SOURCE:
The Week That Was: September 24, 2022)
THIS WEEK:
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
SUMMARY: The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) exaggerate the influence of carbon dioxide on earth’s temperatures. This TWTW will address the exaggerations on three levels.
David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) discusses a paper stating that aerosols are declining. Aerosols are a major fudge factor used in IPCC climate modeling. If aerosols are declining, then any increase in surface temperatures may be from an increase in solar radiation hitting the surface, not from an increase in the greenhouse effect.
Richard Lindzen produced a report for the GWPF titled “An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative.” It was critiqued by independent researcher Nic Lewis who has a background in inference statistics. The exchange is valuable.
The video of Howard Hayden’s presentation to the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness on “Physics the IPCC Ignores – But the climate cannot” is available. A few key points will be discussed.
Dr Javier Vinós of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Andy May have wrapped up their presentation of “The Winter Gatekeeper Hypothesis.” The Hypothesis will be discussed in a subsequent TWTW. However, a quote from Vinós bears special mention: “’On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands climate change.’ J. Vinós, paraphrasing Richard Feynman’s words about quantum mechanics.”
Melting glaciers have been in the news. Steven Koonin had a good article in the Wall Street Journal on Antarctica and TWTW will fill in more about Greenland and the Arctic.
The former parliamentary under-secretary for Energy, Science and Technology, in New Zealand, Barry Brill gives fifty reasons why government climate policies need critical thinking.
Senator Manchin released details of his “deal” with Senator Schumer. It may benefit his career, but not so much the American consumer.
The Office of Attorney General for the State of New York has filed a civil suit, not criminal charges, against Donald Trump and his family. Attorney Francis Menton states this demonstrates the continuing decline in integrity of the office, a decline found elsewhere.
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Hiatus Continued? The reports of the IPCC rely on surface temperature measurements, which are heavily influenced by human activities other than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. These activities include urbanization, draining of water and wetlands, and deforestation – all of which increase temperatures.
Yet climate models are not adjusted to account for these activities and increasing temperatures are blamed on increasing atmospheric CO2. This is one reason TWTW does not respect studies based on increasing surface temperatures.
David Whitehouse discusses an article in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physicsthat uses satellite data to show that concentrations of aerosol particles have decreased significantly since 2000.
Since aerosol particles cause cooling (such as the volcanic activity in the early part of the atmospheric temperature trend record), climate modelers have made assumptions about aerosols to explain why the earth is not warming as much as they have forecast.
The abstract of the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physicsarticle states:
“Anthropogenic aerosols exert a cooling influence that offsets part of the greenhouse gas warming. Due to their short tropospheric lifetime of only several days, the aerosol forcing responds quickly to emissions. Here, we present and discuss the evolution of the aerosol forcing since 2000.
There are multiple lines of evidence that allow us to robustly conclude that the anthropogenic aerosol effective radiative forcing (ERF) – both aerosol–radiation interactions (ERFari) and aerosol–cloud interactions (ERFaci) – has become less negative globally, i.e., the trend in aerosol effective radiative forcing changed sign from negative to positive.
Bottom-up inventories show that anthropogenic primary aerosol and aerosol precursor emissions declined in most regions of the world; observations related to aerosol burden show declining trends, in particular of the fine-mode particles that make up most of the anthropogenic aerosols; satellite retrievals of cloud droplet numbers show trends in regions with aerosol declines that are consistent with these in sign, as do observations of top-of-atmosphere radiation.
Climate model results, including a revised set that is constrained by observations of the ocean heat content evolution show a consistent sign and magnitude for a positive forcing relative to the year 2000 due to reduced aerosol effects.
This reduction leads to an acceleration of the forcing of climate change, i.e., an increase in forcing by 0.1 to 0.3 W m−2, up to 12 % of the total climate forcing in 2019 compared to 1750 according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
Whitehouse writes:
“The researchers estimate that the weakening of aerosol-induced temperature change between 2000 – 2019 is similar to that estimated by the IPCC’s AR6.
Most of this weakening occurred post-2010 coincident with the end of the so-called global warming hiatus period.
It suggests that perhaps up to 60% of the global temperature increase since then is down to the reduction of global aerosols.
“When taken together with a couple of super-strong El Nino events which temporarily drove up global temperature, the new findings suggest that the global warming hiatus — clearly evident prior to 2014 — may not have ended yet.
If NASA’s satellite data are confirmed, it would suggest that much of the very moderate changes in global temperature this century may have been driven primarily by cleaner air and naturally-occurring El Niños.”
Put more simply: In the 21st century, we are not experiencing the CO2-caused temperature increases forecasted by global climate modelers.
The claim of a climate emergency caused by CO2 is an exaggeration.
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A 3-D Problem With A 1-D Solution? Richard S. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is noted for solving complex problems, puzzles as he calls them.
His comments on the complexity of “climate change” in “An assessment of the conventional global warming narrative” are noteworthy. In the Assessment he states:
“Although the gross inadequacy of our understanding of clouds and other factors is openly acknowledged by the IPCC, concerns over global warming are based on what is essentially the assumption that variations in water vapor, clouds, and so on act to amplify rather than oppose the impact of CO₂;
in other words, they are assumed to be positive rather than negative feedbacks. It is on the egregiousness of these assumptions rather than on the greenhouse effect itself, that most sceptics (including myself) have focused.”
General Circulation Models (lately called Global Climate Models) “do especially poorly are presenting the natural internal variability of the atmosphere and the oceans, and almost all of them fail to correctly anticipate changes in the commonly used measure of global temperature. Nor do they simulate past climates adequately.”
The IPCC and its followers have attempted to address the multi-dimensional problem of climate change with a simple solution that is wrong – greenhouse gases.
Among other issues they ignore the complexity of convection by two fluids in motion rubbing against irregular surfaces. The abstract states:
“The one-dimensional picture of the greenhouse effect and the role of carbon dioxide in this mechanism dominates current depictions of climate and global warming.
We briefly review this picture. We then discuss the shortcomings of this approach in dealing with the three-dimensional climate system.
One problem is determining what temperature on the real Earth corresponds to the temperature in the one-dimensional treatment.
This, in turn, leads to the traditional recognition that the Earth has, in fact, many climate regimes at present.
Moreover, there have been profound changes in the temperature difference between the tropics and polar regions over millennia, but at the same time the temperature of the tropical regions has remained little changed.
The popular narrative assumes that small changes in the tropics are amplified at high latitudes. There is no basis for this assumption.
Rather, the difference is determined by dynamic heat fluxes in the atmosphere and oceans, with the controlling flux due to baroclinic instability in the atmosphere.
Changes in mean temperature are primarily due to changes in the tropic-to-pole difference, and not to changes in the greenhouse effect.
The stability of tropical temperatures in the face of strongly varying heat fluxes out from those latitudes points to the existence of strong negative feedbacks in the radiative-convective response of the tropics. Finally, we will comment on the so-called impacts of climate change.”
In a brief non-mathematical presentation, he address issues such as the popular narrative, what is the Earth’s temperature?,
what is the Earth’s climate?,
what determines the tropics-pole temperature difference?,
what produces the stability of the tropical temperature?, where does CO₂ fit in the climate?,
and political impacts of the IPCC’s absurdly simplistic approach to climate change. In the section “Where does this leave us?”
Lindzen writes:
“This all leaves us with a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative.
The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system (a process that has played a prominent role in causing current inflation), while lifting sanctions for Russia’s Nordstream 2 pipeline, which was designed to bypass the existing pipeline through Ukraine used to supply Germany.
It has caused much of the European Union to ban exploitation of shale gas and other sources of fossil fuel, thus leaving it with much higher energy costs, increased energy poverty, and dependence on Russia, thus markedly reducing its ability to oppose Mr Putin’s aggressions.
“Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.
Changing course will be far from a simple task. As President Eisenhower noted in his farewell address in 1961:
‘The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
‘Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.’
“As described in detail in Lindzen (2008, 2012), the US government committed itself to the current narrative by the early 1990s and greatly increased funding as a result.
Moreover, given the size of the energy sector, any attempt to rebuild it, however unnecessarily and ineffectively, presents immense opportunities for huge short-term profits – opportunities that are obviously tempting and strongly defended.
Atop all of this, has been the constant Goebellian repetition by the media of climate alarm.
And this alarm is accompanied by so-called ‘solutions’ that deal with something, namely decarbonisation, that is, in fact, largely irrelevant to climate change, while imposing great and pointless pain.
“It is essential – to western civilization itself – that the harm associated with this totally unwarranted alarm be ended, however difficult the task.”
Nic Lewis has a thoughtful critique of Lindzen’s work. However, Lindzen responds that Lewis uses a one-dimensional approach in addressing the so-called water vapor feedback.
This is a common problem since the 1979 Charney Report which provided the basis for the claims of a warming from a doubling of CO2 found in the six IPCC reports.
Lindzen cites the work of van Wijngaarden and Happer, which TWTW thinks addresses the issue of the warming influence from increasing greenhouse gases better than any work based on the IPCC approach.
Lindzen concludes his response with:
“My paper represents my assessment of how the climate system actually works.
It is the result of almost 60 years of work on the behavior of the physics and dynamics of the atmosphere, and the evolution of my thinking since Lindzen (1993).
Of course, like all of science, it is unlikely to represent the final word on the subject.
However, I am reasonably confident that the current popular narrative is largely incorrect. The notion that the science is ‘settled’ is pretty implausible in either case.”
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Physics Ignored: In his presentation at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, AMO physicist Howard Hayden addressed some of the physics the IPCC ignores.
Hayden has extended the work of van Wijngaarden and Happer on the greenhouse effect. The presentation is now available on video.
In his presentation Hayden develops the concept of Planetary Heat Balance, which is Outgoing Longwave Radiation (infrared radiation) equal to Incoming Solar Radiation (sunlight) less the reflected portion equilibrium.
For all planets, this equation does not change unless sunlight changes or the albedo (the reflectivity) of the planet changes.
Hayden then goes into the well-established Stefan-Boltzmann Law which applies to all black-bodies such as most of the earth’s surface.
The most important part of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law is the relationship between absolute temperature and total amount of radiation at all wavelengths.
(Astronomers regularly use the Stefan-Boltzmann law for stars; gases at thousands of degrees do indeed have a blackbody spectrum for the most part.)
The second most important part of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law is that for a black body, the total amount of emitted radiation for all wavelengths is proportional to the fourth power of absolute temperature (°K).
A small increase in surface temperature can have a dramatic effect on radiation from the surface.
The third most important part is that there is a constant, called the Stefan-Boltzmann constant.
Hayden then combines planetary heat balance, the greenhouse effect, and the Stefan-Boltzmann equation into one equation that must be balanced by all planets at equilibrium with the star they orbit. He shows how IPCC’s models fail to balance the equation.
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Melting “Doomsday” Fears: Writing in the Wall Street Journal, physicist Steven Koonin addresses the so-called Doomsday Glacier in “Don’t Believe the Hype About Antarctica’s Melting Glaciers.” Koonin writes:
“Alarming reports that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking misrepresent the science under way to understand a very complex situation. Antarctica has been ice-covered for at least 30 million years.
The ice sheet holds about 26.5 million gigatons of water (a gigaton is a billion metric tons, or about 2.2 trillion pounds).
If it were to melt completely, sea levels would rise 190 feet. Such a change is many millennia in the future, if it comes at all.
“Much more modest ice loss is normal in Antarctica. Each year, some 2,200 gigatons (or 0.01%) of the ice is discharged in the form of melt and icebergs, while snowfall adds almost the same amount.
The difference between the discharge and addition each year is the ice sheet’s annual loss.
That figure has been increasing in recent decades, from 40 gigatons a year in the 1980s to 250 gigatons a year in the 2010s.
“But the increase is a small change in a complex and highly variable process.
For example, Greenland’s annual loss has fluctuated significantly over the past century.
And while the Antarctic losses seem stupendously large, the recent annual losses amount to 0.001% of the total ice and, if they continued at that rate, would raise sea level by only 3 inches over 100 years.”
Koonin then goes into details on two new studies that have been exaggerated in the general press before concluding:
“These two studies illustrate the progress being made in understanding a dauntingly complex mix of ice, ocean, land, and weather, with clever methods to infer past conditions and sophisticated computer modeling to show potential future scenarios.
These papers describe the science with appropriate precision and caveats, but it is a shame that the media misrepresents the research to raise alarm.
That denies the public the right to make informed decisions about “climate action,” as well as the opportunity to marvel at the science itself.”
A similar problem occurs with the reporting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. The reporters appear to be ignorant of Camp Century, which was in use from 1959 to 1967.
It was a preliminary facility for the US Army project Iceworm to install a network of intermediate range nuclear missiles capable of hitting the Soviet Union.
Camp Century had complete modern bathroom, dining, and medical facilities, all powered by a nuclear reactor.
Within a few years, it became evident that the ice was moving, and the camp was abandoned with the nuclear reactor removed.
One solid scientific accomplishment came from the ice core borings which prompted the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) by the European Science Foundation from 1989 to 1995 at the height of the ice sheet.
These revealed that abrupt climate change occurred more than 25 times since the last glacial period. Named after palaeoclimatologists Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschge, the Dansgaard-Oeschge (DO) events show an abrupt warming followed by a slow cooling roughly every 1,500 years.
These are not as clear in ice cores taken in Antarctica and are possibly caused by changes in the North Atlantic Circulation.
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The Deal: Senator Joe Manchin release details of his deal with Senator Schumer.
According to the analysis by The Wall Street Journal Manchin gets his Mountain Valley Pipeline, but there is not much for consumers and taxpayers.
The analysis outlines some of the undesirable characteristic of the “tax increase and climate spending bill” Manchin voted for.
“The President would have to designate 25 energy projects of strategic national importance, but only five must be for fossil fuels or biofuels such as ethanol.
Federal agencies would be directed to try to complete environmental reviews on these projects within two years, but nothing compels agencies to meet these deadlines.
Projects the President doesn’t favor could languish in regulatory purgatory.
“The bill sets a 150-day statute of limitations on legal challenges to environmental reviews and permits, which is intended to prevent activists from suing to stop projects under construction.
Yet nothing limits the scope of legal challenges and who can bring them.
The bill makes no substantive changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act that let opponents delay projects for years.
“Mr. Manchin also comes up short in addressing the problem of states abusing their authority under the Clean Water Act.
The bill would give states one year to take action on water permits.
But nothing stops Governors from rejecting permits on false environmental pretenses as some habitually do.
“Worse, the bill would expand state discretion to block oil and gas pipelines based on an assessment of a project’s indirect impact on water quality instead of merely discharges into waterways as under current law.
States would have a bigger veto on energy projects and federal environmental reviews.
“The bill’s worst provision would give new power to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to override state objections to expanding electric transmission lines.
States can now deny permits for interstate transmission lines that won’t benefit their citizens.
This can sometimes hurt states that need the energy to balance their grids.
“The bill lets FERC override states and approve transmission lines in the ‘national interest’ if they ‘enhance the ability of facilities that generate or transmit firm or intermittent energy to connect to the electric grid.’
This explicitly ties the national interest to ‘intermittent’ renewable power sources.”
Unreliable electrical power is in the national interest?