WSJ's Sharon Begley should stick to health where at least she gets it less wrong.
JunkScience.com
February 10, 2007
Once again Begley has ventured into climate alarmism with this piece (Friday, February 9, 2007, .pdf for those lacking access here). Once again, Begley has got it all wrong.
After a somewhat snide aside about the Heartland Institute's James Taylor Begley has launched into a support, inter alia, of IPCC misstatements and dead wrong "projections" -- let's see how she does.
"A number of greenhouse projections were spot-on, while others underestimated how radically gases such as carbon dioxide, emitted when fossil fuels burn, would alter climate by trapping heat in the atmosphere."
Um, no -- not even close. To begin with we don't know the Earth's near-surface temperature with a precision equal to estimated warming since the latter 1800s (don't take our word for it, see the Hansen Q&A published by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies). We have no standard means of measuring temperature change, no reliable data that can be compared over time since recording points and instrumentation are evolving, no means of auditing current datasets because curators explicitly state they have careers invested in their data and they have no intention of sharing it with anyone looking for errors in it (note to Phil Jones, science works by falsification dude, people are supposed to look for errors in your data) and no real idea of what the temperature "should" be anyway (we do know at least European datasets begin in the Little Ice Age and are therefore expected to show some warming). What we do know is that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing but that atmospheric temperatures have not demonstrated the expected signature, although the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis insists they must rise approximately 1.3 times faster than surface temperatures.
"The world's surface temperature has increased one-third of a degree Celsius since 1990 -- the upper end of projections, according to scientists led by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, in Germany. Their analysis appeared last week in the online issue of the journal Science."
Oh boy... perhaps we'll just point readers to Professor Roger Pielke Sr.'s outraged response: Blatant Cherry Picking By Stefan Rahmstorf And Colleagues In Science Magazine (in case people don't know, Professor Pielke endorses the view human actions affect the climate).
"With sea level, climate change has outpaced the projections. Satellite measurements show that the waters around the world rose 3.3 millimeters per year, averaged from 1993 to 2006. The IPCC foresaw 2 millimeters per year. "The main message of our [analysis] is to those who have claimed that IPCC is exaggerating climate change or is painting unduly grim future scenarios," says Dr. Rahmstorf. "Unfortunately, this is not true; the real climate system is changing as fast as, or in some components even faster than, expected by IPCC."
Also drawn from the above cherry-picked twaddle and dead flat wrong: recent examination of a century's worth of records indicate the rise actually slowed in the second half of the 20th Century. At least Science and the authors (Stefan Rahmstorf, Anny Cazenave, John A. Church, James E. Hansen, Ralph F. Keeling, David E. Parker, Richard C. J. Somerville) admit their "study" provides nothing from which conclusions can be drawn.
"Ice in arctic seas also is melting faster than expected. (Though that doesn't raise sea levels; melting ice on land does.) It now covers 11% less area than it did in 1978, and 20% less in the late summer. "That's about double the mean model projection," notes physicist Joseph Romm, author of a new book on global warming, "Hell or High Water.""
Maybe, maybe not -- we don't have satellite imagery from prior to 1978 so we have no means of knowing what cycles occur in Arctic ice. Of great significance is the step warming of 1976 (see, for example, the effect the PDO phase shift had on Alaskan temperatures), such a warming, with no apparent trend before or after is not the signature of steadily increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration. Has there been some thawing of the Arctic? Quite possibly but how much might be an oscillation associated with any or some combination of the Artic, Pacific and/or Atlantic oscillations is not known nor knowable at this time. Complicating the issue still further are recent discoveries about ozone from northern industries contributing significantly to Arctic warming (maybe, although it's still a model study).
"Whatever 2100 brings, however, sea-level rise today has exceeded forecasts. That doesn't mean it will continue to; sea-level rise is the most difficult greenhouse effect to predict. But so far, ice sheets at the top and bottom of the world -- in Greenland and Antarctica -- have behaved in ways models failed to predict, disintegrating faster than even the 2001 IPCC report anticipated. "We don't have models of ice-sheet behavior that we have faith in," says Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, an IPCC author. "They didn't predict what the ice sheets have done over the past 15 years.""
No again, as cited above, sea level increase has actually slowed in the second half of the 20th Century and, over the long-term, the rate doesn't appear to have varied all that much over hundreds, possibly thousands of years.
"The models fall short in their representation of ice streams, rivers of ice that (despite being solid) flow from ice sheets out to sea. The streams have been speeding up, carrying ice to the ocean more quickly than expected. "There has been a revolution in our knowledge of how major ice sheets respond to climate change," says Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colo. "This isn't incorporated fully into the models, but observations show [the response is] happening, and faster than expected.""
Wrong. While we've really been studying ice streams the rate of flow has been observed to vary, briefly speeding up but slowing again -- as far as can be told this is how they always behave. Recent claims about massive ice loss are often sourced from GRACE "data" without reference to the fact this is heavily massaged via models to convert from apparent mass gain to meet the "expected" loss and then claimed as "data" (post massage data shows most interesting "ice loss" [loss of mass] from open ocean regions and suggests "ocean holes" -- it is therefore viewed with significant skepticism).
The references in the two preceding extracts to not having models we have faith in and items not being incorporated in models are significant understatements. Climate models are poor prognostic tools and are unable to replicate current conditions, this is what Hansen et al have to say about their state-of-the-art GISS ModelE:
2.4. Principal Model Deficiencies
ModelE (2006) compares the atmospheric model climatology with observations. Model shortcomings include ~25% regional deficiency of summer stratus cloud cover off the west coast of the continents with resulting excessive absorption of solar radiation by as much as 50 W/m2, deficiency in absorbed solar radiation and net radiation over other tropical regions by typically 20 W/m2, sea level pressure too high by 4-8 hPa in the winter in the Arctic and 2-4 hPa too low in all seasons in the tropics, ~20% deficiency of rainfall over the Amazon basin, ~25% deficiency in summer cloud cover in the western United States and central Asia with a corresponding ~5°C excessive summer warmth in these regions. In addition to the inaccuracies in the simulated climatology, another shortcoming of the atmospheric model for climate change studies is the absence of a gravity wave representation, as noted above, which may affect the nature of interactions between the troposphere and stratosphere. The stratospheric variability is less than observed, as shown by analysis of the present 20-layer 4°×5° atmospheric model by J. Perlwitz (personal communication). In a 50-year control run Perlwitz finds that the interannual variability of seasonal mean temperature in the stratosphere maximizes in the region of the subpolar jet streams at realistic values, but the model produces only six sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) in 50 years, compared with about one every two years in the real world. ...
As far as climate models go that's pretty good but it must be noted that an inability to get within 20-50 Wm-2 and surface temperature errors of about 5 kelvins over significant land tracts makes attribution of a possible Watt or two of additional forcing and some part of a possible ~0.5 kelvin to enhanced greenhouse no better than guesswork.
"The IPCC got it right when it projected more downpours and droughts. Already, precipitation falls less often, but when it rains it pours. The basic idea that global average temperatures would rise has also been spot-on, with 11 of the past 12 years among the 12 warmest since instruments began recording temperatures in 1850."
Nope, there's no such evidence although we do have increasing data access. There might have been some recent tropospheric warming but the extent remains to be seen since some of the amount depicted in the MSU measure could be due to orbital drift of some of the units involved. With the closure of rural recording points and relocation and urbanization of others trends are unclear and the result of significant massaging of unknown efficacy. Curiously, after an allegedly "record" year, our thermometric averaging of just over 1,000 METAR records suggests the last year to have been within a few hundredths of the expected 14 °C, suggesting warming to be highly dependent on time series selected and methodology employed.
"Because climate models can't zero in on extreme weather events, though, except to say they will occur more often, they failed to foresee disasters like the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed some 26,000 people."
This old chestnut too, eh? Well, guess what? It's not a symptom of "global warming" but one of European neglect of their old and infirm, along with stupid energy policy making it too expensive for the elderly and infirm to manage their immediate environment when relatives and service personnel abandoned them for the summer holidays. Think for a moment -- do the elderly and infirm manage to survive in Las Vegas, for example? Do you think Europe got hotter than Nevada in summer?
No matter, it was probably the most aggressive regional warming experienced, right? Actually likely not. The Central England Temperature dataset has been maintained for a long time, extending back to 1659, so let's try that as our European proxy:
The most impressive warming evident occurred from the 1690s through 1730s with the 10-year running mean climbing almost 2 °C! We imagine that was a significant relief in the depths of the Little Ice Age although you can imagine the pandemonium should such a warming occur today. Abrupt warmings also occurred in the 1770s; 1810s/20s; 1890s and 1990s. Abrupt coolings are evident along with a relatively sustained warming in the first half of the Twentieth Century. From 1695 to 1733, the annual mean temperature rose from 7.25 °C to 10.47 °C at a time when there was negligible change in atmospheric CO2 -- the running mean did not return to such readings until the 1990s. On the other hand, annual mean temperatures fell from 10.62 °C in 1949 to 8.47 °C by 1963, a period when atmospheric CO2 levels were measurably rising. Greenhouse does not appear to be exerting a strong influence on the CET and by implication climate models driven by anthropogenic emissions to mimic similar warmings are incorrect since they are relying on the wrong forcings.
"In focusing on global averages, climate projections make the coming changes sound gradual, slow, sedate. That's how ozone loss was originally portrayed, too; no one foresaw the sudden "ozone hole" over Antarctica. It remains to be seen if climate reality, too, can suddenly tip into an extreme."
Oh boy... give Sharon an accidental half-point because there is no evidence global mean temperature is a particularly useful metric. Throwing in the "ozone hole" is an act of desperation though and completely wrong.
Atmospheric ozone is measured in Dobson Units, named for the Oxford academic Gordon Miller Bourne Dobson (1889-1976), one of the pioneers of atmospheric ozone research and inventor of the Dobson Spectrophotometer, used to measure atmospheric ozone from the ground. During the International Geophysical Year of 1956 there was a significant increase in the number of these devices in use around the globe and the Halley Bay (Antarctica) anomaly was discovered. Yes, that's 1956, three decades prior to the allegedly alarming "discovery." There was a significantly different perspective then because interest was focused on the November increase - now called a "recovery" - in stratospheric ozone levels over Antarctica with the collapse of the South Polar Vortex.
In a paper titled "Forty Years' Research on Atmospheric Ozone at Oxford: A History" (Applied Optics, March 1968), Dobson described an ozone monitoring program that began at Halley Bay in 1956.
When the data began to arrive, "the values in September and October 1956 were about 150 [Dobson] units lower than expected. ... In November the ozone values suddenly jumped up to those expected. ... It was not until a year later, when the same type of annual variation was repeated, that we realized that the early results were indeed correct and that Halley Bay showed a most interesting difference from other parts of the world." [em added]
Although South Polar temperatures do not appear to have been quite as low in 1957-58 as they have in recent years (a critical factor in ozone destruction) Rigaud and Leroy [Annales Geophysicae (November, 1990)] reported atmospheric ozone levels as low as 110 DU observed at the French Antarctic Observatory at Dumont d'Urville [opposite side of the South Pole from Halley Bay] in the spring of 1958. The South Polar Vortex, where ozone destruction is greatest, was reportedly centred over Dumont d'Urville that year, which suggests any observed differences may be well within the bounds of normal variability.
Well Sharon Begley, for a 'science' column that was something of a disaster, wasn't it? Absolutely woeful. Perhaps you might want to lay off the advocacy and try something you actually know something about in future.
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