Holman Jenkins
discusses Equilibrium
Climate Sensitivity (ECS)
to carbon dioxide (CO2)
in the Wall Street Journal,
and in Nature.
He believes the standard estimate
used by the UN Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
is too high (he believes CO2 causes
less warming than the IPCC claims).
The 'standard estimate'
was developed by
the National Academy of Science,
National Research Council in 1979
-- no change in almost 40 years!
Holman Jenkins says:
“This 40-year lack of progress
is no less embarrassing
for being thoroughly unreported
in the mainstream press."
ECS is the estimated amount
of warming from a doubling of CO2,
once equilibrium is obtained.
But there is no evidence
our planet has ever been in,
or will ever be in,
thermodynamic equilibrium.
The IPCC assumes,
that without humans,
the climate system
would have had
no temperature trend at all
between 1765-2100.
No uncertainty
is expressed by the IPCC,
or the US Global Change
Research Project (USGCRP).
ECS has to be a guess,
usually based only
on surface temperatures
... but a majority of
our planet's surface
has no thermometers,
so temperatures
for those areas (grids)
are wild guessed (infilled)
to compile a global
average temperature!
Our planet is also 71% water,
but there is no credible theory
on how the greenhouse effect
occurs in the oceans.
The greenhouse effect
occurs in the atmosphere,
where the greenhouse gases are.
But the IPCC tries to estimate
the greenhouse effect
using surface temperature data,
not the temperatures
in the troposphere.
Besides the huge issue
of wild guess "infilling",
surface temperatures
are influenced by many
human activities, such as
urbanization, farming, irrigation, etc.
John Christy, of the
University of Alabama in Huntsville,
testified to the
House Science Committee
that climate models
used by the IPCC, and others,
overestimate the warming
in the atmosphere
by an average of
2.5x to 3x times.
Jenkins concludes with:
“Leaving climate sensitivity
uncertainties out of the narrative
certainly distorts
the reporting that follows.
Take a widely cited
IPCC estimate that
“with 95% certainty,”
humans are responsible
for at least half the warming
observed between 1951 and 2010.
This sounds empirical
and is reported as such.
In fact, such estimates
are merely derivative
of how much warming
should have taken place
if the standard climate sensitivity
estimate is correct.
Imagine predicting an 8
before letting the dice fly,
then assuming an 8
must have come up
because that’s what
your model predicted."
“ ... since the press’s job
is to hold institutions accountable,
the output of government
climate science is so poor
partly because of the
abysmally bad job done
by reporters on the climate beat."
“No better example exists
than their gullibility
in the face of U.S. government
press releases pronouncing
the latest year the
“warmest on record.
Scroll down and
the margin of error cited
in the government’s
own press release
would lead you rightly
to suspect that
a clear trend is
actually hard to find
in recent decades
despite a prodigious increase
in CO2 output."
Reporting scientific progress would require admitting uncertainties.
By Holman Jenkins, Jr. WSJ, Feb 27, 2018
Link to letter: Emergent constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity from global temperature variability
By Cos, Huntingford, & Williamson, Nature Letter, Jan 18, 2018