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The Week That Was in Climate Science: (October 22, 2022)Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)The Science and Environmental Policy Project
Quote of the Week: “And it is of paramount importance, in order to make progress, that we recognize this ignorance and this doubt. Because we have doubt, we then propose looking in new ideas. The rate of development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.” — Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
SUMMARY:
Roy Spencer compared the latest 50-year summer surface temperatures trends for the 48 contiguous states of the US with modeled trends from 36 CMIP-6 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) climate models. They are all show too much warming, and the average is almost two times actual trends. The period covers 1973 to 2022.
Physicist Ralph Alexander produced a brief report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Paul Homewood describes it:
“A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals how sober factual information in official climate reports is steadily distorted in moving from the original text (written by scientists) to the Summary for Policymakers (written by political hacks), to the official press releases (written by public relations officials), and then to the media coverage (written by journalists).”
Econometrician and Statistician Ross McKitrick and statistician Stephen McIntyre exposed the noted “hockey-stick” as inferior statistics and poor science. The hockey-stick was featured in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (AR3 (TAR), 2001). As discussed by Alexander and others, it is back in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021).
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Overestimating the Ground? Climate modelers claim they adjust their Global Climate Models (General Circulation Models) to surface-air temperatures, about 2 meters (six and one-half feet) above ground level. On his blog, Roy Spencer summarized his research:
“I’ll get right to the results, which are pretty straightforward.
“As seen in the accompanying plot [not shown here], 50-year (1973-2022) summer (June/July/August) temperature trends for the contiguous 48 U.S. states from 36 CMIP-6 climate model experiments average nearly twice the warming rate as observed by the NOAA climate division dataset.
The 36 models are those catalogued at the KNMI Climate Explorer website, using Tas (surface air temperature), one member per model, for the SSP2-4.5 radiative forcing scenario. (The website says there are 40 models, but I found that four of the models have double entries). The surface temperature observations come from NOAA/NCEI. [SSP2-4.5 is Shared Socio-economic Pathway #2 with 4.5 W/m2 total forcing.]
The official NOAA observations produce a 50-year summer temperature trend of +0.26 C/decade for the U.S., while the model trends range from +0.28 to +0.71 C/decade.
As a check on the observations, I took the 18 UTC daily measurements from 497 ASOS and AWOS stations in the Global Hourly Integrated Surface Database (mostly independent from the official homogenized NOAA data) and computed similar trends for each station separately. I then took the median of all reported trends from within each of the 48 states, and did a 48-state area-weighted temperature trend from those 48 median values, after which I also got +0.26 C/decade.
(Note that this could be an overestimate if increasing urban heat island effects have spuriously influenced trends over the last 50 years, and I have not made any adjustment for that).
The importance of this finding should be obvious: Given that U.S. energy policy depends upon the predictions from these models, their tendency to produce too much warming (and likely also warming-associated climate change) should be factored into energy policy planning.
I doubt that it is, given the climate change exaggerations routinely promoted by environment groups, anti-oil advocates, the media, politicians, and most government agencies. [Boldface in original]
Spencer’s research confirms the official NOAA surface-air temperature trends. Yet, the climate modelers produce trends that are almost double that. As Spencer states in other posts, the 43-year record of atmospheric temperature trends is plus 0.13° C per decade. Although far from a perfect measurement of the greenhouse effect, this is where the greenhouse effect occurs and is more unlikely to be biased by other human activity. Thus, the US surface trends of +0.26° C per decade are twice those of the atmosphere (the better estimate of the effects of greenhouse gases).
The trends from climate models are twice those of the surface, thus approximately four times atmospheric trends. And we are to believe that this warming of four times the warming of the atmosphere is produced by atmospheric greenhouse gases?
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Exaggeration Amplified: In “Chinese Whispers: How climate science gets distorted in translation” retired physicist Ralph Alexander credits the idea to New York University’s Steve Koonin. Alexander writes:
“Koonin concludes that most of the disconnect arises from miscommunication, analogous to the children’s game of Chinese Whispers, as it is known in the UK, or its North American counterpart, Telephone.
He points out that there are ample opportunities for climate information to be misinterpreted or even twisted as it is successively distilled down in going from the research literature to scientific assessment reports, to summaries of the assessment reports, to press releases and ultimately to the media. Media coverage is, of course, the public’s primary source of information about climate science.
“The purpose of this paper is to show how Koonin’s assertion about distorted transmission of the climate message is essentially correct. To do this, I will examine in detail two examples drawn from the voluminous climate science literature: the global temperature record over the last 2000 years, and marine heatwaves. I will trace the distortion of the underlying science as it progresses through the following stages, focusing on the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
“• Assessment Report → Summary for Policymakers (SPM)
• SPM → Press release
• Press release → Media and environmental coverage”
Alexander traces the amplification through two examples. One is the return of the notorious hockey-stick. As discussed in previous TWTWs, Steven McIntire demonstrated this process of taking multiple bits of proxy data and forming them into a whole, without any established standardization period to show they measure the same thing. This is like mixing glue and oak sawdust to make boards for a desk and claiming the desk is solid oak. McIntyre called the issue PAGES 2K, PAGES being an acronym for the group based in Geneva, Switzerland, which compiled it and 2K in that it covers about 2,000 years, irregularly.
As discussed in previous TWTWs, in a series of posts, McIntyre shows how deceitful the process is. As Alexander discusses, the new hockey-stick does not appear in the scientific assessment of IPCC AR6. Thus, it was manufactured for the Summary for Policymakers, the political version. In discussing the role of the UN Secretary-General in press releases, Alexander writes:
“The second IPCC press release, on the UN’s website, takes the Telephone game to an entirely new level, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres warning that:
Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.
“The wording of this widely reported statement may have been chosen for maximum political impact, but has little connection to the science reported in AR6. The Secretary-General also repeats the IPCC’s statement above about ‘unprecedented’ changes.”
Thus, the UN Secretary-General has become little more than a carnival barker, or an announcer for a circus whose acts are poor. Also Alexander discusses examples of Marine Heatwaves before concluding:
“These two examples show just how large a gulf can exist between the science presented in the IPCC’s climate assessment reports and how the public perceives it, thanks to garbled transmission as the scientific message progresses from assessment reports to their summaries to press releases and then to the media.
This progression, as Steven Koonin correctly discerns, provides ample opportunities for the message to be distorted, either willfully or not. The hockey stick, which reappears in the AR6 SPM, and which has been trumpeted in the press, clearly illustrates the accuracy of Koonin’s conjecture.
By excising the MWP and LIA from the global temperature record, the assessment report’s fairly impartial stance on the existence of both becomes warped to the point where the SPM can declare modern warming to be unprecedented.
The IPCC’s discussion of marine heatwaves also backs up Koonin’s Chinese Whispers or Telephone analogy, showing how the popular perception that marine heatwaves are now twice as common as they were just 40 years ago is wrong.”
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Not Roasting? The press uses the poor science in the IPCC reports, particularly the Summary for Policymakers and the carnival barkers of the UN, to dream up horror stories of extreme warming based on what “scientists say.” In the transcript provided by Ron Clutz, Ross McKitrick states:
“People need to understand that for the 20th century as a whole there’s temperature data for less than 50 percent of the Earth’s surface. And a lot of stuff is just being filled in with assumptions or modeling work, so it’s really the output of models. And so, as you go back in time back to the 1920s for instance, here in Southern Ontario we have great temperature records back to the 1920s. Here in Guelph, we have temperature data that goes back to the late 1800s.
“One of the first assignments I have my students do in my environmental economics courses is just to take a few locations in Ontario that have more than 100 Years of temperature data and plot the records for average daily highs back 100 years or more. That always surprises them because they just don’t see what they’re expecting to see in terms of an upward trend. There’s a visible trend up to the 1930s or so. And then after that it’s kind of up and down flat.
“Summertime temperatures especially, have gone down, they’ve gone up, but haven’t really changed much since the 1930s.”
McKitrick explains that since about 1960 adjustments to surface temperature trends have lowered previous temperature trends and increase recent temperature trends
“When you look at the post-1960 U.S record the adjustments are as large as the warming itself.”
Later, McKitrick discusses a core issue:
“The burden of proof here is on the people making the adjustments. For a long time, they would refer back to a paper that was done in the 1980s for the Department of energy by Tom Wigley as the scientific basis of the adjustments.
Eventually I got a hold of that document (because it’s hard to find). It turned out it was really just a lot of: Okay we think this record here moved around 1925, they moved the station from here to there, so we’re gonna make a little few changes here and we’ll bump this stretch of the data set up by this amount. And so it wasn’t like a detailed scientific methodology that you could subject to some testing and validation.”
McKitrick gives evidence that most people are ignoring the false claims of the IPCC and its promoters. They are not choosing energy poverty “to save the world.” McKitrick demonstrates the great increase in wealth, life expectancy, and population that have come from fossil fuel use. [As shown elsewhere in TWTW, China and South Asia are not going along with the altered “science.”] The transcript closes with:
“It was the development of industrial civilization, a net benefit to the world, and the proof is that the places where they didn’t experience that development are doing everything they can to experience it.
“And all the supposed harms that people talk about, getting back to extreme weather which we talked about at the beginning: Where are people in the United States moving to? They’re all moving to the extreme weather areas, to the Florida coast and California coast and leaving behind the areas like the Midwest which have the four seasons but not exactly subject to tornadoes and hurricanes.
As soon as they can retire, they leave those places and go to where they they’ll either have heat waves in the desert or droughts in California or hurricanes on the Florida coast. And that’s where they want to retire to. And then when they get there, they can become climate activists and protest greenhouse gases.” See link under Challenging the Orthodoxy.
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Path to Nowhere: Writing on the energy policy of New York, columnist Holman Jenkins sums up western energy folly. In part, he writes:
“The latest report from New York state’s grid operator is a master class in everything wrong with the Western world’s approach to climate change.
“That is: everything wrong with an approach that consists of throwing money at green business interests in defiance of any practical consideration. If you think something else is going on, such as abating climate change, think again.
“To meet a legislated goal of emissions-free electricity by 2040, New York will need up to 45 gigawatts of what it delicately calls DEFRs, or dispatchable emissions-free resources. Not only is that more than the state’s total current generating capacity of 37 gigawatts, these DEFRs, which are carbon-free like wind and solar yet not interruptible like wind and solar, don’t exist and have no prospect of existing in the next decade.
Starting very much sooner than 2040, New York’s real choice will be Third World electricity reliability vs. paying fossil-fuel operators large fees to keep their plants up and running in a highly inefficient part-time fashion.
“Many involved in the state’s energy ‘transition’ might question whether purging the last 10% or 5% of fossil fuels from the system is worth the exorbitant cost. Don’t expect anyone to admit the bigger problem: The transition won’t likely do much to reduce global emissions.
“This is the great unmentionable. When New Yorkers use less coal, oil or gasoline because of environmental mandates, the market price transmits the benefit to other global users, who then use more.
Even more unspeakable is the corollary: Emission-spewing activities simply relocate from one part of the world to another. China’s emissions growth, from half the U.S.’s to almost 300% of the U.S.’s in 30 years, is partly the product of a transplant of emissions from the U.S. and Europe
“If pressed, Biden officials will privately revert to gobbledygook about carbon taxes that appear immaculately without anyone having to advocate them.
The media fill the gap with wishful thinking and Soviet econometrics, confusing inputs with outputs. Yes, world-wide investment in renewables in the past two years has exceeded investment in fossil fuels.
Supposedly this proves fossil fuels are on their way out. No, it proves fossil fuels are a better deal, consuming less investment to meet their share of the world’s growing power needs.” [Boldface added]
Decades of subsidies for politically favored industries that would fail without them is not the path for economic growth, only destruction. See Article # 1, Problems in the Orthodoxy, and Change in US Administrations.
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Number of the Week: Down 36.5%. According to the US Energy Information, Petroleum & Other Liquids website on Weekly US Ending Stocks of Crude Oil in SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve), on January 22, 2021, the stocks were 638,086,000 barrels. On October 14, 2022, the stocks were 405,135,000 barrels, the lowest since June 1, 1984, when the reserve was still expanding. The decline is 36.5%, the greatest ever; with no war, no embargo or no real crisis, except Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which does not threaten US petroleum production or limit US petroleum use. See https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WCSSTUS1&f=W