Quote of the Week:
“The fact that a great many people believe something
is no guarantee of its truth.”
— William Somerset Maugham, (1874–1965)
THIS WEEK:
by Ken Haapala, President,
Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
OVERVIEW:
John Robson has a video presentation that addresses problems with the sun that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its followers are attempting to bury – variation in Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). The video includes brief clips from an interview with Ronan Connolly, who with 22 others, authored a paper published by Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics that showed tremendous disagreement among solar scientists on constancy of TSI. Given that the IPCC has suppressed exposure of its prior errors such as its “hockey-stick” and the “hot spot” over the tropics that no one can find, the current attempts to suppress solar variation are no surprise.
Since, for purposes of his presentations, he accepts the UN IPCC claim of a solar constant, the solar question is not an issue in Howard Hayden’s essays on Basic Climate Physics. Separately Hayden made estimates of the importance of the greenhouse effect in making the earth inhabitable. These estimates will be presented.
Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. posted an essay by Ross McKitrick further explaining the errors made in claiming that extreme weather events are caused by human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, and others have stated that clouds are a big unknown in climate science despite the IPCC and its followers insisting that the science is settled. The World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews published a paper by Michael Jonas investigating changes in cloud cover, which may explain the warming since 1983. This paper may explain an increase in surface temperatures rather than the presumed influence of CO2.
The Proceedings of the Royal Society A published a paper by Demetris Koutsoyiannis. et al. indicating that attributing recent warming to CO2 may be a misapplication of causality. The paper involves understanding of probability theory beyond the scope of TWTW. But the causality issue is vital, as illustrated by Al Gore’s false claims that CO2 was causing the earth to go into and out of glacial periods over the past 1,000,000 years.
Not to be excluded from the pack of global “experts,” the World Energy Council claimed that the current energy crisis is different. Its reasoning is questionable.
OPEC+ has announced it will increase oil output for July and August by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration continues to favor wind and solar industries as it continues constricting the oil and natural gas industries.
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Measuring Incoming Solar Energy:
In its video, Climate Discussion Nexus clearly presents a major problem in the data for solar output and why it has become a controversy. Active cavity radiometer irradiance monitor instrument on satellites (ACRIM) measures total solar irradiance (TSI) with an average of 1,367 watts per meter squared (W/m2) at the top of the atmosphere. Yet the IPCC estimates that the total CO2 added by humans amounts to only 2 W/m2.
The first IPCC Assessment Report (1990) showed that solar output increased in the 1980s. The third Assessment Report (AR3, 2001) had several reconstructions of solar output (Radiative Forcing of Climate Change Figure 6.4 and 6.5 in the Working Group I (The Scientific Basis)).
What happened? There was over a two-year gap in the ACRIM data due to the Challenger disaster, from June 1989 to October 1991. Figure 6.5 of AR3 shows different estimates from Lean, et al. Hoyt and Schatten, Solanki and Fligge, and Lockwood and Stamper. These include data from the Nimbus 7 satellite used to fill in the ACRIM data. However, the Nimbus was not designed to accurately measure total solar irradiance and its sensors were pointed towards earth instead of the sun.
The IPCC has chosen the datasets with the lowest variation of Total Solar Irradiance as the definitive set. A justification is given by Lean.
“The fact that some people could use Willson’s [the first estimates] results as an excuse to do nothing about greenhouse gas emissions is one reason, we felt we needed to look at the data ourselves.”
This attitude is raw politics not science.
In his comments, Ronan Connolly states IPCC claims solar activity has been declining slightly, according to the IPCC solar activity could not cause the recent warming.
To make matters worse, the Lean et al. study (identified in the Robson presentation as Frolich) claimed an increase in the sensitivity of the Nimbus 7 instrumentation while in orbit. The designers of the instruments stated that there is no known physical change that could create an increase in sensitivity. Further, Nimbus 7s was calibrated electrically every 12 days, no indication of an increased sensitivity.
In July 2021, Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics published a paper by Connolly and 22 other scientists detailing sixteen different views on the changes in solar influence. Yet, the IPCC clings to its view that the one showing the least variation is the correct one.
Further, the followers of the IPCC continue to label those who disagree as corrupt. Yet, the corruption goes in one direction: those who question the science behind questionable and costly government policy are corrupt, according to those who continue to receive hundreds of millions from government.
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Benefits of Greenhouse Gases:
The essays on Basic Climate Physics by Howard Hayden do not depend on whether or not the sun is constant. For simplicity, he accepts the IPCC numbers and shows that using well accepted laws of physics, the IPCC greatly overestimates the warming that will result from a doubling of CO2.
In the February 2020 issue of “The Energy Advocate,” Hayden wrote that if the Earth had no atmosphere and was a true “black body” not reflecting sunlight, on average, the Earth would be about 10°C (18°F) COLDER than it is. If the Earth reflected 30% of the sunlight, as it does, but had no greenhouse gases, the Earth would be about 33°C (59°F) COLDER.
Yet, Washington has declared a climate crisis from a modest increase of the greenhouse effect? It has not given compelling physical evidence of a dangerous increase in the greenhouse effect; an effect humans need to keep the Earth warm enough for inhabitation. No wonder 19th century scientists were curious why the earth was so warm, given its distance from the sun.
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Statistical Biases:
The last TWTW discussed Ross McKitrick’s latest paper on the misuse of Total Least Squares (TLS) attributing unusual weather events to human emissions of CO2. The procedure has a closure problem to obtaining a unique solution – too many unknowns, not enough independent, defining equations.
On October 23, 2021, TWTW discussed the work by McKitrick exposing thousands of studies that used a procedure called optimal fingerprinting which was used to calculate false probabilities for attributing unusual weather events to human emissions. This was based on frequency probabilities, as defined in the Generalized Least Squares (GLS) Theorem by Gauss-Markov. The procedure did not meet the conditions of the Theorem, thus had errors the size of which are unknown. More data only means that you have more confidence in the result, not that the results are correct.
In Climate Etc. McKitrick wrote an update of these efforts stating:
OLS (Ordinary Least Squares, a simplified version of GLS) models assume that the explanatory variables in a regression are accurately measured, so the “errors” separating the dependent variable from the regression line are entirely due to randomness in the dependent variables. If the explanatory variables also contain randomness, for instance due to measurement error, OLS will typically yield biased slope estimators.
“ ... climate scientists should consider using Instrumental Variables as a remedy for the EIV problem, since it can be shown to yield unbiased and consistent results.”
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Understanding Clouds:
In his paper published by World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, Michael Jonas begins with:
“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) repeatedly acknowledge that clouds are a major source of uncertainty in the climate models, including: ‘evidence for a systematic indirect solar effect [on global average low level cloud cover] remains ambiguous,’ and ‘Large uncertainties remain about how clouds might respond to global climate change.’ As indicated by these statements, the climate models contain little or no provision for cloud cover to change over long-time scales other than as a reaction to climate change.
“This paper argues that the behaviour of clouds does suggest that other processes are at work, and that the models should make provision for them.
“The IPCC also say: ‘An albedo decrease of only 1%, bringing the Earth’s albedo from 30% to 29%, would cause an increase in the black-body radiative equilibrium temperature of about 1°C, a highly significant value, roughly equivalent to the direct radiative effect of a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.’ [Actually, it is a decrease of one percentage point, not a decrease of 1%.]
“This paper analyses the behaviour of clouds in light of the above statement, in order to see how much effect clouds might have on climate model projections.
He concludes the paper with a caution:
“The patterns of behaviour of clouds, both for cloud area and cloud opacity, indicate that the decrease in global cloud area over the study period 1983-2017 was caused by an unspecified factor and was not caused directly or indirectly by the global surface temperature increase over the same period.
This also implies that the decrease in global cloud area
was not caused by a man-made increase in CO2.
“Evaluation of changes in both clouds and CO2 in the study period 1983-2017 indicate that cloud changes caused by this unspecified factor had a similar impact to that of the increase in CO2, with respect to the increase in radiation reaching the surface (radiative forcing), and possibly a much larger impact. NB. The comparison is with respect to radiative forcing only, and specifically not to global surface temperature.
“The climate models, which have zero or negative cloud impact independently from CO2, need to take this into account in order to avoid over-estimating the influence of CO2.
Jones goes into further detail in an essay posted on WUWT.
His work reinforces the importance of understanding clouds.
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Establishing Causation From Complex Data
Two papers published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A address the difficulties in establishing causation from complex data. Often a which came first, the chicken or the egg, problem arises. Often there is no clean solution.
As the authors state in the second abstract:
“Starting from the idea of stochastic causal systems, the approach extends it to the more general concept of hen-or-egg causality, which includes as special cases the classic causal, and the potentially causal and anti-causal systems. The framework developed is applicable to large-scale open systems, which are neither controllable nor repeatable.
In this paper, we illustrate and showcase the proposed framework in a number of case studies. Some of them are controlled synthetic examples and are conducted as a proof of applicability of the theoretical concept, to test the methodology with a priori known system properties. Others are real-world studies on interesting scientific problems in geophysics, and in particular hydrology and climatology.”
To TWTW these problems illustrate the need for simplicity to address the core problem, how much will a doubling of CO2 warm the earth. Adding feedbacks without addressing the core problem just complicates the issues.
The essays on Basic Climate Physics by Howard Hayden address the core problem, but one must recognize the results are rough, and fail if the assumptions of a constant sun and albedo (reflectivity) change. For that reason, they are for description not prediction.
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World Energy Council Nonsense
The WEC is an entity dating back to 1924. Headquartered in London, is current mission statement reads: 'To promote the sustainable supply and use of energy for the greatest benefit of all people'.
In an interview posted by Real Clear Energy, Dr. Angela Wilkinson, the Secretary General, said: “We are now experiencing a first global energy shock. This isn’t the same as the 1970s oil shock crisis, this is a consumer driven crisis and the consumer-driven adjustments that are going to come out of this are going to be very significant.”
There is nothing “consumer-driven” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and government policies in cutting off supplies of oil and natural gas from Russia in response. The World Energy Council is another international entity that pretends to speak for the public.
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Coal Mining Boom in Asia
According to Vijay Jayaraj, India is opening 100 Coal Mines: “’Earlier we were hailed as bad boys because we were promoting fossil fuel and now, we are in the news that we are not supplying enough of it,’ said India’s Coal Secretary, pointing to the negative coverage of a media that change colors as frequently as chameleons and the global hypocrisy over fossil fuels.”
According to Robert Bryce, “India and China Coal Production Su
ging By 700M Tons Per Year: That’s Greater Than All U.S. Coal Output.”
The Biden Administration is reacting to the sharpest increase in weekly gasoline prices since the EIA began these records in 1992 (doubling since Biden took office) by restricting oil and gas production on Federal lands while encouraging unreliable wind and solar. Meanwhile OPEC+ has announced a 50% increase in oil output for July and August.
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Number of the Week:
Minus 2°F (minus 19°C).
Howard Hayden estimates that, if the Earth reflected 30% of the sunlight, as it does, but had no greenhouse gases, the average temperature of the Earth would be about 33°C (59°F) COLDER. In its first Assessment Report the IPCC made a similar calculation.
According to Space.com:
The average temperature on Earth lies somewhere around 57 degrees Fahrenheit (13.9 degrees Celsius). According to climate information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that was the 20th century average temperature, measured across land and ocean, night, and day.
This implies an average temperature with no greenhouse effect of minus 2°F (minus 19°C). And Washington calls a slight increase in the greenhouse effect, that cannot be separated from natural variability, a crisis?"