Round 1 to Joe Bastardi & Company

[Tony Crocker]

Today's L.A. Times: "Global warming 'hiatus' puts climate change scientists on the spot"
http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-c ... 1164.story

Naturally I wondered if this issue had been addressed by the NY Times, and found this:
What to Make of a Warming Plateau from June 10.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/scien ... .html?_r=0
IMHO the NY Times is trying to spin their article some, while the LA Times quotes a more balanced range of sources.

Last week's Wall Street Journal article "Dialing Back the Alarm on Climate Change"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 12464.html
The above article is noteworthy for citing multiple sources that highlight excessive water vapor feedback as the primary source of temperature overprojection in the climate models.

Two recent papers (one in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society, the other in the journal Earth System Dynamics) estimate that TCR is probably around 1.65 degrees Celsius. That's uncannily close to the estimate of 1.67 degrees reached in 1938 by Guy Callendar, a British engineer and pioneer student of the greenhouse effect. A Canadian mathematician and blogger named Steve McIntyre has pointed out that Callendar's model does a better job of forecasting the temperature of the world between 1938 and now than do modern models that "hindcast" the same data.

The significance of this is that Callendar assumed that carbon dioxide acts alone, whereas the modern models all assume that its effect is amplified by water vapor. There is not much doubt about the amount of warming that carbon dioxide can cause. There is much more doubt about whether net amplification by water vapor happens in practice or is offset by precipitation and a cooling effect of clouds.

Since the last IPCC report in 2007, much has changed. It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the "pause" already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.

Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. At first, it was hoped that an underestimate of sulfate pollution from industry (which can cool the air by reflecting heat back into space) might explain the pause, but the science has gone the other way—reducing its estimate of sulfate cooling. Now a favorite explanation is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Yet the data to support this thesis come from ocean buoys and deal in hundredths of a degree of temperature change, with a measurement error far larger than that. Moreover, ocean heat uptake has been slowing over the past eight years.

The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake.

A lot of this sounds like what I wrote in response to soulskier on p.2 of this thread in May 2011: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9675&start=15#p61307

Over to you, Patrick. :stir:

 

[longshanks]

Powder Magazine has jumped on the alarmist bandwagon.

DEEP: The Future of Snow
Skiing is in jeopardy. If climatologists are right, we are looking at the end of the sport as we know it in 75 years. Features Editor Porter Fox takes a road trip to the heart of ski town America to find out, what now?

It doesn't look like can you read this article online without a subscription. I sent an e-mail to the editor with my SnowTrend chart (the one I used to analyze how good 2001-11 was and how bad 2011-12 was). A simpler version with trend line showing how North American skiing has been devastated by the warmer temperatures of the 2000's vs. the 1970's.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for a response.

Well Tony...your chart does not show a define trend in any direction...as for alarmists - Beware of the Zealots always

 

[flyover]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/opini ... ml?hp&_r=0

 

[Admin]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/opinion/a-pause-not-an-end-to-warming.html?hp&_r=0

An op-ed from a Berkeley professor published by the NY Times. Gee, I'm shocked.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note II using Tapatalk 2

 

[flyover]

An op-ed from a Berkeley professor published by the NY Times. Gee, I'm shocked.

Muller's history is a little more complicated than that.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/30 ... e-20120730

 

[Tony Crocker]

Muller's history is a little more complicated than that.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/30 ... e-20120730

Yes, we had some discussion about Muller's study on p. 2 of this thread
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=9675&start=15#p66285

An op-ed from a Berkeley professor published by the NY Times. Gee, I'm shocked.

It's best to analyze articles by their content and perhaps some background research rather than just where they were published. My correspondence with Powder is not going too well at the moment because I made the error of sending that reference from the Wall Street Journal (quoted on the previous page of this thread), which their editor dismissed out of hand much as admin does with the NY Times.

Matt Ridley, the author of the WSJ op-ed, has some history too. He's a member of the British House of Lords and his family is in the coal industry in northern England. I Google-searched to find an estimate for the upcoming IPCC report to compare with the 4-6C that was used in the Powder article and found this in Ridley's piece.

The upcoming IPCC report will say, "transient climate response" (TCR)—the actual temperature change expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide about 70 years from now, is "likely" to be 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius and "extremely unlikely" to be greater than 3 degrees."

Ridley has been taken to task for inaccuracies in the past. I have no idea whether he's making this up, but I should probably have looked harder for another source.

 

[Tony Crocker]

The IPCC reports have multiple scenarios. The 4th report in 2007 had 6:

B1 scenario 1.8 C best estimate, 1.1 – 2.9C range
A1T scenario 2.4C best estimate, 1.4 – 3.8C range
B2 scenario 2.4C best estimate, 1.4 – 3.8C range
A1B scenario 2.8C best estimate, 1.7 – 4.4C range
A2 scenario 3.4C best estimate, 2.0 – 5.4C range
A1FI scenario 4.0C best estimate, 2.4 – 6.4C range

The 5th report (available online via NY Times since Sept. 28) has 4 scenarios

RCP2.6 1.0C best estimate, 0.3 – 1.7 C range
RCP4.5 1.8C best estimate, 1.1 – 2.6C range
RCP6.0 2.2C best estimate, 1.4 – 3.1C range
RCP8.5 3.7C best estimate, 2.6 – 4.8C range

So it is clear that the IPCC has lowered the long term estimates some, and also that author Porter Fox using a 4.0 - 6.0C range for the Powder article was an extreme case even using the old report and outside all ranges of the new one.

 

[Tony Crocker]

Joe Bastardi is doubling down on his short to intermediate term predictions:
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/41944

The capsule background:
Global temperature graph: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/hanse ... trend.html
IPCC predicted temperature increase per decade is in the 0.20C range
Actual of course depends upon start and end points. Avoiding El Nino (1998, 2015) or La Nina (1999, 2000, 2011 or 2012) start or end points actual increase 2001-2014 was 0.077C per decade and from 2001-2013 it was only .052C per decade. The latter number is beyond the confidence interval of most models.

2015 was a different animal. The anomaly was 0.86C vs. prior record 0.74 in 2014, and more relevantly the 0.63C of El Nino 1998. Actual increase 1998-2015 (El Nino to El Nino) was 0.137C per decade, still below IPCC projections but making the projection look far less unreasonable than a couple of years ago.

Joe Bastardi says La Nina 2017 will be a monster and drive the temperatures way down. We don't have so long to wait and see whether this particular prediction pans out. The drop from 1998 to 1999 was only 0.21C. A similar drop in 2017 would still make 2017 warmer than El Nino 1998.

 

[Tony Crocker]

As with weather forecasts, it's worth reviewing how climate predictions turned out.

World temperature anomalies in Celsius since 1998, along with average MEI index (El Nino/La Nina):

1998​	0.61​	10.444​
1999​	0.38​	-10.061​
2000​	0.39​	-5.946​
2001​	0.54​	-1.935​
2002​	0.63​	7.185​
2003​	0.62​	5.589​
2004​	0.54​	5.284​
2005​	0.68​	3.636​
2006​	0.64​	4.110​
2007​	0.66​	-3.526​
2008​	0.54​	-7.756​
2009​	0.66​	4.602​
2010​	0.72​	-4.958​
2011​	0.61​	-11.132​
2012​	0.64​	1.805​
2013​	0.68​	-2.096​
2014​	0.74​	5.181​
2015​	0.90​	19.626​
2016​	1.01​	10.755​
2017​	0.92​	1.718​
2018​	0.85​	0.629​
2019​	0.98​	4.300​
2020​	1.02​	-6.900​
2021​	0.85​	-14.400​
2022​	0.89​	-18.800​

With 24 years here, the underlying trend is a temperature increase of about 0.21C per decade. During the flatter period of 2001-2013 it looked like the trend was only about 0.07C per decade. The top of the table shows the impact of swinging from strong El Nino in 1998 to strong La Nina in 1999. There was no big La Nina in 2017 and the drop in temperature vs. El Nino 2016 was modest. La Nina was strong in 2021 and 2022 yet those years were still warmer than any prior to 2015.