off from glaciers. This form of loss of ice mass is called ‘dynamic ice-mass loss’ and it can be many times higher than the loss of ice due to melting.

Until now, researchers have believed that the dynamic ice-mass loss accelerated constantly. Most climate models are based on this belief.

We can see that the dynamic ice-mass loss is not accelerating constantly, as we had believed,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan, a senior researcher at DTU Space – the National Space Institute.

“It is only periodically that the ice disappears as rapidly as is happening today. We expect that the reduction in Greenland’s ice mass due to the dynamic ice-mass loss will ease over the next couple of years and will reach zero again.”

http://sciencenordic.com/aerial-photos-greenland-topple-climate-models

Conclusion:

Is Greenland ice melting? Maybe. . . Probably a little.

It has melted a lot faster in the past, and only restarted recently, while the ice sheet has persisted over many millennia. No one knows how long it will melt and when it will reverse. Some Greenland ice loss is a good thing, since it means we are still in a warm period and not yet sliding into the next Ice Age.

So it is something interesting to watch, but not a reason to lose sleep. And it is nothing that we can fix.

Additional informative discussion is here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/30/greenland-ice-melt-due-to-global-warming-found-not-so-bad-after-all/

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What is Climate? Is it Changing?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Updates October 27 below

Thanks Arnd for another provocative comment.

EXXON, as many others, deserve no regret when „charged with all kinds of misdoing with respect to climate science“. EXXON’s fault is not strongly opposing a meaningless language with regard what ‘climate’ is.Full Comment is here:

Dr. Bernaerts raises a number of issues and goes into some depth at his website, especially this page.

I am prompted by this to respond with three points.

1. Climate Alarmism Depends on Equivocation

There is something like a lawyer’s frustration in Dr. Bernaerts’ writing about climate. It is customary in a legal document for the first section to define all the terms, and then in later sections to respect those definitions in making arguments. He is right to criticize climate science for lacking such discipline.

Going further, it can be said that the anti-fossil fuel movement is built upon equivocation. That is a fallacy in which the meaning of a word changes in the course of a logical argument, so that a change of subject occurs in a hidden way. Alarmists frequently refer to CO2 as “carbon pollution” when the harmless trace gas is essential to life in the biosphere. A slight change of ocean pH toward 7.0 is called acidification. And so on with assertions that climate will cause all kinds of catastrophic weather: extra rain in wet places, drought in dry places, melting glaciers, sea level rises, destructive storms, etc. Much is made of the “greenhouse gas effect” to raise concerns about CO2, without acknowledging that H2O is by far the most important IR active gas in the atmosphere.

Without obfuscation, there would be no cause for alarm or for 40,000 people to gather at the Paris COP.

2. Climate Itself is a Human Construct.

Andrew John Herbertson, a British geographer and Professor at Oxford, wrote in a textbook from 1901:

By climate we mean the average weather as ascertained by many years’ observations. Climate also takes into account the extreme weather experienced during that period. Climate is what on an average we may expect, weather is what we actually get.

Mark Twain, who is often credited with that last sentence actually said:

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The point is, weather consists of events occurring in real time, while climate is a statistical artifact. Weather is like a baseball player swinging in the batter’s box, climate is his batting average, RBIs, bases on balls, etc.

In a previous post, The Climates, They are A-changing, I wrote about seasonal climate change, which farmers in a place like Canada rely on to plan their planting and harvesting, knowing their actual activities may be earlier or later depending on this year’s weather. Meanwhile in equatorial zones, like the Caribbean or Tahiti, the seasons shift between wet and dry, rather than hot and cold. Of course, even the notion of years divided into named months is human imagination imposed over nature.

In other words weather is natural events while climate is a pattern imposed by humans upon the weather. And so, to speak of “climate change’ is engaging in a double abstraction: the derivative (change) in our expectations (patterns) of weather.

When the anti-fossil fuel movement began, it was at least honest in its claim of Global Warming. That assertion has some content to it: an expectation that future temperatures will be higher than the past. And climate models were built to project those rising temperatures as an effect from rising CO2. Once people noticed the exaggeration of those projections compared to observations, the issue was renamed “climate change”, with the advantage that any weather can then be cited as proof.

3. Weather is the Climate System at work.

Another distortion is the notion that weather is bad or good, depending on humans finding it favorable. In fact, all that we call weather are the ocean and atmosphere acting to resolve differences in temperatures, humidities and pressures. It is the natural result of a rotating, irregular planetary surface mostly covered with water and illuminated mostly at its equator.

When activists say that climate change causes more or worse storms, they are obfuscating. Climate is the result of weather, not the cause. What they really mean to say: “The climate system has changed because of our burning fossil fuels, and the weather will be worse for us.”

That statement is plainly ridiculous as Dr. Ball has illustrated:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/24/water-vapour-the-big-wet-elephant-in-the-room/

Update 1

In the comments below both ElCore and Frederick Colbourne helpfully emphasize an important aspect of this topic: namely that humans invented “climate” in order to describe local realities. Climate is not global, it is local and even micro in its uniqueness.

Some years ago Roger Pielke Sr. did excellent research on a set of weather stations in Colorado to investigate a strange phenomenon. The regional average from the 11 stations did not reflect any of the individual records that went into the calculation. The study linked below showed that numerous differences in the landscapes at each site meant that temperature and precipitation measurements differed significantly from one to the other, even when located a few kms apart. Not only absolute differences, such as altitude would create, but also the trends of changes differed due to terrain features. Thus the averages are not descriptive of any of the local realities. In my studies of temperature trends, I took Pielke findings to heart and focused on the pattern of change observed in each specific site.

The paper is available here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.706/abstract

Update 2

Thanks to smamarver for reminding me of a pertinent quote from Dr. Bernearts

It seems Dr. Bernaerts struggles with this question since long, writing a letter to the Editor of NATURE 1992, “Climate Change”, Vol. 360, p. 292; http://www.whatisclimate.com/1992-nature.html:
“SIR – The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the earlier struggle for a Convention on Climate Change may serve as a reminder that the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea has its tenth anniversary on 10 December. It is not only one of the most comprehensive and strongest international treaties ever negotiated but the best possible legal means to protect the global climate. But sadly, there has been little interest in using it for this purpose. For too long, climate has been defined as the average weather and Rio was not able to define it at all. Instead, the Climate Change Convention uses the term ‘climate system’, defining it as “the totality of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geosphere and their interactions”. All that this boils down to is ‘the interactions of the natural system’. What is the point of a legal term if it explains nothing? For decades, the real question has been who is responsible for the climate. Climate should have been defined as ‘the continuation of the oceans by other means’. Thus, the 1982 Convention could long since have been used to protect the climate. After all, it is the most powerful tool with which to force politicians and the community of states into actions.”

IPCC Racketeers Order Hit on Exxon

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A lot of alarmist voices are charging Exxon with all kinds of misdoings with respect to climate science. The usual suspects are implicated, including Bill McKibben, Naomi Oreskes and Bob Ward.

InsideClimateNews broke the story, with the others piling on. Exxon is fighting back and tell their story here:  http://www.exxonmobilperspectives.com/2015/10/21/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-read-the-documents/

The documents referred to are here.

Exxon’s Position:

“Reading the documents shows that these allegations are based on deliberately cherry-picked statements attributed to various ExxonMobil employees to wrongly suggest definitive conclusions were reached decades ago by company researchers. These statements were taken completely out of context and ignored other readily available statements demonstrating that our researchers recognized the developing nature of climate science at the time which, in fact, mirrored global understanding.

What these documents actually demonstrate is a robust culture of scientific discourse on the causes and risks of climate change that took place at ExxonMobil in the 1970s and ’80s and continues today. They point to corporate efforts to fill the substantial gaps in knowledge that existed during the earliest years of climate change research.

They also help explain why ExxonMobil would work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leading universities like MIT and Stanford on ways to expand climate science knowledge.”

The Royal Society

The list of documents includes an interchange with the Royal Society, and their spokesman, Bob Ward. He criticizes Exxon’s publications for not saying the same things as IPCC documents. He accuses Exxon of funding “organizations that have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change.” That sounds so much like the RICO20 letter.

Kenneth Cohen of ExxonMobil responded in a letter to Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society at that time:

“The Royal Society should welcome the diversity of opinions on all scientific issues. Taking the position that any person or organization that disagrees with the Royal Society on an important scientific issue should be publicly vilified is surely counterproductive for the development of scientific theory, ignores freedom of expression and is hardly consistent with the Society’s stated objective of promoting excellence in science.”

Cohen’s full letter is here:
http://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/documents/Exxon%20Letter%20to%20Royal%20Society%20%282006%29.pdf

Exxon says that they are part of the solution and not the problem, and are asking people to read the documents and decide for themselves.  Sounds reasonable.

Background on RICO and IPCC:

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/anti-racketeering-initiative/

To My Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Congratulations on winning a majority in the election and now to form the government. I voted for Ramez Ayoub, your newly elected MP in my riding north of Montreal.

The point of this letter is to alert you to the issue of climate change. It was little discussed during the campaign, but it will be immediately forced onto your attention due to the conference next month in Paris.

The knee-jerk reaction would be to declare the Conservatives wrong on this issue and that Liberals will demonstrate change by reversing Canada’s position. That would be unfortunate and premature, considering all of the pitfalls and ramifications tied to this.

For an example of how to mismanage this issue, you need only look south to the US self-imposed predicament. President Obama picked a radical environmentalist, John Holdren, as his science adviser. Uncritically following that advice, Obama has now painted himself into an ideological corner, and will find it difficult to deny claims for payment of reparations from dozens of developing countries.

You could make the same mistake by appointing David Suzuki as your science adviser. He is a renowned environmentalist and biologist, but has no expertise in climate science, energy or economics. The so-called climate consensus surveys of scientists carefully excluded anyone not working for government or academia. That sort of unbalanced approach is wrong-headed.

Despite the pressure to make early commitments on this issue, I urge you to keep a cool head, have a scientific curiosity, and pick a team of advisers providing a balance of environmental and industrial perspectives. You might want to make an announcement that your government will respect the scientific and economic realities concerning the climate, including attention to cost-benefit analyses of policy proposals.

Sincerely,

Ronald R. Clutz
Therese-De-Blainville Riding

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/category/science-and-society/

 

Just Say No!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

There was a time when our leaders appealed to reason and common sense:

But today, CO2 Fever is upon us, and there is no CO2 rumor too outrageous to be broadcast, repeated and exaggerated.

Just in the last few hours, we have these headlines (from Google News) threatening global warming:

Climate change clips wings of migratory birds
Miami and New Orleans will sink
Global warming could lead to worldwide wars
Coral reefs are dying
25 million Americans could lose their homes to global warming and rising seas
Ocean food chains will collapse
Climate change major threat to global economic stability
Etc., etc. Etc.

Meanwhile, the good news about CO2 is not mentioned in the press, unless you look very hard for it.

London 12 October: In an important new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, former IPCC delegate Dr Indur Goklany calls for a reassessment of carbon dioxide, which he says has many benefits for the natural world and for humankind.

Dr Goklany said: “Carbon dioxide fertilises plants, and emissions from fossil fuels have already had a hugely beneficial effect on crops, increasing yields by at least 10-15%. This has not only been good for humankind but for the natural world too, because an acre of land that is not used for crops is an acre of land that is left for nature”.

http://www.thegwpf.org/climate-doomsayers-ignore-benefits-of-carbon-dioxide-emissions/

In the Forward, world-renowned physicist Freeman Dyson says this:

“To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.”
The full document can be accessed here:

Click to access benefits1.pdf

CO2 hysteria is addictive. Here’s what it does to your brain:

Just say No!

Ice House of Mirrors

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In the fable of Snow White, the evil step-mother asked her hand mirror: “Who is the fairest in the land?” The mirror on the wall always flattered her, but this mirror did not. As we all know, the hand mirror told the truth, the queen was angry and people had to suffer.

We expect mirrors to tell the truth, to show us the objective reality. That is why it is amusing at the carnival sideshow to gaze into mirrors that make normal people look obese or like a beanpole, or otherwise distort one’s appearance.

This post is about what Arctic Ice Extent looks like in the mirrors available to the public.

Mirror #1

If you wonder what is happening with Arctic Ice, the first (and maybe only) depiction you encounter will look like this:

I call this The Incredibly Shrinking Ice Mirror, because it is certainly scary (Death Spiral comes to mind). Ice is obviously going to hell in a hand-basket. Once your fright abates, you might wonder about the scale or how much ice is measured. And you might notice this is about September; except for March other months of the year are excluded from view.

You wouldn’t know from this chart that scary looking 2012 had one of the higher March maximums and on average was not so far out. But that wouldn’t be as exciting.

Mirror #2

Just for fun, let’s make a mirror from the same dataset, just one month later. I call this The Incredibly Persisting Ice Mirror.

october extents lrg2

You won’t find this one on the Internet because it is politically incorrect and pretty boring. But it is just as valid as Mirror #1. It is showing a very slow, unalarming decline with something unusual in 2007, but recovering after that.

Is it a distortion? Absolutely, it is incomplete in the same way as Mirror #1, but gives the opposite impression, just by choosing a different month. But at least this one informs your impression with the actual monthly average extents in M km2 (no anomalies or %s).

Mirror #3

There are more informative pictures of Arctic Ice dynamics if you look for them. For example, there is this presentation of the complete dataset:

NOAA NH Ice Extent

I call this The Bird’s Eye Ice Mirror because you can see the big picture from the satellite passive microwave sensors: the full range of annual variation, the actual measured extents and averages. Note the trend line looks much more like October than September. Is there a reason September is preferred?

Mirror #4

As I have pointed out there are other views of ice extent patterns, such as this:

masie annuallarge273

Let’s call it the The Navigator’s Eye Ice Mirror because it is the accumulation of the ice extents you could expect to observe at sea level from buoys or from the deck of a ship operating in the Arctic region (source: MASIE ice charts).

Of course, there are other mirrors trying in their own ways to tell us about Arctic Ice.

Here’s two Magnifying Ice Mirrors, giving you closeups of what is happening with the ice:

JAXA 2006 to 2015

Let’s not forget The Rear-view Ice Mirrors showing that there were ice observations long before the satellite record started in 1979.

Figure 16-3: Time series of April sea-ice extent in Nordic Sea (1864-1998) given by 2-year running mean and second-order polynomial curves. Top: Nordic Sea; middle: eastern area; bottom: western area (after Vinje, 2000). IPCC Third Assessment Report

Conclusion:

We know as a fact of life that any mirror contains some distortion or bias, even those trying to tell the truth. So it is wise to look at several of them, and pay attention to the frames, before concluding what is happening. Be sure to have a chuckle when you pass by Mirror #1. Although setting energy policies and investing billions of research dollars based on that distortion is not amusing.

Footnote:

Some commentators wondered whether the statistics are affected by icebreakers.  I don’t know, but there is evidence of a Norwegian icebreaker in operation:

 

Pause Deniers Busted

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Updates October 3 and 30 below

With Paris COP drawing near, the lack of warming this century is inconvenient and undermines the cause.

As Dr. Judith Curry said, “I have been expecting to start seeing papers on the ‘hiatus is over.’ Instead I am seeing papers on ‘the hiatus never happened.’”

One that was trumpeted came out of my Alma Mater, Stanford.  They garnered the expected headlines from the usual places:

Global Warming “Hiatus” Never Happened: Eos

There never was any global warming “pause.”:  Washington Post

The text is here: Debunking the climate hiatus

http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/969/art%253A10.1007%252Fs10584-015-1495-y.pdf?originUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flink.springer.com%2Farticle%2F10.1007

The write up has statistical razzle-dazzle and lots of opaque sentences, but let’s not get lost in the weeds.

Let’s not talk about the multiple tamperings to the land records they chose to study.  Let’s even overlook their including the bogus upward adjustments to the SSTs by Karl et al.  Bob Tisdale dissected that here: https://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/noaancdcs-new-pause-buster-paper-a-laughable-attempt-to-create-warming-by-adjusting-past-data/

We don’t need to get into the technicalities of why they stopped with 2013 data, the suitability of the tests applied or their interpretations of the results.

Here’s what you need to know about this study:

They ignored the satellite records (RSS and UAH), the gold standard of temperature measurements, because the absence of warming there is undeniable.

For the land and ocean datasets they analyzed, they ignored the huge divergence between observations and the predictions (projections) from climate models.

Conclusion:

Natural variability in the climate system has neutralized any warming from increased CO2 this century, and also offset most, if not all of the secular rise in temperature since the Little Ice Age.  The models did not forecast this; they can only project warming, and do so at rates several times higher than observations.  The models fail for three reasons:  high sensitivity to CO2; positive feedback from water vapor; and lack of thermal inertia by the oceans.

For more on climate models and temperature projections:
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/temperatures-according-to-climate-models/

The Stanford football team was impressive beating highly-rated Southern Cal on their home field last Saturday.  The work of the research team, however, looks like pandering rather than science.  They need to up their game: No cookies.

Update October 3

I found the time to look into the details of this paper and the statistical trick comes to light.

They took as the null hypothesis: “Temperatures are not rising.”  After applying several statistical tests, they conclude that the statement is not supported by the data, so we cannot say with certainty temperatures are not rising.

And what about the other null hypothesis: “Temperatures are rising.”  Silence.

I suspect they didn’t want to admit that the same statistical tests would also disprove that statement.

A reasonable person concludes: When you can not say for sure that temperatures are not rising, or that they are rising, that would surely indicate a plateau in temperatures.

Update October 30–Another classic from Josh

A Welcome Voice in the Climate Debate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Someone has written a book much needed, adding a welcome voice into rational consideration of climate matters. The book is entitled: Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science, it is free and can be downloaded here:

Click to access longhurst-final.pdf

About the author

Alan R. Longhurst is a biological oceanographer who has studied the ecology of the continental shelf of the Gulf of Guinea (1954-63), and the trophic structure and flux of energy through the pelagic ecosystems of the eastern Pacific (1963-71), the Barents Sea (1973), the Canadian Arctic (1983-89) and the Northwest Atlantic (1978-94). He coordinated the international EASTROPAC expeditions in the 1960s and directed the NOAA SW Science Center on the Scripps campus at La Jolla (1967-71), the Marine Ecology Laboratory at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (1977-79) and was Director-General of that Institute (1970-86). He has published 80-odd research papers and his most recent books are “Ecological Geography of the Sea” (Elsevier, 1998 & 2007) and “Mismanagement of Marine Fisheries” (Cambridge, 2010).

I recommend this climate science book as readable, thorough, considerate, and well-documented.  He also gives insightful personal experiences from his oceanographic career. I particularly appreciate his emphasis on the ocean’s complex role in climate dynamics. Also his discussion of surface temperature measurements  has echos in my own analyses of the records.

For a review and overview by Dr. Judith Curry, her post is here:

http://judithcurry.com/2015/09/20/new-book-doubt-and-certainty-in-climate-science/

Longhurst concludes with this:

Perhaps the one thing that would shake the collective certainty would be if the simple, single value used to represent global surface temperature continued to languish at around the same value as it has for the last 15 years for, say, another 5 years? Of course, it may not – simply because the next Nino will quickly reduce the area of cold, upwelled water exposed at the sea surface and global SST will suddenly rise, as it did in 1998. In fact, as I write, this is occurring and the anticipated announcement has already been made NOAA that this year we experienced the warmest July ever recorded.

But if a new Gleissberg cycle makes itself felt when the equatorial Pacific has settled back into its ‘normal’ Trade Wind state, and if the new cycle overwhelms the effect on SAT measurements of urbanisation and land use change so that the GSMT index cools significantly, then the earth sciences will have a heavy bill to be paid in the arena of public support. And the more so if a Convention concerning measures agreed to be taken has already been signed into effect…

The Climates, They are A-changing.

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Updated below with comments and additional links September 17-19

Seeing a lot more of this lately, along with hearing the geese  honking. And in the next month or so, we expect that trees around here will lose their leaves. It definitely is climate change of the seasonal variety.

Interestingly, the science on this is settled: It is all due to reduction of solar energy because of the shorter length of days (LOD). The trees drop their leaves and go dormant because of less sunlight, not because of lower temperatures. The latter is an effect, not the cause.

Of course, the farther north you go, the more remarkable the seasonal climate change. St. Petersburg, Russia has their balmy “White Nights” in June when twilight is as dark as it gets, followed by the cold, dark winter and a chance to see the Northern Lights.

And as we have been monitoring, the Arctic ice has been melting from sunlight in recent months, but will now begin to build again in the darkness to its maximum in March.

We can also expect in January and February for another migration of millions of Canadians (nicknamed “snowbirds”) to fly south in search of a summer-like climate to renew their memories and hopes. As was said to me by one man in Saskatchewan (part of the Canadian wheat breadbasket region): “Around here we have Triple-A farmers: April to August, and then Arizona.” Here’s what he was talking about: Quartzsite Arizona annually hosts 1.5M visitors, mostly between November and March.

Of course, this is just North America. Similar migrations occur in Europe, and in the Southern Hemisphere, the climates are changing in the opposite direction, Springtime currently. Since it is so obviously the sun causing this seasonal change, the question arises: Does the sunlight vary on longer than annual timescales?

The Solar-Climate Debate

And therein lies a great, enduring controversy between those (like the IPCC) who dismiss the sun as a driver of multi-Decadal climate change, and those who see a connection between solar cycles and Earth’s climate history. One side can be accused of ignoring the sun because of a prior commitment to CO2 as the climate “control knob”.

The other side is repeatedly denounced as “cyclomaniacs” in search of curve-fitting patterns to prove one or another thesis. It is also argued that a claim of 60-year cycles can not be validated with only 150 years or so of reliable data. That point has weight, but it is usually made by those on the CO2 bandwagon despite temperature and CO2 trends correlating for only 2 decades during the last century.

One scientist in this field is Nicola Scaffeta, who presents the basic concept this way:

“The theory is very simple in words. The solar system is characterized by a set of specific gravitational oscillations due to the fact that the planets are moving around the sun. Everything in the solar system tends to synchronize to these frequencies beginning with the sun itself. The oscillating sun then causes equivalent cycles in the climate system. Also the moon acts on the climate system with its own harmonics. In conclusion we have a climate system that is mostly made of a set of complex cycles that mirror astronomical cycles. Consequently it is possible to use these harmonics to both approximately hindcast and forecast the harmonic component of the climate, at least on a global scale. This theory is supported by strong empirical evidences using the available solar and climatic data.”

He goes on to say:

“The global surface temperature record appears to be made of natural specific oscillations with a likely solar/astronomical origin plus a noncyclical anthropogenic contribution during the last decades. Indeed, because the boundary condition of the climate system is regulated also by astronomical harmonic forcings, the astronomical frequencies need to be part of the climate signal in the same way the tidal oscillations are regulated by soli-lunar harmonics.”

He has concluded that “at least 60% of the warming of the Earth observed since 1970 appears to be induced by natural cycles which are present in the solar system.” For the near future he predicts a stabilization of global temperature until about 2016 and cooling until 2030-2040.

https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/nicola-scafetta-global-temperatures-and-sunspot-numbers-are-they-related-yes-but-non-linearly/

A Deeper, but Accessible Presentation of Solar-Climate Theory

I have found this presentation by Ian Wilson to be persuasive while honestly considering all of the complexities involved.

The author raises the question: What if there is a third factor that not only drives the variations in solar activity that we see on the Sun but also drives the changes that we see in climate here on the Earth?

The linked article is quite readable by a general audience, and comes to a similar conclusion as Scaffeta above: There is a connection, but it is not simple cause and effect. And yes, length of day (LOD) is a factor beyond the annual cycle.

Click to access IanwilsonForum2008.pdf

It is fair to say that we are still at the theorizing stage of understanding a solar connection to earth’s climate. And at this stage, investigators look for correlations in the data and propose theories (explanations) for what mechanisms are at work. Interestingly, despite the lack of interest from the IPCC, solar and climate variability is a very active research field these days.

A summary of current studies is provided at NoTricksZone:

http://notrickszone.com/2015/09/14/already-23-papers-supporting-sun-as-major-climate-factor-in-2015-burgeoning-evidence-no-longer-dismissible/#sthash.2MviVRWR.dpbs

Ian Wilson has much more to say at his blog: http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com.au/

Once again, it appears that the world is more complicated than a simple cause and effect model suggests.

For everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

(Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 1:9)

Update Sept. 17: Commentary with Dr. Arnd Bernaerts

ArndB comments:

Fine writing, Ron, well done!
No doubt the sun is the by far the most important factor for not living on a globe with temperatures down to minus 200°C. That makes me hesitating to comment on „solar and climate variability” or “the sun drives climate” (currently at NTZ – link above), but today merely requesting humbly that the claimed correlation should be based at least on some evidence showing that the sun has ever caused a significant climatic shift during the last one million years, which was not only a bit air temperature variability due to solar cycles that necessarily occur in correlation with the intake and release of solar-radiation by the oceans and seas.

Interestingly the UK MetOffice just released a report (Sept.2015, pages 21) titled:
“Big Changes Underway in the Climate System?”
by attributing the most possible and likely changes to the current status of El Niño, PDO, and AMO, and – of course – carbon dioxide -, and a bit speculation on less sun-energy (see following excerpt at link)

Click to access Changes_In_The_Climate_System.pdf

From p. 13: “It is well established that trace gases such as carbon dioxide warm our planet through the “greenhouse effect”. These gases are relatively transparent to incoming sunlight, but trap some of the longer-wavelength radiation emitted by the Earth. However, other factors, both natural and man-made, can also change global temperatures. For example, a cooling could be caused by a downturn of the amount of energy received from the sun, or an increase in the sunlight reflected back to space by aerosol particles in the atmosphere. Aerosols increase temporarily after volcanic eruptions, but are also generated by pollution such as sulphur dioxide from factories.
These “external” factors are imposed on the climate system and may also affect the ENSO, PDO and AMO variations……

My Reply:

Thanks Arnd for engaging in this topic.

My view is that the ocean makes the climate by means of its huge storage of solar energy, and the fluctuations, oscillations in the processes of distributing that energy globally and to the poles. In addition, the ocean is the most affected by any variation in the incoming solar energy, both by the sun outputting more or less, and also by clouds and aerosols blocking incoming radiation more or less (albedo or brightness variability).

https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/the-climate-water-wheel/

The oscillations you mention, including the present El Nino (and Blob) phenomenon, show natural oceanic variability over years and decades. Other ocean cycles occur over multi-decadal and centennial scales, and are still being analyzed.

At the other end of the scale, I am persuaded that the earth switches between the “hot house” and the “ice house” mainly due to orbital cycles, which are an astronomical phenomenon. These are strong enough to overwhelm the moderating effect of the ocean thermal flywheel.

The debate centers on the extent to which solar activity has contributed to climate change over the last 3000 years of our current interglacial period, including current solar cycles.

Update September 19

Additional studies showing a solar-climate connection are here: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kaltesonne.de%2Fsonne-macht-klima-neues-aus-europa%2F