THIS WEEK IN CLIMATE SCIENCE:
by Ken Haapala, President,
Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Scope: In part 4 of his series on The Big 5 Natural Causes of Climate Change, Jim Steele discusses human landscape changes and that science organizations fail to separate the influences of these changes from their reported surface temperature trends, largely blaming increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for increases due to changes in landscapes. The validity of the entire surface temperature record is highly doubtful. Steele gives clear examples of how the urban heat island effect changes temperatures.
Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo incorporates the work of the late Nils Axil Mörner and the late Tom Wysmuller to point out the absurdity of the claims that sea level rise, which has been roughly constant for thousands of years, is accelerating. Ron Clutz gives examples of the rise from melting ice following the last glacial maximum some 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. It appears that those claiming concern for saving the planet have no concern for its history.
Econometrician Ross McKitrick exposed the logical failings in the use of Ordinary Least Squares in attributing extreme weather events to increasing CO2. Literally, thousands of papers were published following this technique that was based on one erroneous paper, a classic example of bandwagon science so common to climate studies. Now, McKitrick exposes another deficient technique used to falsely attribute weather events to CO2: total least squares (TLS) or multivariate orthogonal regression. It seems that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its followers cannot find a competent statistician to review their work.
Meanwhile, NOAA has released another absurd index used to claim, “Greenhouse gas pollution trapping almost 50 percent more heat than 30 years ago.” Without greenhouse gases it is doubtful that humanity would exist, the land masses would go into a deep freeze at night, stopping all growth. Now, NOAA claims that the warming influence of these gases on temperatures has increased by about 50% in the last 30 years? The lack of physical evidence is glaring.
... The World Economic Forum at Davos is over. Wealthy potentates had the opportunity to express the need for democracies to abandon their system of government and give economic power to the select few. Eduard Harinck of CLINTEL sent TWTW a copy of the agenda for the wealthy. A few points are discussed below.
Donn Dears concludes his straightforward energy analysis of achieving the myth of net zero with: “Neither wind, nuclear nor PV solar, can achieve net-zero carbon, but could a combination of the three achieve net-zero carbon by 2050?”
And Francis Menton addresses an interdisciplinary MIT Study of how energy storage can achieve net zero.
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Changing Landscapes: In “The Big 5 Causes of Natural Climate Change
(charts from Jim Steele's website added by Ye Editor)
The full article is here: https://perhapsallnatural.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-big-5-causes-of-natural-climate.html
Part 4 Landscape Changes” ecologist Jim Steele clearly explains how humans are causing increases in local and regional temperatures, largely by draining water.
He states: “Less vegetation and bare desert soils heat surfaces to greater extremes. You have likely experienced a similar effect when walking barefoot in the summer on a cool grassy surface and then, stepped onto burning asphalt pavement.
“Dry regions also produce fewer clouds allowing greater solar heating than elsewhere.
“The same amount of energy can raise the temperatures of dry surfaces much more than moist surfaces. And dark soils, reflect less and so absorb more solar energy than other surfaces"
“Similarly, urban heat islands form in part because urban development has created desert-like conditions.
“Because urban heat islands amplify every heat wave and set new records, people living in urban centers are more easily seduced into accepting climate crisis narratives than people living in cooler rural regions.
“The temperature of the air is determined by the temperature of the earth's surfaces.
“1. The sun primarily heats the earth's surface, not the air
“2. The air then gets heated by contact with the earth's heated surface. And that warmed air rises and warms the atmosphere above [in general, the greenhouse effect is greater than this process.]
“3. At higher altitudes, the rising air radiates heat back to space and cools and sinks back to the surface [Actually it is the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that radiate heat to space.]
“Any large- or small-scale conversions of ecosystems from forests to grasslands or grasslands to deserts increases the earth's skin surface temperatures.
“With the advent of the satellite era, we now have global coverage of the earth's skin surface. But skin surface temperatures can be as much as 30 degrees Celsius hotter than conventional air temperatures measured 5 feet above the surface. This map of the earth's land surface maximum temperatures illustrates how solar heating and landscapes combine to determine skin temperatures.
“As expected, the coldest regions are at the poles represented in dark blue. But surprisingly for most people, the hottest maximum temperatures are not recorded at the equator, but elsewhere due to landscape effects.”
Steele gives a graph of the estimates of annual maximum daytime surface temperatures for various types of ecosystems, then goes on to explain:
“Forest ecosystems cover the greatest area. The northern forest across Canada and Eurasia experience maximum temperatures centered around 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit and the equatorial forests reach maximums centered around 30 Celsius or about 86 Fahrenheit.
“Grasslands typically experience higher maximum temperatures, spanning 30 to 50 degrees Celsius. The prairies of north America illustrated in yellow are warmer than north Americas eastern forests but cooler than the western deserts
“The hottest maximum temperatures are recorded in the deserts spanning 45 to 70 degrees Celsius. Death Valley's 56.7 Celsius record air temperature was observed in 1913. In 1922, 57.8 degrees Celsius was recorded in the desert of Libya breaking the Death Valley record.
“However, because these extreme air temperatures happened 100 years ago and conflict with CO2 climate narratives, some researchers speculated that Libya’s temperature must have been incorrectly recorded, so successfully lobbied to remove it from the record books. There have been ongoing similar attempts to erase Death Valley's record temperature. Clearly those who control the present narratives, control the past.
“Now with satellites measuring skin surfaces, the record hottest skin surface temperature of 70.7 Celsius (about 160 Fahrenheit) was recorded in 2005 in Iran’s Lut Desert, but it's not clear what the air temperature would have been.
“The reason different ecosystems experience such different temperatures, even at the same latitude, is because of moisture.”
Steele gives a graph comparing the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of various types of surfaces by 1°C and states:
“The same amount of energy required to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius, measured here in joules, can also raise [1 gram of] dry air by 4 degrees.
“The same amount of energy that increases wet soil by one degree raises dry soil by 2 degrees
“Likewise, that same amount of energy would raise asphalt by 2 degrees. In addition, asphalt and other dark surfaces absorb more energy.
“Finally, 2200 times more energy is required to evaporate one gram of water without changing the temperature. Without moisture to evaporate, that energy instead causes surface temperatures to rise.”
Steele then describes changes in surfaces that cause temperatures to increase such as: 1) the loss of wetlands worldwide; 2) overgrazing of grasslands; 3) invasive species of grasses; and 4) urban heat islands. He states:
“To what degree these landscape changes bias the global average temperature upwards, depends on the proximity to any landscape changes, of the weather stations that contribute to that average,
“As of 2011, the World Meteorological Organization oversees 11,119 weather stations, and to easily operate them these stations are associated with human habitat, not wilderness. The United States has the densest coverage and the most stations operating for 75 years or more (represented by red dots) the minimum time span needed to assess natural vs human climate changes.
“For the rest of the globe, that coverage averages out to just one station for each area the size of the state of Connecticut. And that one weather station is assumed to represent all temperatures in the surrounding 5,000 square miles.
“Urban areas represent less than 1% of the entire land surface of earth. However, 27% of the weather stations used to calculate climate change are in urban areas.
“Urban heat islands are typically 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, or 5 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than surrounding, well-vegetated suburban and rural regions.
Urban heat islands are typically created by reducing vegetation and removing rainfall into storm drains while paving over moist soils and wetlands with asphalt and concrete.”
Steele goes into detail on the urban heat island effect which is well established. Yet, government entities that report surface temperature trends fail to adjust important changes to landscapes and blame CO2 for increasing temperatures.
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Rebutting NOAA sea level scaremongering:
Using his work and the work of the late Nils Axil Mörner and the late Tom Wysmuller, meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo rebuts the NOAA Ocean Service report of 2022.
According to the report:
“The Next 30 Years of Sea Level Rise ‘Sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10 - 12 inches (0.25 - 0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020 - 2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920 - 2020). Sea level rise will vary regionally along U.S. coasts because of changes in both land and ocean height.’”
D’Aleo “REBUTTAL This claim is demonstrably false. It really hinges on this statement: “Tide gauges and satellites agree with the model projections.” The models project a rapid acceleration of sea level rise over the next 30 to 70 years. So, it must be true. However, while the models may project acceleration, the tide gauges clearly do not.
“All data from tide gauges in areas where land is not rising or sinking show instead a steady linear and unchanging sea level rate of rise near 4 inches/century, with variations due to gravitational factors.
It is true that where the land is sinking as it is in the Tidewater area of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta region, sea levels will appear to rise faster but no changes in CO2 emissions would change that. The implication that measured, validated, and verified Tide Gauge data support this conclusion remains simply false.”
D'Aleo goes into considerable detail explaining why the NOAA report is false. These include adjusting data to show an increase in the rise when the unadjusted data does not.
As discussed in last week’s TWTW, similar false claims on increasing sea level rise were made in the” State of the Global Climate 2021” report released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Are we to believe that such false claims are accidental?
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Biased and Unstable Climate Statistics:
Climate Dynamics published an article by Ross McKitrick challenging the use of total least squares in detecting a human influence in climate changes. The abstract reads:
“Total least squares (TLS) or multivariate orthogonal regression is widely used as a remedy for attenuation bias in climate signal detection or ‘optimal fingerprinting’ regression. But under some circumstances it overcorrects and imparts an upward bias, as well as generating extremely unstable and imprecise coefficient estimates.
While there has been increasing attention paid recently to the validity of TLS-based confidence intervals, there has been no corresponding examination of coefficient bias problems.
This note explains why they are pertinent and presents a Monte Carlo simulation to illustrate the hazards of using TLS in a signal detection application without testing whether the modeling context makes it a suitable choice.
TLS is not automatically preferred over OLS [ordinary least squares] even when explanatory variables are believed to contain random errors.
Notably it can be sufficiently biased to cause false positives when explanatory signals are negatively correlated, and the bias gets worse as the signal-noise ratio on the explanatory variables rises.
Additionally, TLS should not be used on its own for climate signal detection inferences since if the no-signal null is true, TLS is generally inconsistent whereas OLS attenuation bias disappears.”
The text of the paper brings up established papers on the subject and McKitrick writes:
Claims about the validity of TLS coefficient estimates, especially consistency and unbiasedness, typically require strong assumptions about unobservable error terms.
As noted in Carroll and Ruppert (1996) in a univariate orthogonal regression there are five sufficient statistics available in the sample and six parameters to estimate, so identification of the slope parameter b requires a normalizing assumption on the ratio of the unknown error variances.
Here we see the common problem in climate studies discussed by Christopher Essex in his essay “Can Computer Models Predict Climate?” (April 23, TWTW). There are more unknowns than independent, defining equations. This is the closure problem, there is no unique solution, just guesses.
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NOAA Report Nonsense - Classic Lying With Statistics
The NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory issued a report “NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI). It goes through the various IPCC definitions using 1750 as the start of the baseline, to estimate a direct climate forcing (radiative forcing). As last week’s TWTW described, famine was a common characteristic in the 1700 and 1800s. Now, this era is considered normal?
The Annual Greenhouse Gas Index includes carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and various chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). It did not include water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas.
The NOAA report states:
“The atmospheric abundance and radiative forcing of the three main long-lived greenhouse gases continue to increase in the atmosphere. While the combined radiative forcing of these and all the other long-lived, well-mixed greenhouse gases included in the AGGI rose 49% from 1990 to 2021 (by ~1.06 watts m-2), CO2 has accounted for about 80% of this increase (~0.85 watts m-2), which makes it by far the biggest contributor to increases in climate forcing since 1990.”
This is classic lying with statistics. Ignore all the big stuff—the total greenhouse effect of about 159 W/m2—so now NOAA makes the minuscule look huge.
It was an increase in water vapor which the 1979 Charney report claimed would cause a warming of 3°C plus or minus 1.5°C which was carried forward by the IPCC.
And it was the “hot spot” over the tropics from the release of latent heat from condensing water vapor presented in the second IPCC assessment report (AR2, 1995) that was used to justify the IPCC and the push for a climate treaty.
The hot spot was a feature of the models, but non-existent in the data. Now we have a push for a treaty for no cause? A climate crisis without a cause?
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Earth's internal Heat:
One TWTW reader asked why the essays in Basic Climate Physics don’t include the energy generated internal to the earth that is given off to space. It is a matter of orders of magnitude, powers of ten. The abstract of a paper in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate explains the issue:
“The Sun is Earth’s primary source of energy. In this paper, we compare the magnitude of the Sun to all other external (to the atmosphere) energy sources. These external sources were previously identified in Sellers (1965); here, we quantify and update them. These external sources provide a total energy to the Earth that is more than 3700 times smaller than that provided by the Sun, a vast majority of which is provided by heat from the Earth’s interior. After accounting for the fact that 71% of incident solar radiation is deposited into the earth system, the Sun provides a total energy to Earth that is still more than 2600 times larger than the sum of all other external sources.”
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Another Lobbying Group: The 2022 World Economic Forum ended.
It was a pompous gabfest of the wealthy signifying nothing. Eduard Harinck of CLINTEL sent TWTW a copy of the agenda and one of its reports: “Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2022.”
Part seven of the Executive Summary states:
The window of opportunity to prevent the worst consequences of climate change is closing fast. It is essential to make the energy transition robust by building the necessary enablers that will keep the transition going if the economic and energy security context deteriorates. With the world in the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s, it is critically important to speed up action to put mankind on the path to net-zero emissions while addressing energy security needs.
These wealthy potentates are trying to force upon the world’s public an inefficient, unreliable, expensive form of energy. They should convince the leaders of China first. China is the largest emitter of CO2.
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Net Zero Dream World:
Energy professional Donn Dears addresses the dream world promised by solar promoters in Net-Zero Reality Check #3. He states that at the current US rate of installation:
“... it will take 182 years to install all the PV solar capacity needed to achieve net-zero carbon using PV solar.
“Equally important, PV solar can’t generate electricity at night so a huge amount of storage capacity would also be needed. No battery yet produced can store large quantities of electricity for a week or two.”
In reality Check # 4 he explores the possibility of wind, solar and nuclear delivering all the electricity needed by 2050 and finds that at the current rate in the US none are capable of providing the electricity the US needs by 2050. The promoters of net zero in the administration are living in a dream world.
Further, Francis Menton examines the latest MIT interdisciplinary study on energy storage and concludes:
“Bottom line: I’m not trusting anybody’s so-called ‘model’ to prove that this gigantic energy transformation is going to work. Show me the demonstration project that actually works.
They won’t. Indeed, there is not even an attempt to put such a thing together, even as we hurtle down the road to ‘net zero’ without any idea how it is going to work.”
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Number of the Week: 25% of land area.
It is impossible to know the maximum extent and thickness of the last major glaciation which ended 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. The USGS reports:
“The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) occurred about 20,000 years ago, during the last phase of the Pleistocene epoch. At that time, global sea level was more than 400 feet lower than it is today, and glaciers covered approximately: 8% of Earth’s surface -- 25% of Earth’s land area”
“Beginning about 15,000 years ago, continental glaciers retreated, and sea level began to rise. Sea level reached its current height about 8,000 years ago and has fluctuated ever since. “Today, glaciers cover approximately: “3% of Earth’s surface -- 11% of Earth’s land area”
In addressing the false claims in “The State of the Global Climate” by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Ron Clutz makes a solid estimate based on generally accepted reports that the Laurentide ice sheet was centered over western Hudson Bay to a height up to 3300 meters (10,500 feet).