"Scope:
The TWTW summary of major contributions to climate science over the past year or so will wrap-up by discussing them in four groups:
1) use of proper data,
2) false attribution and use of data,
3) deficiencies in the current procedures used in climate science,
4) suggestions of a way forward to better understand influence of human increases to greenhouse gases in the extraordinarily complex climate system. (this) will be discussed more fully next week.
Some in the West are slowly learning that their hope for reliable, affordable alternatives to fossil fuels is an illusion (mirage).
Western leaders were driven to these hopes by the delusion (fantasy) that climate models can predict / project / forecast future temperatures.
The models cannot describe what is occurring today.
Thus, there is no logical reason to assume that they can predict temperatures thirty to eighty years from now.
Scientific organizations that receive public money and pretend the models are useful for prediction are committing a disservice to the public.
... The issue extends to scope and intensity of storage needed to back-up unreliable electricity generation.
A current term of art used in climate studies is “a new normal.”
TWTW will explore how once respected scientific organizations are using the term, even though their work demonstrates ignorance of prior significant work.
Data Standards:
To understand what is happening in the physical world researchers must use the best physical evidence, data, available.
If they do not use appropriate physical evidence, the researchers are misleading themselves and others who may believe them.
The results of climate models that have not been verified and validated against appropriate physical evidence are not physical evidence but speculation.
The climate industry ignores the best physical evidence, forty-two years of atmospheric temperature trend measurements from the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama in Huntsville.
These are verified against weather balloon data taken by different instruments and checked against information compiled from reanalyses of weather forecasts.
There is no better global temperature data.
They are not without some issues.
For example, it was determined that readings need to be corrected for orbital drift of satellites.
When this was discovered and verified, the corrections were promptly made, as they should be, following the scientific method.
Roy Spencer, the co-founder of the techniques of using satellite data to develop temperature trends, reports:
“The linear warming trend since January 1979 now stands at +0.13 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).”
The Earth System Science Center reports:
“Equatorial cooling associated with the on-going presence of La Niña continued and the tropics are now substantially below the 30-year average at -0.24 °C (-0.43 °F).
As is often noted on these reports, the maximum cooling effect of La Niñas usually occurs sometime from February to May.”
From this we know that the data not only include the greenhouse effect, which occurs in the atmosphere, but also includes other variations to the earth systems such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which has been occurring for hundreds if not thousands of years.
However, there is no cause to the ENSO change that has been explained satisfactorily.
Further, the data collection began after a period of global cooling during which some climate scientists were predicting Ice Age glaciation.
Why this cooling stopped is not clear, but it may be due to a change in ocean oscillations such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).
Even though the temperature trends taken by satellites include influences other than the influence of changing greenhouse gases on temperatures, they best represent the maximum change occurring from changing atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
They clearly show there is no “climate crisis” and the predictions of one in the future using global climate models that do not consider atmosphere trends are not reliable.
The reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and reports such as the US National Climate Assessment are a disgrace to science.
These government organizations ignore the scientific method requiring testing of the hypotheses against all available physical data.
The essays published in January 2021 under David Legates used proper data to strongly criticize the US National Climate Assessment Reports (NCA) mandated by Congress published under the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
These NCA reports have ignored the scientific method, which the essays followed.
Both Legates and Patrick Michaels gave talks explaining the problem in climate science at the 14th International Congress on Climate Change organized by the Heartland Institute.
Major Errors:
The IPCC assumes that the sun is almost constant, with slight variation.
However, in August a group of solar scientists published a paper demonstrating significant disagreement among solar scientists whether or not the assumption is correct.
If the assumption is not correct, then the findings of the IPCC are largely meaningless.
Statisticians Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre have found major statistical errors in the studies used by the IPCC to buttress claims that carbon dioxide is causing dangerous global warming.
McKitrick focused on errors in understanding the widely accepted Gauss-Markoff theorem of Generalized Least-Squares to claim a method used for the past 20 years can calculate the probability of an event being caused by human additions of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
As McKitrick demonstrates, the attribution calculations are statistically meaningless.
McIntyre focused on many studies of marine proxies of temperature being used to develop the claim that there was no variation in global marine temperatures for 2000 years until about 1850, with the start of the industrial revolution.
The studies are little bits and pieces with no established relationship.
The result is little better than sawdust and glue poured into a form.
Again, they have no meaning.
Procedural Problems:
As discussed in last week’s TWTW, the books by Steve Koonin and Mototaka Nakamura bring out sever problems with global climate models, even if one accepts the use of surface temperature data, which TWTW thinks is a poor choice.
As brought out by Richard Lindzen:
1) The core of the system consists in two turbulent fluids (the atmosphere and oceans) interacting with each other;
2) The two fluids are on a rotating planet that is differentially [unevenly] heated by the sun and unevenly absorbing the solar warming.
Solar rays directly hit the equator and skim the earth at the poles resulting in uneven heating, which drives the circulation of the atmosphere.
The result is heat transport from the equator towards the poles (meridional); and
3) The earth’s climate system is never in equilibrium.
Thus, the IPCC’s pursuit of an “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS) is a fool’s errand.
Despite thousands of pages of studies there will never be a solution unless there is a significant change in human knowledge of the physical world.
As Nakamura writes:
“...climate simulation models are fine tools to study the climate system, so long as the users are aware of the limitations of the models and exercise caution in designing experiments and interpreting their output.”
“The models just become useless pieces of junk or worse (worse, in a sense that they can produce gravely misleading output) only when they are used for climate forecasting.”
“All climate simulation models have many details that become fatal flaws when they are used as climate forecasting tools, especially for mid- to long-term (several years and longer) climate variations and changes.”
“It means that they are also completely useless for assessing the effects of the past atmospheric carbon dioxide increase on the climate.
I myself used to use climate simulation models for scientific studies, not for predictions, and learned about their problems and limitations in the process.”
Steve Koonin expresses similar views and was taken aback when a lead author of the climate model evaluation chapter in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5, 2013) publicly said that it was IPCC procedure to first adjust the models to fit surface temperatures, then to discard the adjustments when making projections.
Using this procedure there is no way that one can know the errors and uncertainties in the projections, or correct them.
A Better Way?
IPCC climate science has stagnated.
But, the more stagnant the science becomes, the more shrill the climate advocates become.
In 2020, W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer submitted a paper titled: “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases,” discussed in the January 22, 2022, TWTW.
Also discussed are the views of Tom Sheahen that the paper is especially important because it shows a remarkable agreement between theory and observations under significantly different conditions:
1) the desert (the Sahara); temperate regions (the Mediterranean) and the polar regions (Antarctica).
Interestingly, the atmosphere of Antarctica gives off far more infrared radiation (cooling the earth) than the surface,
demonstrating the importance of convection (atmosphere and oceans) in transporting heat from the tropics to the polar regions.
One must realize that the calculations for warming are for “clear skies.”
Once an adequate theory for cloud formation develops the estimates for doubling of carbon dioxide will likely be below one degree C, far below the IPCC estimate of 3 °C plus or minus 1.5 °C.
Also, the same TWTW discusses the recent work of Howard Hayden following on the work of van Wijngaarden and Happer.
To understand the changing impacts of greenhouse gases, we must understand the flow of energy (all forms of electromagnetic radiation) from the sun to the earth, and the flow of energy (infrared radiation) from the globe with the atmosphere included to space.
The IPCC does not, and only recently incorporated the important Stefan-Boltzmann law, which was used incorrectly.
Future TWTWs will follow developments in understanding these energy flows."