S. Fred Singer (1924 – 2020) passed away on April 6, 2020 at the age of 95.
Dr. Singer is the author, coauthor, and editor of many books, including Climate Change Reconsidered (several volumes), a comprehensive critique of the assessment reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was a senior fellow of The Heartland Institute and research fellow with the Independent Institute.
Dr. Singer published more than 200 technical papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, His editorial essays and articles have appeared in Cosmos, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New Republic, Newsweek, Journal of Commerce, Washington Times, Washington Post, and many other publications. His accomplishments have been featured in front-cover stories appearing in Time, Life, and U.S. News & World Report
Dr. Singer was an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Geophysical Union, American Physical Society, and American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. Dr. Singer gave hundreds of lectures and seminars on global warming, including to the science faculties at leading universities around the world.
This post commemorates his steadfast labors to expose the truth of climate change as a natural variability and to neutralize the poison of claiming humans are causing a climate crisis or emergency. To this end below is a synopsis of his analysis originally published Sept. 10, 2001 in the Wall Street Journal. The source is Water Vapor Rules the Greenhouse System at ClimateCite.
Just how much of the “Greenhouse Effect” is caused by human activity?
It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account– about 5.53%, if not.
This point is so crucial to the debate over global warming that how water vapor is or isn’t factored into an analysis of Earth’s greenhouse gases makes the difference between describing a significant human contribution to the greenhouse effect, or a negligible one.
Water vapor constitutes Earth’s most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth’s greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many “facts and figures’ regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold.
Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC’s, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic).
For those interested in more details a series of data sets and charts have been assembled below in a 5-step statistical synopsis.
Note that the first two steps ignore water vapor.
♦ 1. Greenhouse gas concentrations
♦ 2. Convertingconcentrations to contribution
♦ 3. Factoring in water vapor
♦ 4. Distinguishing natural vs man-made greenhouse gases
♦ 5. Putting it all together
Note: Calculations are expressed to 3 significant digits to reduce rounding errors, not necessarily to indicate statistical precision of the data. All charts were plotted using Lotus 1-2-3.
Caveat: This analysis is intended to provide a simplified comparison of the various man-made and natural greenhouse gases on an equal basis with each other. It does not take into account all of the complicated interactions between atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial systems, a feat which can only be accomplished by better computer models than are currently in use.
1. The following table was constructed from data published by the U.S. Department of Energy (1) and other sources, summarizing concentrations of the various atmospheric greenhouse gases. Because some of the concentrations are very small the numbers are stated in parts per billion. DOE chose to NOT show water vapor as a greenhouse gas!
TABLE 1.The Important Greenhouse Gases (except water vapor) U.S. Department of Energy, (October, 2000) (1)
Table 1 is not a very meaningful view because 1) the data has not been corrected for the actual Global Warming Potential (GWP) of each gas, and 2) water vapor is ignored. But these are the numbers one would use if the goal is to exaggerate human greenhouse contributions:
The various greenhouse gases are not equal in their heat-retention properties though, so to remain statistically relevant % concentrations must be changed to % contribution relative to CO2. This is done in Table 2, below, through the use of GWP multipliers for each gas, derived by various researchers.
2. Using appropriate corrections for the Global Warming Potential of the respective gases provides the following more meaningful comparison of greenhouse gases, based on the conversion:
( concentration )X( the appropriate GWP multiplier (2) (3) of each gas relative to CO2 )= greenhouse >contribution.:
TABLE 2.Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases (except water vapor)
adjusted for heat retention characteristics, relative to CO2
NOTE: GWP (Global Warming Potential) is used to contrast different greenhouse gases relative to CO2.
Compared to the concentration statistics in Table 1, the GWP comparison in Table 2 illustrates, among other things:
♦ Total carbon dioxide (CO2) contributions are reduced to 72.37% of all greenhouse gases (368,400 / 509,056)– (ignoring water vapor).
Also, from Table 2 (but not shown on graph):
♦ Anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contributions drop to (11,880 / 509,056) or 2.33% of total of all greenhouse gases, (ignoring water vapor).
♦ Total combined anthropogenic greenhouse gases becomes(28,162 / 509,056) or 5.53% of all greenhouse gas contributions, (ignoring water vapor).
To properly represent the total relative impacts of Earth’s greenhouse gases Table 3 (below) factors in the effect of water vapor on the system.
3. Table 3, shows what happens when the effect of water vapor is factored in, and together with all other greenhouse gases expressed as a relative % of the total greenhouse effect.
TABLE 3.Role of Atmospheric Greenhouse Gases (man-made and natural) as a % of Relative
Contribution to the “Greenhouse Effect”
Total atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) — both man-made and natural– is only about 3.62% of the overall greenhouse effect— a big difference from the 72.37% figure in Table 2, which ignored water!
Water vapor, the most significant greenhouse gas, comes from natural sources and is responsible for roughly 95% of the greenhouse effect (4). Among climatologists this is common knowledge but among special interests, certain governmental groups, and news reporters this fact is under-emphasized or just ignored altogether.
Conceding that it might be “a little misleading” to leave water vapor out, they nonetheless defend the practice by stating that it is “customary” to do so!
4. Of course, even among the remaining 5% of non-water vapor greenhouse gases, humans contribute only a very small part (and human contributions to water vapor are negligible).
Constructed from data in Table 1, the charts (below) illustrate graphically how much of each greenhouse gas is natural vs how much is man-made. These allocations are used for the next and final step in this analysis– total man-made contributions to the greenhouse effect. Units are expressed to 3 significant digits in order to reduce rounding errors for those who wish to walk through the calculations, not to imply numerical precision as there is some variation among various researchers.
5. To finish with the math, by calculating the product of the adjusted CO2 contribution to greenhouse gases (3.618%) and % of CO2 concentration from anthropogenic (man-made) sources (3.225%), we see that only (0.03618 X 0.03225) or 0.117% of the greenhouse effect is due to atmospheric CO2 from human activity. The other greenhouse gases are similarly calculated and are summarized below.
TABLE 4a.Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the “Greenhouse Effect,” expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)This is the statistically correct way to represent relative human contributions to the greenhouse effect.
From Table 4a, both natural and man-made greenhouse contributions are illustrated in this chart, in gray and green, respectively. For clarity only the man-made (anthropogenic) contributions are labeled on the chart.
♦ Water vapor, responsible for 95% of Earth’s greenhouse effect, is 99.999% natural (some argue, 100%). Even if we wanted to we can do nothing to change this.
♦ Anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contributions cause only about 0.117% of Earth’s greenhouse effect, (factoring in water vapor). This is insignificant!
♦ Adding up all anthropogenic greenhouse sources, the total human contribution to the greenhouse effect is around 0.28% (factoring in water vapor).
The Kyoto Protocol calls for mandatory carbon dioxide reductions of 30% from developed countries like the U.S. Reducing man-made CO2 emissions this much would have an undetectable effect on climate while having a devastating effect on the U.S. economy. Can you drive your car 30% less, reduce your winter heating 30%? Pay 20-50% more for everything from automobiles to zippers? And that is just a down payment, with more sacrifices to come later.
Such drastic measures, even if imposed equally on all countries around the world, would reduce total human greenhouse contributions from CO2 by about 0.035%.
My Comment
Readers may have wondered, as I have, how the typical Earth Energy Balance diagrams can show surface solar radiation amounting to ~161 W/m2 and downwelling IR atmospheric radiation ~333 W/m2, more than twice as much. This despite the fact that shorter wavelengths are more energetic and longer wavelengths have less energy.
Part of the problem lies in calculating the conversion from radiation amounts to energy. The formula is Energy level E = pV, where p is the Planck constant and V is the frequency. Too often the shortcut is to assume the average frequency of visible light as the conversion factor. That is a reasonable assumption for sunlight, but greatly exaggerates the energy of LWIR, which is 10 to 20 times longer than sunlight wavelengths.
In the tables above Dr. Singer did all the calculations considering each GHG’s volume and adjusted it by its ability to absorb IR radiation and the energy carried by each IR frequency.
Footnote
A comment below dismisses Fred Singer’s expertise, likely based on a popular climate paradigm that is logical, simple and wrong. To understand the flaws in thinking about earth’s climate, see this post:
Raymond notified me that this new repository is live and standalone with some improvements. The previous location links are gone and the infographics are available as described below.
The World of CO₂” charts are officially hosted here only!
This post is to announce that Raymond Inauen of RIC-Communications has a website up for the public to access a series of infographics regarding CO2 and climate science. As seen above, the website is here:
Readers will be aware of previous posts on the four themes to be discovered. Raymond introduces this resource in this way:
WELCO₂ME
Would you like to learn more about CO₂ so you can have informed conversations about climate policy and future energy investments? Or would you rather pass judgment on CO₂ after learning about the basics? Then this is the website for you.
There are 29 infographic images that can be downloaded in four PDF files. Thanks again, Raymond for your interest and efforts to make essential scientific information available to one and all.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius proposed a model predicting that increased concentration of carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere would result in a warming of the planet. In his model, the warming effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapour in preventing heat flow from the Earth’ s surface (now known as the “Greenhouse Effect”) are counteracted by a cooling effect where the same gasses are responsiblefor the radiation of heat to space from the atmosphere. His analysis found that there was a net warming effect and his model has remained the foundation of the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect—Global Warming hypothesis.
This paper attempts to quantify the parameters in his equations but on evaluation his model cannot produce thermodynamic equilibrium. A modified model is proposed which reveals that increased atmospheric emissivity enhances the ability of the atmosphere to radiate heat to space overcoming the cooling effect resulting in a net cooling of the planet. In consideration of this result, there is a need for greenhouse effect—global warming models to be revised.
1. Introduction
In 1896 Arrhenius proposed that changes in the levels of “carbonic acid” (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature of the Earth. This has come to be known as the greenhouse effect. Arrhenius’ paper, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground”, was published in Philosophical Magazine. Arrhenius concludes:
“If the quantity of carbonic acid in the air should sink to one-half its present percentage, the temperature would fall by about 4˚; a diminution to one-quarter would reduce the temperature by 8˚. On the other hand, any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth’s surface by 4˚; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8˚ ” [ 2 ].
It is interesting to note that Arrhenius considered this greenhouse effect a positive thing if we were to avoid the ice ages of the past. Nevertheless, Arrhenius’ theory has become the foundation of the enhanced greenhouse effect―global warming hypothesis in the 21st century. His model remains the basis for most modern energy equilibrium models.
2. Arrhenius’ Energy Equilibrium Model
Arrhenius’ proposed a two-part energy equilibrium model in which the atmosphere radiates the same amount of heat to space as it receives and, likewise, the ground transfers the same amount of heat to the atmosphere and to space as it receives. The model contains the following assumptions:
• Heat conducted from the center of the Earth is neglected.
• Heat flow by convection between the surface and the atmosphere and throughout the atmosphere remains constant.
• Cloud cover remains constant. This is questionable but allows the model to be quantified.
Part 1: Equilibrium of the Air
The balance of heat flow to and from the air (or atmosphere) has four components as shown in Figure 1. The arrow labelled S1 indicates the solar energy absorbed by the atmosphere. R indicates the infra-red radiation from the surface of the Earth to the atmosphere, M is the quantity of heat “conveyed” to the atmosphere by convection and Q1 represents heat loss from the atmosphere to space by radiation. All quantities are measured in terms of energy per unit area per unit time (W/m2).
Figure 1. Model of the energy balance of the atmosphere. The heat received by the atmosphere ( R+M+S1 ) equals the heat lost to space (Q1). In this single layer atmospheric model, the absorbing and emitting layers are one and the same.
Part 2: Thermal Equilibrium of the Ground
In the second part of his model, Arrhenius describes the heat flow equilibrium at the “ground” or surface of the Earth. There are four contributions to the surface heat flow as shown in Figure 2. S2 is the solar energy absorbed by the surface, R is the infra-red radiation emitted from the surface and transferred to the atmosphere, N is the heat conveyed to the atmosphere by convection and Q2 is the heat radiated to space from the surface. Note: Here Arrhenius uses the term N for the convective heat flow. It is equivalent to the term M used in the air equilibrium model.
Figure 2. The energy balance at the surface of the Earth. The energy received by the ground is equal to the energy lost.
3. Finding the Temperature of the Earth
Arrhenius combined these equations and, by eliminating the temperature of the atmosphere which according to Arrhenius “has no considerable interest”, he arrived at the following relationship:
ΔTg is the expected change in the temperature of the Earth for a change in atmospheric emissivity from ε1 to ε2. Arrhenius determined that the current transparency of the atmosphere was 0.31 and, therefore the emissivity/absorptivity ε1 = 0.69. The current mean temperature for the surface of the Earth can be assumed to be To = 288 K.
Figure 3. Arrhenius’ model is used to determine the mean surface temperature of the Earth as a function of atmospheric emissivity ε. For initial conditions, ε = 0.69 and the surface temperature is 288 K. An increase in atmospheric emissivity produces an increase in the surface temperature of the Earth.
Arrhenius estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would produce a change in emissivity from 0.69 to 0.78 raising the temperature of the surface by approximately 6 K. This value would be considered high by modern climate researchers; however, Arrhenius’ modelhas become the foundation of the greenhouse-global warming theory today. Arrhenius made no attempt to quantify the specific heat flow values in his model. At the time of his paper there was little quantitative data available relating to heat flow for the Earth.
4. Evaluation of Arrhenius’ Model under Present Conditions
More recently, Kiehl and Trenberth (K & T) [ 3 ] and others have quantified the heat flow values used in Arrhenius’ model. K & T’s data are summarised in Figure 4.
The reflected solar radiation, which plays no part in the energy balance described in this model, is ignored. R is the net radiative transfer from the ground to the atmosphere derived from K & T’s diagram. The majority of the heat radiated to space originates from the atmosphere (Q1 > Q2). And the majority of the heat lost from the ground is by means of convection to the atmosphere (M > R + Q2).
Figure 4. Model of the mean energy budget of the earth as determined by Kiehl and Trenberth.
Q2=(1−ε)σνT4e(5)
Substituting ε = 0.567, ν = 1.0 and Tg = 288 K we get: Q2=149.2 W/m2
Using Arrhenius value of 0.69 for the atmospheric emissivity Q2 = 120.9 W/m2.
Both values are significantly more than the 40 W/m2 determined by K & T.
The equation will not balance, something is clearly wrong.
Figure 5 illustrates the problem.
Equation (5) is based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law which is an empirical relationship which describes the amount of radiation from a hot surface passing through a vacuum to a region of space at a temperature of absolute zero. This is clearly not the case for radiation passing through the Earth’s atmosphere and as a result the amount of heat lost by radiation has been grossly overestimated.
No amount of adjusting parameters will allow this relationship to produce
sensible quantities and the required net heat flow of 40 W/m2.
This error affects the equilibrium heat flow values in Arrhenius’ model and the model is not able to produce a reasonable approximation of present day conditions as shown in Table 1. In particular, the convective heat flow takes on very different values from the two parts of the model. The values M and N in the table should be equivalent.
5. A New Energy Equilibrium Model
A modified model is proposed which will determine the change in surface temperature of the Earth caused by a change in the emissivity of the atmosphere (as would occur when greenhouse gas concentrations change). The model incorporates the following ideas:
1) The total heat radiated from the Earth ( Q1+Q2Q1+Q2 ) will remain constant and equal to the total solar radiation absorbed by the Earth ( S1+S2S1+S2 ).
2) Convective heat flow M remains constant. Convective heat flow between two regions is dependent on their temperature difference, as expressed by Newton’s Law of cooling1. The temperature difference between the atmosphere and the ground is maintained at 8.9 K (see Equation 7(a)). M = 102 W/m2 (K & T).
3) A surface temperature of 288 K and an atmospheric emissivity of 0.567 (Equation (7b)) is assumed for initial or present conditions.
Equation (9) represents the new model relating the emissivity of the atmosphere ε to the surface temperature Tg. Results from this model are shown in Table 2. The table shows the individual heat flow quantities and the temperature of the surface of the Earth that is required to maintain equilibrium:
The table shows that as the value of the atmospheric emissivity ε is increased less heat flows from the Earth’s surface to space, Q2 decreases. This is what would be expected. As well, more heat is radiated to space from the atmosphere; Q1 increases. This is also expected. The total energy radiated to space Q1+Q2=235 W/m2 . A plot of the resultant surface temperature Tg versus the atmospheric emissivity ε is shown below Figure 6.
Figure 6. Plot of the Earth’s mean surface temperature as a function of the atmospheric emissivity. This model predicts that the temperature of the Earth will decrease as the emissivity of the atmosphere increases.
6. Conclusion
Arrhenius identified the fact that the emissivity/absorptivity of the atmosphere increased with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and this would affect the temperature of the Earth. He understood that infra-red active gases in the atmosphere contribute both to the absorption of radiation from the Earth’s surface and to the emission of radiation to space from the atmosphere. These were competing processes; one trapped heat, warming the Earth; the other released heat, cooling the Earth. He derived a relationship between the surface temperature and the emissivity of the atmosphere and deduced that an increase in emissivity led to an increase in the surface temperature of the Earth.
However, his model is unable to produce sensible results for the heat flow quantities as determined by K & T and others. In particular, his model and all similar recent models, grossly exaggerate the quantity of radiative heat flow from the Earth’s surface to space. A new energy equilibrium model has been proposed which is consistent with the measured heat flow quantities and maintains thermal equilibrium. This model predicts the changes in the heat flow quantities in response to changes in atmospheric emissivity and reveals that Arrhenius’ prediction is reversed. Increasing atmospheric emissivity due to increased greenhouse gas concentrations will have a net cooling effect.
It is therefore proposed by the author that any attempt to curtail emissions of CO2
will have no effect in curbing global warming.
This post is to announce that Raymond Inauen of RIC-Communications has a website up for the public to access a series of infographics regarding CO2 and climate science. As seen above, the website is here:
Readers will be aware of previous posts on the four themes to be discovered. Raymond introduces this resource in this way:
WELCO₂ME
Would you like to learn more about CO₂ so you can have informed conversations about climate policy and future energy investments? Or would you rather pass judgment on CO₂ after learning about the basics? Then this is the website for you.
There are 29 infographic images that can be downloaded in four PDF files. Thanks again, Raymond for your interest and efforts to make essential scientific information available to one and all.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through December 2022. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. In 2021 the summer NH summer spike was joined by warming in the Tropics but offset by a drop in SH SSTs, which raised the Global anomaly slightly over the mean.
Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean. Oct./Nov. temps dropped in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. Now in December an uptick in SH has lifted the Global anomaly slightly above the mean.
A longer view of SSTs
To enlarge image open in new tab.
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. Now in 2021-22 there are again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, now in October and November by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
But the peaks coming nearly every summer in HadSST require a different picture. Let’s look at August, the hottest month in the North Atlantic from the Kaplan dataset.
The AMO Index is from from Kaplan SST v2, the unaltered and not detrended dataset. By definition, the data are monthly average SSTs interpolated to a 5×5 grid over the North Atlantic basically 0 to 70N. The graph shows August warming began after 1992 up to 1998, with a series of matching years since, including 2020, dropping down in 2021. Because the N. Atlantic has partnered with the Pacific ENSO recently, let’s take a closer look at some AMO years in the last 2 decades.
This graph shows monthly AMO temps for some important years. The Peak years were 1998, 2010 and 2016, with the latter emphasized as the most recent. The other years show lesser warming, with 2007 emphasized as the coolest in the last 20 years. Note the red 2018 line is at the bottom of all these tracks. The heavy blue line shows that 2022 started warm, dropped to the bottom and stayed near the lower tracks. Note the strength of this summer’s warming pulse, in September peaking to nearly 24 Celsius, a new record for this dataset. In November the SSTs were closer to the middle.
Summary
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? If the pattern of recent years continues, NH SST anomalies will likely decline in coming months, along with ENSO also weakening will probably determine a cooler outcome.
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
Footnote Rare Triple Dip La Nina Likely This Winter
The unusual weather phenomenon might result in the snowiest season in years for some parts of the country.
The long-range winter forecast could be good news for skiers living in the certain parts of the U.S. and Canada. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) estimates that the chance of a La Niña occurring this fall and early winter is 86 percent, and the main beneficiary is expected to be mountains in the Northwest and Northern Rockies.
If NOAA’s predictions pan out, this will be the third La Niña in a row—a rare phenomenon called a “Triple Dip La Niña.” Between now and 1950, only two Triple Dips have occurred.
Smith also notes that winters on the East Coast are similarly tricky to predict during La Niña years. “In the West, you’re simply looking for above-average precipitation, which typically translates to above-average snowfall, but in the East, you have temperature to worry about as well … that adds another complication.” In other words, increased precip could lead to more rain if the temperatures aren’t cooperative.
The presence of a La Niña doesn’t always translate to higher snowfall in the North, either, as evidenced by last ski season, which saw few powder days.
However, in consecutive La Niña triplets, one winter usually involves above-average snowfall. While this historical pattern isn’t tied to any documented meteorological function, it could mean that the odds of a snowy 2022’-’23 season are higher, given the previous two La Niñas didn’t deliver the goods.
This post is about proving that CO2 changes in response to temperature changes, not the other way around, as is often claimed. In order to do that we need two datasets: one for measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time and one for estimates of Global Mean Temperature changes over time.
Climate science is unsettling because past data are not fixed, but change later on. I ran into this previously and now again in 2021 and 2022 when I set out to update an analysis done in 2014 by Jeremy Shiers (discussed in a previous post reprinted at the end). Jeremy provided a spreadsheet in his essay Murray Salby Showed CO2 Follows Temperature Now You Can Too posted in January 2014. I downloaded his spreadsheet intending to bring the analysis up to the present to see if the results hold up. The two sources of data were:
Uploading the CO2 dataset showed that many numbers had changed (why?).
The blue line shows annual observed differences in monthly values year over year, e.g. June 2020 minus June 2019 etc. The first 12 months (1979) provide the observed starting values from which differentials are calculated. The orange line shows those CO2 values changed slightly in the 2020 dataset vs. the 2014 dataset, on average +0.035 ppm. But there is no pattern or trend added, and deviations vary randomly between + and -. So last year I took the 2020 dataset to replace the older one for updating the analysis.
Now I find the NOAA dataset starting in 2021 has almost completely new values due to a method shift in February 2021, requiring a recalibration of all previous measurements. The new picture of ΔCO2 is graphed below.
The method shift is reported at a NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory webpage, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) WMO Scale, with a justification for the difference between X2007 results and the new results from X2019 now in force. The orange line shows that the shift has resulted in higher values, especially early on and a general slightly increasing trend over time. However, these are small variations at the decimal level on values 340 and above. Further, the graph shows that yearly differentials month by month are virtually the same as before. Thus I redid the analysis with the new values.
Global Temperature Anomalies (ΔTemp)
The other time series was the record of global temperature anomalies according to RSS. The current RSS dataset is not at all the same as the past.
Here we see some seriously unsettling science at work. The purple line is RSS in 2014, and the blue is RSS as of 2020. Some further increases appear in the gold 2022 rss dataset. The red line shows alterations from the old to the new. There is a slight cooling of the data in the beginning years, then the three versions mostly match until 1997, when systematic warming enters the record. From 1997/5 to 2003/12 the average anomaly increases by 0.04C. After 2004/1 to 2012/8 the average increase is 0.15C. At the end from 2012/9 to 2013/12, the average anomaly was higher by 0.21. The 2022 version added slight warming over 2020 values.
RSS continues that accelerated warming to the present, but it cannot be trusted. And who knows what the numbers will be a few years down the line? As Dr. Ole Humlum said some years ago (regarding Gistemp): “It should however be noted, that a temperature record which keeps on changing the past hardly can qualify as being correct.”
Given the above manipulations, I went instead to the other satellite dataset UAH version 6. UAH has also made a shift by changing its baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020. This resulted in systematically reducing the anomaly values, but did not alter the pattern of variation over time. For comparison, here are the two records with measurements through December 2022.
Comparing UAH temperature anomalies to NOAA CO2 changes.
Here are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.
Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. As stated above, CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example June 2022 minus June 2021). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month.
The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1979 with a simple mathematical formula:
For each subsequent year, the co2 level for each month was generated
CO2 this month this year = a + b × Temp this month this year + CO2 this month last year
Jeremy used Python to estimate a and b, but I used his spreadsheet to guess values that place for comparison the observed and calculated CO2 levels on top of each other.
In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9985 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically.
Previous Post: What Causes Rising Atmospheric CO2?
This post is prompted by a recent exchange with those reasserting the “consensus” view attributing all additional atmospheric CO2 to humans burning fossil fuels.
The IPCC doctrine which has long been promoted goes as follows. We have a number over here for monthly fossil fuel CO2 emissions, and a number over there for monthly atmospheric CO2. We don’t have good numbers for the rest of it-oceans, soils, biosphere–though rough estimates are orders of magnitude higher, dwarfing human CO2. So we ignore nature and assume it is always a sink, explaining the difference between the two numbers we do have. Easy peasy, science settled.
What about the fact that nature continues to absorb about half of human emissions, even while FF CO2 increased by 60% over the last 2 decades? What about the fact that in 2020 FF CO2 declined significantly with no discernable impact on rising atmospheric CO2?
These and other issues are raised by Murray Salby and others who conclude that it is not that simple, and the science is not settled. And so these dissenters must be cancelled lest the narrative be weakened.
The non-IPCC paradigm is that atmospheric CO2 levels are a function of two very different fluxes. FF CO2 changes rapidly and increases steadily, while Natural CO2 changes slowly over time, and fluctuates up and down from temperature changes. The implications are that human CO2 is a simple addition, while natural CO2 comes from the integral of previous fluctuations. Jeremy Shiers has a series of posts at his blog clarifying this paradigm. See Increasing CO2 Raises Global Temperature Or Does Increasing Temperature Raise CO2 Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
The following graph which shows the change in CO2 levels (rather than the levels directly) makes this much clearer.
Note the vertical scale refers to the first differential of the CO2 level not the level itself. The graph depicts that change rate in ppm per year.
There are big swings in the amount of CO2 emitted. Taking the mean as 1.6 ppmv/year (at a guess) there are +/- swings of around 1.2 nearly +/- 100%.
And, surprise surprise, the change in net emissions of CO2 is very strongly correlated with changes in global temperature.
This clearly indicates the net amount of CO2 emitted in any one year is directly linked to global mean temperature in that year.
For any given year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the sum of
all the net annual emissions of CO2
in all previous years.
For each year the net annual emission of CO2 is proportional to the annual global mean temperature.
This means the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be related to the sum of temperatures in previous years.
So CO2 levels are not directly related to the current temperature but the integral of temperature over previous years.
The following graph again shows observed levels of CO2 and global temperatures but also has calculated levels of CO2 based on sum of previous years temperatures (dotted blue line).
Summary:
The massive fluxes from natural sources dominate the flow of CO2 through the atmosphere. Human CO2 from burning fossil fuels is around 4% of the annual addition from all sources. Even if rising CO2 could cause rising temperatures (no evidence, only claims), reducing our emissions would have little impact.
Addendum:
Roland Van den Broek makes the valid point in his comments below that any two data sets generally trending positive will show a high degree of correlation, not proving any causation. Certainly, UAH reports rising GMA (Global Mean Anomalies) and MLO reports rising CO2. Note however that Δ GMA predicts Δ CO2 with a correlation of 0.9985. For comparison, I generated GMA from CO2 differentials, resulting in a lower correlation of 0.6030. I conclude that Δ CO2 ⇒ Δ GMA is spurious, while Δ GMA ⇒ Δ CO2 is real.
The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022 Now at year end 2022, we have again global temp anomaly matching zero warming since 1995. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).
For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~55 ppm, a 15% increase.
Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.
The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.
Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles.
Update August 3, 2021
Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT
With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you will hear a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino was fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. May NH land and SH ocean showed temps matching March, reversing an upward blip in April, and then June was virtually the mean since 1995.
UAH has updated their tlt (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for December 2022. Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month came ahead of updated records from HadSST4. I have previously posted on SSTs using HadSST4 Ocean Temps Dropping November 2022This month also has a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years. Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. However, in December temps in all land and ocean regions dropped sharply.
Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values change with the baseline reference shift.
Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.
Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus the cooling oceans now portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6 which are now posted for December. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.
The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.
Note 2020 was warmed mainly by a spike in February in all regions, and secondarily by an October spike in NH alone. In 2021, SH and the Tropics both pulled the Global anomaly down to a new low in April. Then SH and Tropics upward spikes, along with NH warming brought Global temps to a peak in October. That warmth was gone as November 2021 ocean temps plummeted everywhere. After an upward bump 01/2022 temps reversed and plunged downward in June. After an upward spike in July, ocean air everywhere cooled in August and also in September. Now in December 2022, sharp cooling everywhere brings the global anomaly to zero.
Land Air Temperatures Tracking Downward in Seesaw Pattern
We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for December is below.
Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. Land temps are dominated by NH with a 2021 spike in January, then dropping before rising in the summer to peak in October 2021. As with the ocean air temps, all that was erased in November with a sharp cooling everywhere. Land temps dropped sharply for four months, even more than did the Oceans. March and April 2022 saw some warming, reversed In May when all land regions cooled pulling down the global anomaly. In July, Tropics and SH land rose sharply, NH slightly, pulling up the Global land anomaly. Note the sharp drop in SH land temps in August and September, while NH Land rose, leaving the Global anomaly unchanged. Nov. and Dec. saw steep declines in air temps over land.
The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980
The chart shows monthly Global anomalies starting 01/1980 to present. The average monthly anomaly is -0.06, for this period of more than four decades. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. A small upward bump in 2021 has been reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022. March and April brought warmer Global temps, reversed in May and the June anomaly was almost zero. With the sharp drop in Nov. and Dec. temps, there is only about 0.1C increase since 1980.
TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST3, but are now showing the same pattern. It seems obvious that despite the three El Ninos, their warming has not persisted, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.
BizNews TV interviewed Dr. John Christy last week as shown in the video above. For those who prefer to read what was said, I provide a lightly edited transcript below in italics with my bolds and added images. BN refers to questions from the interviewer and JC refers to responses from Christy.
BN: Joining me today is Dr John Christy, climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Alabama State climatologist since 2000. Dr Christy, thank you so much for your time. You’ve described yourself as a climate nerd and apparently you were 12 when your unwavering desire to understand weather and climate started. Why climate?
JC: Well I think it was more like 10 years old when I was fascinated with some unusual weather events that happened in my home area of California. So that began a fascination for me, and I wanted to try to figure out why things happen the way they did. Why did one year have more rain–that’s a big story in California, does it rain or not–and another year would be very dry. Why were the mountains covered with snow in one April and not another. In fact I have here April 1967 that I recorded as a teenager. This has been a passion of mine forever, and as it turns out now that I’m as old as I am, I still can’t figure out why one year is wetter than the other.
BN: Well you seem to be getting a lot closer than most people would. I think it was in 1989 when you and NASA scientist Roy Spencer pioneered a new method of measuring and monitoring temperature recordsvia satellites, since that time up until now. Why did you feel you needed to develop a new method to begin with, and how did it differ in terms of the readings of established methods at the time?
JC: Well the issue was we only had surface temperature measurements and they are scattered over the world. They don’t cover much of the world at all, actually mainly just the land regions and scattered places on the ocean. And the measurement itself is not that robust. The stations move, the instruments changed through time, and so it’s a very difficult thing to detect. In fact a small little change in the area right around the station can really affect the temperature of that station
So Roy Spencer and Dick Mcknight came up with an idea about looking at some satellite data. This is the temperature of the deep layer of the atmosphere, so this is like the surface to about 8000 meters. And so if we could see the temperature of that bulk atmospheric layer, we would have a very robust measurement, and the microwave sensors on the NOAA Polo orbiting satellites did precisely that. And so we were the first to really put those data into a simple data set that had the temperature, at that time, for month by month since about November 1978.
BN: Okay, and how do readings differ from the climate science at the time?
JC:First of all they differed because we had a global measurement. We really did see the entire Globe from satellite, because the orbit of that satellite is polar and the Earth spins around underneath. So every day we have 14 orbits as the Earth spins around underneath. We see the entire planet so that’s one big difference.
The other one is that the actual result did not show as much warming as what the surface temperatures showed. And we’re doing even more work now to demonstrate that a lot of the surface stations are spuriously affected by the growth of an infrastructure around them. And so there’s kind of a false warming signal there. You don’t get the background climate signal with surface temperature measurements; you get a bit of what’s happening in the local area.
BN: Your research has to do with testing the theories posited by climate model forecasts, so you don’t actually do any modeling yourself. But what criteria do you use to test these theories?
JC: That’s a very good question, because in climate you hear all kinds of claims and theories being thrown out there. For a lot of people who don’t really understand the climate system it’s a quick and easy answer just to say: Oh humans caused that, you know it’s global warming, something like that is the answer. When in fact the climate system is very complex, so we look at these claims and Roy Spencer and I are just a few of the people around the world that actually build data sets from scratch. I mean we start with the photon counts of the satellite radiometers, or the original paper records of 19th century East Africa, for example. We do all this from scratch so that we can test the claims that people make.
Once we build the data set, we test it to make sure we have confidence in the data set, that it’s telling us a truth about what’s happening over time. And then we check the claim. So for example, we make surface temperature data sets that go back to the 19th century. Someone will say: Well this is now the hottest decade, or that more records happen this decade than in the past. And we can demonstrate, in the United States especially, that’s not the case. You would need to go back to the 1930s if you want to see real record temperatures that occurred at that time.
And for climate models we like to use the satellite data set since it’s a robust deep layer measurement; it’s measuring lots of mass of the atmosphere, the heat content really. That’s a direct value we can get out of the climate model, so we are comparing Apples to Apples: What the satellite produces and observes is what the climate model also generates, and we can compare them one to one.
In a paper Ross McKitrick and I wrote a couple of years ago, we found that 100 of the climate models we’re warming the atmosphere faster than it was actually warming. So that’s not a good result if you’re trying to test your theory of how the climate works with the model against what actually happens.
BN: How much do you think the deeply over-exaggerated predictions of Doom and Gloom have to do with the methodology substantiated by confirmation bias?
JC: That’s an interesting question because we’re a bit confused as well. We have been publishing these papers since 1994 that have demonstrated models warm too much relative to the actual climate, and yet we don’t see an improvement in climate models and trying to match reality with their model output. Now I think a number of modelers understand that: yes the there is a difference there and the models are just too hot. But what is the process that’s gone wrong in the models is a difficult question for these folks. Because models have hundreds of places you can turn a little knob, change a coefficient, and that will change the result. It’s not a physical thing, it’s not based on physics; it’s the model parameterizations— the little pieces of the model that try to represent an actual part of the atmosphere. For example, when do clouds form? That’s a pretty big question. How much humidity in the atmosphere is required to create a cloud? Because once the cloud forms it reflects sunlight and cools the Earth. So that’s it that’s one of the big questions.
So in testing the models we like to use the bulk atmospheric temperature; it’d a very direct measurement that models produce and so we can then say there’s a problem here with climate models.
BN: To what degree did your observation on data differ from their forecasts?
Generally it’s about a factor of two. At times it’s been more, but on average the latest models (CMIP6) for the Deep layer of the atmosphere are warming about twice too fast, and that’s a real problem. I think when now we’re looking at over 40 years with which we can test these models, and they’re already that far off.
Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models. Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa.
So we should not use them to to tell us what’s going to happen in the future since they haven’t even gotten us to the right place in the last 40 years.
BN: Given that your real world data refuted what the forecasts were every time for decades, why then (and I recognize that this is conjecture) why are, let’s say, 97 or 99 % of scientists so firmly behind climate crisis narrative?
JC: Yeah I don’t know how many are really fully behind that crisis climate narrative. I saw a recent survey where about 55 percent might have been of the opinion that the climate warming was going to be a problem. Warming itself is not a problem: I mean the Earth has been warmer in the past than it is today, so the Earth has survived that before. And I don’t think putting extra plant food in the atmosphere is going to be a real problem for us to overcome. I do think the world is going to warm some from the extra CO2, but there are a lot of benefits that come from that.
You’re you’re dealing with a question about human nature and funding and so on. I think we all know that the more dramatic the story is, especially in the political world, the more attention you will get. Therefore your work can be highlighted and that helps you with funding and attention and so on. And part of what’s going on here. Then there’s the other real stronger political narrative: that there are groups and in the world political Elite that like to have a narrative that scares people, so that they can then offer a solution. And so it’s a simple way to say: elect me to this office and I will be able to solve this problem.
Then you are facing people like us who actually produce the data and we can report on extreme events and so on and say: Well you know there isn’t any change in these extreme events, so what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? And then we look at the other side of that issue and say: Okay if you actually implement this regulation or this law, it’s not going to make any difference on the climate end, so it’s a you kind of lose on two ends on that story.
BN: You’re a distinguished professor of atmospheric science and also director of Earth Sciences also at Alabama in Huntsville, these are prominent positions. How have you managed to hold on to them with climate views that are so divergent from the norm?
JC: Well the environment in the state of Alabama is different than what you have in Washington. I’m from California way across the country, and I tell people that one of the reasons I like to live in Alabama because in Alabama you can call a duck a duck; that you can just be direct about what’s going on and and you’re not going to be given the evil eye or cast out. As it is now in the climate establishment, you know, saying that all the models are warming too much and that there is not a disaster arising that causes great consternation.Because the narrative has been built over the last 30 years that we are supposed to be in a catastrophe. To come out and say, well here’s the data and the data show there is no catastrophe looming; we’re doing fine, the world is doing fine, human life is thriving in places it’s allowed to. So what’s the problem here you’re trying to solve.
BN:Did you ever manage to get your findings to policy makers that have influence to do something about it?
[An important proof against the CO2 global warming claim was included in John Christy’s testimony 29 March 2017 at the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. The text and diagram below are from that document which can be accessed here.
IPCC Assessment Reports show that the IPCC climate models performed best versus observations when they did not include extra GHGs and this result can be demonstrated with a statistical model as well.
Figure 5. Simplification of IPCC AR5 shown above in Fig. 4. The colored lines represent the range of results for the models and observations. The trends here represent trends at different levels of the tropical atmosphere from the surface up to 50,000 ft. The gray lines are the bounds for the range of observations, the blue for the range of IPCC model results without extra GHGs and the red for IPCC model results with extra GHGs.The key point displayed is the lack of overlap between the GHG model results (red) and the observations (gray). The nonGHG model runs (blue) overlap the observations almost completely.
JC: Well, I’ve been to Congress 20 times, testified before hearings. So the information is there and available, but I can’t force Congress to make legislation that matches the real world. The Congressional world is a political world, and things happen there that are kind of out of my reach and ability to influence.
BN: According to your research, you’ve also said that the climate models underestimate negative feedback loops. Can you explain to me what is this mechanism and the effect of overestimation of the loops on understanding climate for what it is?
JC: That’s a very complicated issue, and I don’t understand it all for sure, but we can say just from some general results and general observation what’s going on here. One of those General observations is that when a climate model warms up the atmosphere one degree Kelvin, it sends out 1.4 watts per metersquared so the air atmosphere warms up and energy escapes to space 1.4 watts. When we use actual observations of the atmosphere, when the real atmosphere warms up one Kelvin it sends out 2.6 watts of energy. That’s almost twice as much so that tells you right there that the climate models are retaining or holding on to energy that the real world allows to escape when it warms. So that’s a negative feedback: as the atmosphere warms for a bit the real real world knows how to let that heat escape; whereas the models don’t and they retain it and that’s why they keep building up heat over time.
BN: What other variables do you look at?
JC: The state climatologists I deal a lot get very practical questions that people ask. They want to know: is it getting hot or is it getting wetter. Are rain storms getting heavier and are the Hurricanes getting worse and so on. I actually wrote a booklet called a practical guide to climate change in Alabama. But it covers a lot of the country as well. It’s free, you can download it from the first page of my website The Alabama State climatologist. I answer a lot of these very practical questions and as we go down the list: droughts are not getting worse over time, heavy rainstorms are not getting worse over time, here in the Southeast in fact. Ross McKitrick and I also had a paper where we went back to 1878 and demonstrated that the trends are not significant. Hurricanes are not going up at all; in fact 2022 is going to be one of the quietest that we’ve had in a while. Tornadoes are not becoming more numerous, heat waves are not becoming worse. So one after another, the weather that people really care about, that if it changes could cause problem or catastrophe, we find those events are not changing, they’ve always been around.[Title below in red is link to Christy’s booklet.]
BN: Some of the biggest critics of climate skeptics say: okay yeah it’s not fair one extreme weather event doesn’t say much, but they argue that there are very particular trends that have been on the increase. Recently have you observed this at all?
JC: That’s exactly the kind of thing we build data sets to discover. For example there is a story, and there is some evidence for it, that in the last hundred years there’s been an increase in in heavy rain events in part of our country, not all of it just part of the country. So I built a data set that went back in fact back to the 1860s. And we looked at that very carefully, and found that when you go back far enough, there were a lot of heavy events back then. And so over the long time period of 140 years or more we don’t see an upward trend. It’s unusual in that sample of time 140 years that we don’t see a change in those kind of events. So that’s why I think it has great value to build these data sets so you can specifically answer the question and the claim that is being made
One of the worst ones was made by the New York Times when they were talking about how many record high temperatures occurred in a recent heat wave around the country. So I looked at that carefully, and they were allowing stations to be included that only had 30 years or even less than 30 years of data. Some had a hundred years but a lot of them just had 30 years. Well when you become very systematic, you say: I’m only going to allow stations that have a hundred years so that every station that measured in 2022 can be compared with the entire time series. Then their story falls apart because the 1930s and the 50s were so hot in our country that they still hold the records for the number of high temperature events.
The scary thing for me is that as much as it completely falls apart, there’s no logic to it,
yet it’s still firmly stands as what most people believe.
You have to credit those in the climate establishment and the media or whoever is behind all this, that they have been successful in scaring people about the climate. Because now you find that even in grade school textbooks. Almost every new story that comes out, and this is where this establishment is very good, they make sure every story has some kind of line in it about climate change. They don’t ever go back and talk to someone who actually builds these data sets who says is that really the worst it’s been was 120 years ago. They just make those claims.
Other than the fact that sea level is rising a bit, the extreme events are just not there to really cause problems now. We are in a problem of having greater damages occur because of extreme events, and mainly because we’ve just built so much more stuff and placed It In harm’s way. Our coastlines are crowded with Condominiums, entertainment parks and retirement villages, and so on. There’s so many more of them that when a hurricane does come, it’s going to wipe out a lot more and so for the absolute value of those damages has gone up. But the number of hurricanes, their strength and so on, the background climate has not caused that problem. It’s just that we like to build things in places that are dangerous.
We have records of sea level rise, and it’s on the order of about an inch per decade, except in places where the land’s sinking. You can find that on the Louisiana Gulf Coast and places like that, but otherwise it’s about an inch per decade. I tell folks that an inch per decade, two and a half centimeters a decade is not your problem. It’s 10 feet in six hours from the next hurricane that’s your problem. If you can withstand a rise of sea level of 10 feet in six hours then you’re probably going to be okay. But if you can’t then a hurricane can really cause problems, and so we just have more exposure to that kind of his situation now than we’ve had before.
BN: What about the trend with sea level rise? Should we be worried about future Generations having to deal with issues that might not affect us in our lifetime but eventually will threaten their lives?
I think your listeners would need to understand that sea level is a dynamic variable–It goes up, it goes down. It has been over a hundred meters lower than today just in the last 25,000 years, and there was a period from about 15 000 years ago to 8 000 years ago where the sea level rose about 12 centimeters per decade for seven thousand years. That’s a lot more than two and a half centimeters a decade as it’s doing now, so the world has managed to deal with rising sea levels before. If we go back to the last warm period about 130 000 years ago, the sea level then was higher than it is now by about five meters or so. So just naturally we would expect at least another five meters of sea level; it won’t happen tomorrow, it won’t happen this Century. But slowly it will likely continue to rise and so that should be placed in your thinking if you’re building a dock for say a military port or something you want to last a long time. Put a cushion in there, a way to handle another half meter of seat level rise in the next hundred years, and you should be okay.
BN: About your temperature records: How much has the Earth warmed let’s say over the last four years?
JC: Yes. With this November we finished 43 years of measurements. In that time the temperature has risen half a degree Celsius. And you might want to look at other things about the world. World agricultural production has expanded tremendously. Nations are now exporting grain more than they had before, because people are pretty smart and figure out how to do things better all the time. Growing food is one thing they figured out how to do better as time passed, so the climate warming of a half degree has not caused a a major catastrophe at all. Wealth has increased around the planet, now some governments are trying to prevent you from growing your wealth, but that’s a hard thing to stop people who like to have food; they like to have conveniences in their life and that’s hard to pass laws that say you can’t enjoy the life the way you want to.
BN:How much of the warming are you reliably able to say is as a result of human activity?
JC: Okay. The answer is none in the sense that you said reliably. I can’t come up with an answer for that reliably. Warming from humans assumes warming that is not due to El Nino; or warming that’s not due to volcanic suppression of temperatures earlier in the record, which comes up to about a tenth of a degree per decade.
Are there other factors that we can say for sure have played a role in the incremental warming of the planet over the last few decades. We see that we’ve had a couple of volcanoes in the first half of that period Eyjafjallajökull and Pinatubo and those cool the planet in the first half of that 40 years. So that tilted the trend up and that’s where I come up with a one-tenth per decade is the warming rate, which means the climate is not very sensitive to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas warming. It’s probably half or even less as sensitive as models tend to report.
BN: So if CO2 exposure or insertion into the atmosphere were to double what would the results be?
JC: I actually had a little paper on that and we’re kind of expecting maybe about 2070 or 2080 it will be double from what it was back in 1850. And the warming of that amount uh will be about a degree, 1.3 C is what I calculated. The general rule I found about people is they don’t mind an extra degree on their temperature. In fact if you look at the United States the average American experiences a much warmer temperature now than they did a hundred years ago. Because the average American has moved South; the average American has moved to much warmer climates–California, Arizona Texas, Alabama, Florida and so on. Because cold is not a whole lot of fun. You know, skiing, snowmobiling and ice fishing and so on, that’s fine. But the average person likes it to be warm and so that’s why many people in our country have moved to warmer areas. So I don’t think that 1.3 Kelvin is going to matter much whether people really care about those extreme events and so on.
BN: What do you your temperature records tell you about previous hotter temperatures?
JC: Since 1979, what we see is an upward trend in the in the global temperature that I think is manageable. But it goes up and down the 1997-98 El Nino was a big event and in 2016 El Nino was a big event. We also see the downs that come from a volcano that might go off and cool off the planet. Those are bigger effects than that small trend that’s going up. The global temperature can change by two tenths of a degree from month to month when we’re talking about a tenth per decade. Then people say, you know a month to month we can handle but we can’t handle 20 years worth of a small change. That just doesn’t make sense and and the real world evidence is pretty clear that that humans have done extremely well as our planet has been warming a little bit, whether it’s natural or not.
BN: Can you tell me about the Milankovich Cycles?
Milankovich Cycles are the orbital cycles of the earth orbit around the Sun and its tilt of the axis and the distance from the Sun. It is not a perfect circular orbit around the sun, it’s kind of an ellipse and it changes through time. All those factors work together to put a little bit more solar energy in certain places and less than others. These cycles are likely related to the Ice Ages we talk about.
If you can melt the snow in Canada in the summer, then you won’t have an ice age. So the snow falls in the winter and if you can’t melt the snow in Canada in the summer because the Earth is tilted away a bit in July and August. Then the snow hangs around all summer long, the next winter more snow that piles up the next summer it doesn’t melt and so on the next year. You get this mechanism that adds and extends snow cover leading to an ice age
So the tilt of the axis and other parameters I just mentioned can moderate how much sunlight comes in the summertime in Canada. And it’s up to 100 watts per meter squared which is a lot of energy difference over time. That’s probably the strongest theory that has a good amount of evidence that those orbital changes can cause huge changes in the climate from ice ages to the current interglacial.
BN: There’s claims that the way that humans are living is causing daily Extinction of two to three hundred different species. Is this a natural course of Evolution?
JC: You know 99 % of the species that have ever lived are extinct, so extinction is is pretty natural. Obviously humans cause some extinctions. When you destroy the environment of a small place and that was the only place that particular species lived then yes you know humans caused that extinction Did climate change from humans cause any extinctions? I think that jury is still out because most species love the extra carbon dioxide. Plants do specifically and then everything that eats plants loves that, so you might want to say the extra carbon dioxide actually helped in some sense the whole biosphere.
But I think that what humans do to the surface and to water, if it’s not clean properly and if you just really poison the surface in the air, then that can cause some real problems for the species that are living out there. And that’s why we have rules about not putting poison in air or in the water.
BN: Does that qualify as climate change?
JC: No. To say carbon dioxide is a poison, you really have to scratch your head on that because plants love the stuff. It invigorates the biosphere. When did all of this Greenery evolve and the corals occur and grow and develop? it was when there was two to four or five times as much CO2 as is in the air now. Carbon dioxide invigorates the biosphere, so we’re just actually putting back carbon dioxide that had been in the atmosphere earlier. And I don’t think the world is going to have much problem with that in terms of its biosphere. The issue is about the climate going to become so bad that some things can’t handle it and I don’t really see the evidence for that happening.
BN: Critics of your views on climate have argued that you undercut your credibility by making claims that exceed your data and that you’re unwilling to agree with different findings. How do you respond to that?
JC: Show me a finding and let me look at it and if it’s a valid finding, fine I’ll agree with it. But you know you can find anything on the web these days about claims that someone might make but you show me the evidence. Let me see what you’re complaining about and we can have a discussion about that. I just had a paper published last week on snowfall in the western states of the United States that shows for the main snowfall regions there is no trend in snowfall. The amount of snow that’s falling right now is the same as it was 120 years ago. So snow is still falling out in the western mountains of the United States–that’s evidence, that’s data. And so when someone claims that oh my, snowfall is going away out in the west, I said well well here look at this evidence from real station data that people recorded back in 1890 to now.
So I can answer that question with real information. You don’t see many people like me in debates because they’re not offered to me. In fact I’ve been uninvited you know. Someone on a particular panel would say hey let’s get this guy to come here and speak to us, and then I receive the disinvitation because I was not going to go along with the theme of their climate change as a catastrophe presentation
BN: You referred to times in the past that CO2 levels were significantly higher than they are now. Do records show any negative effects as a result of such high CO2?
JC: Well when you say negative, that’s almost a moral question: good or bad that the dinosaurs went extinct? I think they’d the dinosaurs would have an opinion about that. Let me rephrase: If it had to be on those levels today would it negatively impact Humanity? We see carbon dioxide has increased as humans are producing energy so that their lives can be enhanced. There’s a direct relationship between how much carbon or energy you’re able to use and carbon is the main source today and your ability to thrive.
Think about it we didn’t leave the Stone Age because we ran out of rocks. We left the Stone Age because something better came along, you know, Iron, Bronze and so on. In terms of energy we didn’t leave the wood and dung age because we ran out of trees or excrement, we found a better source that was carbon: coal, oil and so on. And transportation: we didn’t leave the horse and buggy age because we ran out of horses. It was because Henry Ford made a vehicle that was cheap and affordable. My great grandfather who was in destitute poverty in Oklahoma in the 1930s had a Model T. And another thing about Henry Ford: He didn’t go around getting the government to kill all the horses so you’d have to buy his cars. Horses were still available for the poorest people you know. And he didn’t make the government go out and build gas stations or drill for oil, that was done at the market for the private level.
But today we have a government that says this is what we want for the energy structure, and so we’re going to be using your taxpayer money to put out all these charging stations and force you to buy electric cars or at least subsidize them tremendously, and put up all these windmills and so on at Great expense and great environmental wreckage.
I can assure you that without energy life is brutal and short, and so energy is a thing that has caused our lifespans to double so that children no longer fear about diseases that used to wipe out Millions. Because of the advances that energy has brought through electricity and experimentation and all the sciences that we have developed now. All that’s based upon that access to energy.
So yes developing countries are going to get their energy, they’re going to find the energy they need. I’m not making this as a prediction, just using this as an observation. Right now it’s carbon that’s the cheapest and most effective and very high density. So we will see these countries use carbon to advance and we should not stand in their way. Because they want to live like us who already have pretty big carbon Footprints.
If you want to have some comfort in that, remember the carbon dioxide we’re putting back into the atmosphere is invigorating the biosphere and it also represents people living longer and better lives. Just no question that as energy is made available and affordable people live longer and better lives. I think that’s going to ultimately be the the inertia that’s going to carry forward this issue past all the preaching about carbon dioxide problems.
Environmentalists would argue that they’re not against electricity and prosperity, they’re just advocating for a better cleaner way to do it. It’s a tremendous misconception that a windmill or a solar panel can somehow give you cleaner and more reliable energy than what you have now. That’s just not true. To build a windmill, there’s tremendous environmental wreckage that you have to go through in terms of all the minerals you have to yank out of the earth and process. And processing takes energy by the way. And then building all these transmission lines. The energy is so diffuse, it is so weak in wind and solar that you have to gather up huge amounts of land to put it together. Robert Price said it well when he called it the iron law of power: the weaker the source of energy the more stuff and material you need to gather it, to concentrate it and to make it useful.
You have to spend huge amounts of dollars in environmental cost to make a windmill or make a solar panel, which by the way doesn’t last forever. So this carbon that already has a tremendous amount of energy in a very small dense space means that its environmental footprint is much much smaller than what you have with solar or wind. In fact it’s about one to a thousand or two thousand in terms of the square footage you need.
Look at windmill and solar panel farms. Not only are they just ugly but they cause tremendous environmental damage in their construction and maintenance. What are the long-term effects decades from now? If we just continue to get our energy from fossil fuels how bad can it get?
Well start with how good it can get. People will have access to affordable energy so they’re going to live longer and they’re going to live better lives when you have access to this. The impact on the climate is about the only thing you can think of. Well the sea level is going to continue to rise since it’s been rising for several hundred years, and at a manageable rate by the way. And the atmosphere might warm some more, but certainly not in terms of some catastrophic effect that will cause us to lose our ability to thrive.
I’m just very optimistic that people are clever and they can figure out how to adapt to whatever is going to happen. The real issues I deal with as a state climatologist are the extreme events that we know are going to happen that you’re not ready for. I mean that flood that happened 50 years ago is going to come back again. And it’s going to cause some real problems if you don’t build your infrastructure and put your houses or industry where they can be safe. If you don’t build up on the coast too much, so then you won’t be clobbered by a hurricane or something like that. It’s these kind of natural extreme events to which we’re far more vulnerable right now, rather than some small and gradual change that the climate system might undergo.
BN: I did read somewhere that someone has said, and I’m sure you must get it a lot, whether you get any funding from the fossil fuel industry. Do you?
JC: No I do not, and I made that decision way back in the early 1990s. I might make a fossil fuel company mad by some of them information I would produce, but so be it. I can put my head to bed at night and not be worried about: Did I accommodate some agenda somewhere? I’m just after what observations say. Can I build the best observational data sets to answer the questions of climate that we have, and that’s what I want to do.
BN: I suppose one of the biggest tragedies about it would be that it would discredit the real science and the fundamental research that you’re doing. Just that it’ll be a non-starter because people will immediately dismiss it.
JC: That’s unfortunate because the perception then is that, well if a fossil fuel company paid someone to do some research they really wanted to know the answer about something and this person was completely honest did the work properly and provided the answer to the fossil fuel companies is as. Well that answer would be tainted because it came from a fossil fuel company. Well hello: Think about what environmental advocacy groups and pressure groups do all of the time. They pay tremendous sums to people so they can come up with an answer that gives them their leverage in claiming this is a catastrophic problem. So I can at least take that perception off the table.
BN: Lastly are you aware of any ways in which geoengineering could possibly be affecting the natural balance of things? Is it being done more than we’re aware of and could it backfire?
JC: Anytime humansdo something they’re going to have an impact, no question about that. So you could call it geoengineering but inadvertently we have made some desert valleys cooler because now we irrigate crops. We have taken water that fell someplace and moved it to another place. So that’s a bit of geoengineering there. And by the way a lot of those places feed a lot of the world, so you can’t say it’s bad I suppose.
But the other question about geoengineering is:
Can we do something to prevent a perceived problem here?
And that’s the real danger I think, because you don’t know the consequences when you start tinkering with a very complex and dynamic system. And so I would say stay away from that. Suppose someone did a big geoengineering experiment and something bad happened somewhere. Well that country would sue the world and say: look you made this bad thing happen to us you are liable. And so then we’re getting nowhere in terms of preventing some problem on the planet.
The diagram at the top shows how grateful we should be for living in today’s climate instead of a glacial icehouse. (H/T Raymond Inauen) For most of its history Earth has been frozen rather than the mostly green place it is today. And the reference is to the extent of the North American ice sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).
To see this geologically recent glacial period in perspective, consider the maps created by paleo climatologist Christopher Scotese, leader of the Paleomap Project.
The animation below shows how the planet surface changed over the past millions of years (Ma means Millions of years Ago).
Note that in 66 Ma Earth was a “hothouse” with little ice and green polar land masses. By 50 Ma cooling resulted in polar ice caps and glaciers. By 14 Ma both Greenland and Antarctica are ice covered. 18Ka a severe “icehouse” world is evidenced by the Laurentian icecap. Then the Modern world appears with the ice retreating, but still covering the two poles. Continental drifts are also shown by India starting as an island and later joining Asia, and by Africa isolated but later approaching Europe.
For further context consider that geologists refer to our time as a “Severe Icehouse World”, among the various conditions in earth’s history, as diagramed below by Christopher Scotese. Referring to the Global Mean Temperatures, it appears after many decades, we are slowly rising to “Icehouse World”, which would seem to be a good thing.
As of 2015 earth is showing a GMT of 14.4C, compared to pre-industrial GMT of 13.8C. According to the best geological evidence from millions of years of earth’s history, that puts us in the category “Severe Icehouse.” So, thankfully we are warming up, albeit very slowly. Moreover, progress toward a warming world means flattening the profile at the higher latitudes, especially the Arctic. Equatorial locations remain at 23C throughout the millennia, while the gradient decreases in a warmer world.
We have many, many centuries to go before the earth can warm up to the “Greenhouse” profile, let alone get to “Hothouse.” Regional and local climates at higher latitudes will see slightly warming temperatures and smaller differences from equatorial climates. These are facts based on solid geological evidence, not opinions or estimates from computer models.
It is still a very cold world, but we are moving in the right direction. Stay the course.
Instead of fear mongering over a bit of warming, we should celebrate our good fortune, and do our best for humanity and the biosphere. Matthew Ridley takes it from there in a previous post.
Background from previous post The Goodness of Global Warming
LAI refers to Leaf Area Index.
As noted in other posts here, warming comes and goes and a cooling period may now be ensuing. See No Global Warming, Chilly January Land and Sea. Matt Ridley provides a concise and clear argument to celebrate any warming that comes to our world in his Spiked article Why global warming is good for us. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Climate change is creating a greener, safer planet.
Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm?
The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that.
The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife.
But because good news is no news, green pressure groups and environmental correspondents in the media prefer to ignore global greening. Astonishingly, it merited no mentions on the BBC’s recent Green Planet series, despite the name. Or, if it is mentioned, the media point to studies suggesting greening may soon cease. These studies are based on questionable models, not data (because data show the effect continuing at the same pace). On the very few occasions when the BBC has mentioned global greening it is always accompanied by a health warning in case any viewer might glimpse a silver lining to climate change – for example, ‘extra foliage helps slow climate change, but researchers warn this will be offset by rising temperatures’.
Another bit of good news is on deaths. We’re against them, right? A recent study shows that rising temperatures have resulted in half a million fewer deaths in Britain over the past two decades. That is because cold weather kills about ’20 times as many people as hot weather’, according to the study, which analyses ‘over 74million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries’. This is especially true in a temperate place like Britain, where summer days are rarely hot enough to kill. So global warming and the unrelated phenomenon of urban warming relative to rural areas, caused by the retention of heat by buildings plus energy use, are both preventing premature deaths on a huge scale.
Summer temperatures in the US are changing at half the rate of winter temperatures and daytimes are warming 20 per cent slower than nighttimes. A similar pattern is seen in most countries. Tropical nations are mostly experiencing very slow, almost undetectable daytime warming (outside cities), while Arctic nations are seeing quite rapid change, especially in winter and at night. Alarmists love to talk about polar amplification of average climate change, but they usually omit its inevitable flip side: that tropical temperatures (where most poor people live) are changing more slowly than the average.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little.
Indeed, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) repeatedly confirms, there is no clear pattern of storms growing in either frequency or ferocity, droughts are decreasing slightly and floods are getting worse only where land-use changes (like deforestation or building houses on flood plains) create a problem. Globally, deaths from droughts, floods and storms are down by about 98 per cent over the past 100 years – not because weather is less dangerous but because shelter, transport and communication (which are mostly the products of the fossil-fuel economy) have dramatically improved people’s ability to survive such natural disasters.
The effect of today’s warming (and greening) on farming is, on average, positive: crops can be grown farther north and for longer seasons and rainfall is slightly heavier in dry regions. We are feeding over seven billion people today much more easily than we fed three billion in the 1960s, and from a similar acreage of farmland. Global cereal production is on course to break its record this year, for the sixth time in 10 years.
Nature, too, will do generally better in a warming world. There are more species in warmer climates, so more new birds and insects are arriving to breed in southern England than are disappearing from northern Scotland. Warmer means wetter, too: 9,000 years ago, when the climate was warmer than today, the Sahara was green. Alarmists like to imply that concern about climate change goes hand in hand with concern about nature generally. But this is belied by the evidence. Climate policies often harm wildlife:biofuels compete for land with agriculture, eroding the benefits of improved agricultural productivity and increasing pressure on wild land; wind farms kill birds and bats; and the reckless planting of alien sitka spruce trees turns diverse moorland into dark monoculture.
Meanwhile, real environmental issues are ignored or neglected because of the obsession with climate. With the help of local volunteers I have been fighting to protect the red squirrel in Northumberland for years. The government does literally nothing to help us, while it pours money into grants for studying the most far-fetched and minuscule possible climate-change impacts. Invasive alien species are the main cause of species extinction worldwide (like grey squirrels driving the red to the margins), whereas climate change has yet to be shown to have caused a single species to die out altogether anywhere.
Of course, climate change does and will bring problems as well as benefits. Rapid sea-level rise could be catastrophic. But whereas the sea level shot up between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, rising by about 60 metres in two millennia, or roughly three metres per century, todaythe change is nine times slower: three millimetres a year, or a foot per century, and with not much sign of acceleration. Countries like the Netherlands and Vietnam show that it is possible to gain land from the sea even in a world where sea levels are rising. The land area of the planet is actually increasing, not shrinking, thanks to siltation and reclamation.
Environmentalists don’t get donations or invitations to appear on the telly if they say moderate things. To stand up and pronounce that ‘climate change is real and needs to be tackled, but it’s not happening very fast and other environmental issues are more urgent’ would be about as popular as an MP in Oliver Cromwell’s parliament declaring, ‘The evidence for God is looking a bit weak, and I’m not so very sure that fornication really is a sin’. And I speak as someone who has made several speeches on climate in parliament.
No wonder we don’t hear about the good news on climate change.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through November 2022. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period. In 2021 the summer NH summer spike was joined by warming in the Tropics but offset by a drop in SH SSTs, which raised the Global anomaly slightly over the mean. Now in 2022, another strong NH summer spike has peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH are countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, now receding to the mean. Now dropping Oct./Nov. temps in NH and the Tropics have taken the Global anomaly below the average for this period. Note that 2022/11 Tropical SSTs are 0.8C below their peak in 2015.
A longer view of SSTs
To enlarge image open in new tab.
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July.1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. Now in 2021-22 there are again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, now in October and November by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
But the peaks coming nearly every summer in HadSST require a different picture. Let’s look at August, the hottest month in the North Atlantic from the Kaplan dataset.
The AMO Index is from from Kaplan SST v2, the unaltered and not detrended dataset. By definition, the data are monthly average SSTs interpolated to a 5×5 grid over the North Atlantic basically 0 to 70N. The graph shows August warming began after 1992 up to 1998, with a series of matching years since, including 2020, dropping down in 2021. Because the N. Atlantic has partnered with the Pacific ENSO recently, let’s take a closer look at some AMO years in the last 2 decades.
This graph shows monthly AMO temps for some important years. The Peak years were 1998, 2010 and 2016, with the latter emphasized as the most recent. The other years show lesser warming, with 2007 emphasized as the coolest in the last 20 years. Note the red 2018 line is at the bottom of all these tracks. The heavy blue line shows that 2022 started warm, dropped to the bottom and stayed near the lower tracks. Note the strength of this summer’s warming pulse, in September peaking to nearly 24 Celsius, a new record for this dataset. Now in November the SSTs are closer to the middle.
Summary
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? If the pattern of recent years continues, NH SST anomalies will likely decline in coming months, along with ENSO also weakening will probably determine a cooler outcome.
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
Footnote Rare Triple Dip La Nina Likely This Winter
The unusual weather phenomenon might result in the snowiest season in years for some parts of the country.
The long-range winter forecast could be good news for skiers living in the certain parts of the U.S. and Canada. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) estimates that the chance of a La Niña occurring this fall and early winter is 86 percent, and the main beneficiary is expected to be mountains in the Northwest and Northern Rockies.
If NOAA’s predictions pan out, this will be the third La Niña in a row—a rare phenomenon called a “Triple Dip La Niña.” Between now and 1950, only two Triple Dips have occurred.
Smith also notes that winters on the East Coast are similarly tricky to predict during La Niña years. “In the West, you’re simply looking for above-average precipitation, which typically translates to above-average snowfall, but in the East, you have temperature to worry about as well … that adds another complication.” In other words, increased precip could lead to more rain if the temperatures aren’t cooperative.
The presence of a La Niña doesn’t always translate to higher snowfall in the North, either, as evidenced by last ski season, which saw few powder days.
However, in consecutive La Niña triplets, one winter usually involves above-average snowfall. While this historical pattern isn’t tied to any documented meteorological function, it could mean that the odds of a snowy 2022’-’23 season are higher, given the previous two La Niñas didn’t deliver the goods.
This is the statistically correct way to represent relative human contributions to the greenhouse effect.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
Science Matters 