Global Climate Modeling: What Temperatures To Use, What Variables Are There?

John Tierney, a columnist for the New York Times is beginning to ask some probing questions about global warming and the science behind the global climate models used for predictions. He is expressing a good deal of doubt. Of course skeptics (like me) have more than just a little doubt, as even a brief review of material on my blog will show. I think it is a positive sign that the large, liberal, mainstream media like the New York Times is beginning to question the Al Gore and United Nations views on climate. It is about time.
Peter

source:

January 10, 2008, 8:58 am
A Spot Check of Global Warming
By John Tierney


How do predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jibe with reality? The solid brown line shows the warming projected by the IPCC, with a range of uncertainty bounded by the dotted brown lines. The other lines show the actual temperatures recorded during the past seven years by different methods on the ground and by satellite. (The lines show the amount of warming, in degrees Celsius, relative to the average temperature during the last two decades of the 20th century.) (Source: Roger A. Pielke, Jr.)



Last week I asked if there were any good weather omens to look for. I raised a question originally posed by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado: Are there any indicators in the next 1, 5 or 10 years that would be inconsistent with the consensus view on climate change?

Lab readers contributed some ideas (and much invective), but I think the most useful one came from a climate scientist who wrote directly to Dr. Pielke and suggested comparing what has happened since 2000 with the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Pielke took up the suggestion and looked at the increase in global average temperature projected by the IPCC from 2000 to 2007. (The IPCC projected various scenarios, depending on the rate of greenhouse emissions; Dr. Pielke chose the scenario that most closely matches the actual emissions since 2000.)

The hard part was figuring out what has actually happened the past seven years, because it all depends on who’s doing the measuring, and whether it’s being done on the surface or by satellite. As you can see from the blue line in the graph above, the recent surface measurements by NASA (the blue line) are warmer than those by the United Kingdom Met Office (the green line), and there are different satellite measurements from Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Pielke calls it “a feast for cherrypickers.” In the Prometheus blog, where you can read the details of his computations, he writes: “One can arrive at whatever conclusion one wants with respect to the IPCC predictions. Want the temperature record to be consistent with IPCC? OK, then you like NASA. How about inconsistent? Well, then you are a fan of RSS. On the fence? Well, UAH and UKMET serve that purpose pretty well.”

No matter which line you prefer on the graph, you can’t draw any firm conclusions about the IPCC’s projections — a few years does not a trend make, and the global temperature is just one of the indicators to look at. But the different lines on the graph are certainly evidence of how complicated the climate debate is. If scientists can’t even agree on what has happened in the past, imagine how much more difficult it is to figure out the future. I’m not suggesting that the global warming isn’t real, or that the uncertainties justify inaction — we take out insurance all the time against risks that are uncertain. I’d like to see a carbon tax. But I’d also like to see fewer dogmatists claiming that the scientific debate is over.

Dr. Pielke suggests that more scientists do reality checks on other predictions by the IPCC, and that the IPCC make it easier for its predictions to be tested by specifying in detail what the variables are, who is measuring them, and what to look for in the future. “If weather forecasters, stock brokers, and gamblers can do it, then you can too,” he urges the IPCC in his blog post. Dr. Pielke told me that scientists have been focusing on the predictions for the summer ice melt in the Arctic — which called for less dramatic change than what has actually occurred — but not paying enough attention to other indicators.

“Rather than select among predictions, why not verify them all?” he said. “Seven years is not a lot to allow much to be said, but certainly 10 and 15 years will be. Once predictions are made, they should not be forgotten, but evaluated against experience. This is not skepticism at work, just the good old scientific method.”

If you’ve got any thoughts on how to interpret the results on Dr. Pielke’s graph — or how to look for other indicators — let me know. I’d be glad to hear suggestions from scientists at the popular Real Climate blog on a short list of variables (beyond temperature and sea ice) that might be used to compare with specific IPCC predictions and point interested readers to where data on them can be found.

Noted Climate Scientist Dismisses Importance of CO2 In Climate Change....And More

I have posted articles about and by Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. on this blog previously. He is speaking out again here about some of the key issues involved in the global warming/climate change debate. Most importantly, he rejects the notion that atmospheric CO2 is the primary driver of climate change. He is very critical of the United Nation's IPCC. He thinks the current computer climate models are inadequate to predict future climate changes and should NOT be used to make policy decisions. Please read the article for more information.

Also note that these views are from a highly respected climate scientist, and Professor (now retired) and affiliated with two major universities.
Peter

source: http://www.ecoworld.com/home/articles2.cfm?tid=445


Beyond Global
Warming
NOTED CLIMATE SCIENTIST ROGER PIELKE SR. REJECTS THE NOTION THAT ELEVATED CO2 LEVELS ARE THE SOLE CULPRITS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
by Ed Ring

Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr."Scientific rigor has been sacrificed,and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow."

Roger Pielke Sr. is a retired professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, and a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since July 2005 he has written and maintained Climate Science, a blog that serves as a scientific forum for dialogue and commentary on climate issues. With William R. Cotton, he is the co-author of Human Impacts on Weather and Climate (Cambridge University Press, 2007). And over the past summer he co-hosted a conference entitled "Land Use and Climate Change," in Boulder, Colorado. While Dr. Pielke rejects being characterized as a "global warming skeptic," his work is unwaveringly critical of the current conventional wisdom regarding climate change and what to do about it. EcoWorld Editor Ed Ring recently caught up with Dr. Pielke, who had the following to say on the topic:

EcoWorld: How would you say that current conventional wisdom regarding climate change has gotten it wrong?

Pielke: In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment [of Climate Change] have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in relation to a diversity of other human climate- forcing mechanisms. Indeed, many research studies incorrectly oversimplify climate change by characterizing it as being dominated by the radiative effect of human-added CO2. But while prudence suggests that we work to minimize our disturbance of the climate system (since we don't fully understand it), by focusing on just one subset of forcing mechanisms, we end up seriously misleading policymakers as to the most effective way of dealing with our social and environmental vulnerability in the context of the entire spectrum of environmental risks and other threats we face today.

EcoWorld: What about experts' predictions of rising sea levels, extreme weather, melting polar ice caps, and so on?

Pielke: Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated themselves to be skillful predictors of regional and local climate change and variability over multidecadal time scales. For example, in the case of sea ice, the models are consistent with the decrease in Arctic sea ice in recent years, but they cannot explain the multiyear increase in Antarctic sea ice (including a record level this year). With respect to extreme weather, a much more important issue than how greenhouse gases are altering our climate is society's greatly increased vulnerability to extreme weather events - a direct result not of changes in weather but of increased settlement by expanding human populations into low-lying coastal regions, floodplains, and marginal arid land.

EcoWorld: But what about the northern icecap shrinking this September to possibly its smallest size in history (exposing more than 1 million square miles of open water) or the comments of Robert Correll, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, regarding recent observations in Greenland ("We have seen a massive acceleration of the speed with which these glaciers are moving into the sea")? Is something new and alarming happening?

Pielke: These examples represent selected observations that promote the view that human-input carbon dioxide is dominating climate change. However, the climate is - and always will be - changing. Thus, although human activity certainly affects the way in which climate varies and changes, actual global observations present a much more complex picture than that represented by the two examples listed above. For example, Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum coverage in 2007, and the globally averaged lower atmosphere has not warmed in the last nine years (and, in fact, is cooler than it was in 1998). In addition, there are regions of the world where glaciers are advancing (such as New Zealand, parts of the Himalayas, and Norway). However, this information - which conflicts with the projections of the multi-decadal global climate models and the 2007 IPCC report - has been almost completely ignored by policymakers and the media.

Human Impacts on Weather andClimate, by Roger Pielke, Sr.,and William R. Cotton Cambridge University Press

EcoWorld: What role have alterations in land use played in climate change?

Pielke: Changes in land use by humans and the resulting alterations in weather and hydrology are major drivers of long-term regional and global climate patterns - yet the 2007 IPCC Statement for Policymakers largely ignores their importance (despite extensive documentation in research literature). Along with the diverse influences of aerosols on climate, land use effects (caused, for example, by deforestation, desertification, and conversion of land to farming) may be at least as important in altering the weather as the changes in climate patterns associated with the radiative effect of carbon dioxide and other well-mixed greenhouse gases. Moreover, land use and land cover changes will continue to exert an important influence on the Earth's climate for the next century.
The reason for this is that even if the globally averaged surface temperature change over time ends up being close to zero in response to land use and land cover change and variability, the regional changes in surface temperature, precipitation, and other climate metrics could be as large as or larger than those that result from the anthropogenic increase of greenhouse gases. Moreover, people and ecosystems experience the effects of environmental change regionally, not as global averaged values. Thus, the issue of a "discernable human influence on global climate" misses the obvious, in that we have been altering climate by land use and land cover change ever since humans began large-scale alterations of the land surface.

EcoWorld: What were the main conclusions to come out of your recent conference focusing on the land use changes that affect the Earth's climate?

Pielke: This meeting reconfirmed the first order role of land management as a climate forcing mechanism. These findings supported the conclusions of the 2005 National Research Council report "Radiative Forcing of Climate Change: Expanding the Concept and Addressing Uncertainties," which identified land use change as having a major effect on climate. Unfortunately, the role of land surface processes was underreported in the body of the IPCC report and was essentially ignored in the IPCC Statement for Policymakers.

EcoWorld: Sticking with land use changes: Do you think that tropical forests create a thermostatic effect that moderates extreme weather? And following on that, do you think tropical deforestation could be as significant a driver in climate change as anthropogenic CO2?

Pielke: Tropical deforestation clearly has an effect on both regional and global climate that is at least as important as the radiative effect of adding CO2. When forests are removed, not only does the climate system lose the biodiversity and other benefits of that environment, the vegetation loses its ability to dynamically respond in ways that reduce extreme weather fluctuations. For example, when trees access deeper water through their roots, the resulting transpiration of water vapor into the atmosphere (making rain more likely) can help ameliorate dry conditions when the large-scale weather pattern is one of drought.

EcoWorld: What is your criticism of the IPCC?

Pielke: Mainly the fact that the same individuals who are doing primary research into humans' impact on the climate system are being permitted to lead the assessment of that research. Suppose a group of scientists introduced a drug they claimed could save many lives: There were side effects, of course, but the scientists claimed the drug's benefits far outweighed its risks. If the government then asked these same scientists to form an assessment committee to evaluate their claim (and the committee consisted of colleagues of the scientists who made the original claim as well as the drug's developers), an uproar would occur, and there would be protests. It would represent a clear conflict of interest. Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process. To date, either few people recognize this conflict, or those that do choose to ignore it because the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed, and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow.

EcoWorld: How effective are current climate computer models in helping us understand global climate trends?

Pielke: Using global climate models to improve our understanding of how the system works represents a valuable application of such tools, but the term sensitivity study should be used to characterize these assessments. In sensitivity studies, a subset of the forcings and/or feedback of the climate system are perturbed to examine their response. Since the computer model of the climate system is incomplete (meaning it doesn't include all of the important feedbacks and forcings), what the IPCC is really doing is conducting a sensitivity study.
The IPCC reports, however, inaccurately present their assessment as a "projection" - one that's widely interpreted by policymakers and others as being able to skillfully forecast the future state of the climate system. But even one of the IPCC's leading authors, Kevin Trenberth, has gone on record reminding people of the limitations of the models used in its projections. Says Trenberth, "There are no predictions by IPCC & and there never have been." He further states, "None of the models used by IPCC are initialized to the observed state, and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate."
Indeed, says Trenberth, "The current projection method works to the extent it does because it utilizes differences from one time to another, and the main model bias and systematic errors are thereby subtracted out. This assumes linearity. It works for global forced variations, but it cannot work for many aspects of climate, especially those related to the water cycle."
Thus, as clarified even by one of the key IPCC contributors (who has a vested interest in the acceptance of the 2007 IPCC report), current climate models clearly cannot accurately model observed real-world changes in climate. Global model results projected out decades into the future should never be interpreted as skillful forecasts. Instead, they should be interpreted as sensitivity studies on limited variables. When authors of research papers use definitive words (such as "will occur") and display model output with specific time periods in the future, they are misleading policymakers and other people who use this information.

EcoWorld: What policies should be considered to deal with climate change? Is reducing CO2 emissions part of the solution?

Pielke: Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions can only serve as a useful "environmental currency" as long as it provides the benefits needed to reduce the risk to critical environmental and social resources. As such, it needs to be part of a win-win strategy that provides a diversity of benefits. With energy efficiency and energy independence, for example, everyone benefits. As the "currency" for these benefits, however, greenhouse gas emission reduction represents an unnecessarily blunt instrument if there are more effective ways to reduce the risks to societal and environmental resources. Moreover, greenhouse gas policies can produce serious unintended negative consequences such as an increase in carcinogenic emissions when biodiesel is used, or reductions in biodiversity and alterations in climate when land management practices convert large areas to biofuels.
Greenhouse gas emission reductions, relative to other environmental currencies, should be evaluated with respect to their ability to reduce risk to essential social and environmental resources. In this framework, greenhouse emission reductions are only useful if they provide real benefit to those resources. Thus, if a policy made for other reasons also happens to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you clearly have a win-win situation. The current focus on using reductions in CO2 emissions as the primary currency for achieving benefits to society and the environment, however, clearly represents a very flawed approach.

Advocacy In The Guise of Climate Science.....Hansen Revealed For What He Is......

It is pretty clear in the following commentary that Dr. Pielke is no follower of James Hansen of NASA. Read the following and see if you agree with the alarmist nature of Hansen's paper and its obvious advocacy for a his personal agenda. This is science being used for political purposes at its most blatant.
Peter


Advocacy In The Guise Of Climate Science - A New Paper That Exemplifies This Approach
Filed under: Climate Science Reporting, Climate Science Misconceptions — Roger Pielke Sr. @ 7:00 am
There is a new paper that presents a claim that the Earth’s climate system is dominated by positive radiative feedbacks, and that includes the heading in section of the paper “Planet Earth today: imminent peril”. This sensationalism, however, in the view of Climate Science, is unsubstantiated by examining even the most basic of measures, where if the 2007 values of the IPCC radiative forcing are accepted, and the observed ocean heat storage data is used to diagnose what has been the sum total of real world radiative forcings and feedbacks in the last few decades, the climate feedbacks have been negative (as is discussed below)! This contradicts the fundamental premise of the paper.

Hansen, J., M. Sato, P. Kharecha G. Russell, D. W. Lea, M. Siddall, 2007: Climate change and trace gases; Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2007) 365, 1925–1954 doi:10.1098/rsta.2007.2052 Published online 18 May 2007.
The abstract reads,
“Palaeoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. One feedback, the ‘albedo flip’ property of ice/water, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that ‘flips’ the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Inertia of ice sheet and ocean provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming. Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest human-made climate forcing, but other trace constituents are also important.

Only intense simultaneous efforts to slow CO2 emissions and reduce non-CO2 forcings can keep climate within or near the range of the past million years. The most important of the non-CO2 forcings is methane (CH4), as it causes the second largest human-made GHG climate forcing and is the principal cause of increased tropospheric ozone (O3), which is the third largest GHG forcing. Nitrous oxide (N2O) should also be a focus of climate mitigation efforts. Black carbon (‘black soot’) has a high global warming potential (approx. 2000, 500 and 200 for 20, 100 and 500 years, respectively) and deserves greater attention. Some forcings are especially effective at high latitudes, so concerted efforts to reduce their emissions could preserve Arctic ice,while also having major benefits for human health, agricultural productivity and the global environment.”

One statement in the conclusion reads,
“Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to forcings, i.e. imposed changes of the planet’s energy balance. Both fast and slow feedbacks turn out to be predominately positive. As a result, our climate has the potential for large rapid fluctuations. Indeed, the Earth, and the creatures struggling to exist on the planet, have been repeatedly whipsawed between climate states.”
This is obviously an erroneous statement! If all of the feedbacks were predominately positive, the climate would long ago evolved to a a very extreme state. This clearly has not occurred, and such statements in this article are unsubstantiated scientifically in the paper, and, even more importantly, fail to represented the dynamics of the current climate system, where, as has been summarized on Climate Science, the net effect of all of the feedbacks, assuming the 2007 IPCC estimate of climate forcings is correct, is negative!

That the feedbacks must be negative in recent years (or the 2007 IPCC net forcing is in error) is discussed in
The Net Climate Feedbacks Must Be A Negative Effect On The Global Average Radiative Imbalance If The IPCC Conclusion Of Net Anthropogenic Radiative Forcings Is Correct.
Just two excerpts from the paper are needed to recognize what the Hansen et al paper is all about, i.e.

“The Arctic epitomizes the global climate situation. The most rapid feasible slowdown of CO2 emissions, coupled with focused reductions of other forcings, may just have a chance of avoiding disastrous climate change.”
and

“The potential of these ‘amber waves of grain’ and coastal facilities for permanent underground storage ‘from sea to shining sea’ to help restore America’s technical prowess, moral authority and prestige, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, in the course of helping to solve the climate problem, has not escaped our attention.”

This paper is clearly an advocacy article using the guise of cherrypicked science to promote a particular political and policy agenda. It very much fits into the definition of “stealth issue advocacy” as discussed in

Pielke, R. A. Jr., 2007: The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and PoliticsRoger A., Jr. University of Colorado, Boulder
The Hansen et al paper is clearly not an example of serving as an honest broker of climate science.

Hansen et al, of course, are correct that the climate system is nonlinear and sudden transitions on a variety of space and time scales do occur, as we discussed in
Rial, J., R.A. Pielke Sr., M. Beniston, M. Claussen, J. Canadell, P. Cox, H. Held, N. de Noblet-Ducoudre, R. Prinn, J. Reynolds, and J.D. Salas, 2004: Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth’s climate system. Climatic Change, 65, 11-38.

The Hansen et al article, however oversimplifies the climate system as being dominated by the radiative effect of human added CO2. Such a perturbation, of course, just as easily could move us away from undesirable climate transitions, instead of toward such transitions. Prudence suggests that we work to minimize our disturbance of the climate system since we do not understand the climate system well enough.

However, to focus on just a small subset of forcings is seriously misleading policymakers on the most effective way to deal with our social and environmental vulnerability from the entire spectrum of the actual environmental risks and other threats that we face.

Roger Pielke, Sr. On The IPCC and Its Obvious Conflict of Interest

Ok, this comes from the prominent meteorologist, Dr. Roger A. Pielke, Sr. He explains why the IPCC conclusions about global warming and climate change are so distorted, wrong, and essentially worthless. In other words, they should not be believed, or acted upon. Sorry Al Gore and Jim Hansen and all the true believers of man-caused global warming.
Peter


The 2007 IPCC Assessment Process - Its Obvious Conflict of Interest
Filed under: Climate Science Op-Eds — Roger Pielke Sr. @ 7:00 am
Climate Science has discussed the shortcomings, bias and errors with the 2007 IPCC Report (e.g. see, see, see, and see). My final Climate Science posting summarizes the fundamental problem with this assessment.

If instead of evaluating research in climate, suppose a group of scientists introduced a new cancer drug that they claimed could save many lives. There were side effects, of course, but they claimed that the benefit far out weighed these risks. The government than asked these scientist to form an assessment Committee to evaluate this claim. Colleagues of the group of scientists who introduced the drug are then asked to serve on this Committee, along with the developers.

If this occurred, of course, there would be an uproar of protest! This is a clear conflict of interest.
Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process! The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow
.
In a previous climate assessment, I made a recommendation as to how to correct this defective assessment process. This is discussed in the report
Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2005: Public Comment on CCSP Report “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences”. 88 pp including appendices,
where I wrote

“Future assessment Committees need to appoint members with a diversity of views and who do not have a significant conflict of interest with respect to their own work. Such Committees should be chaired by individuals committed to the presentation of a diversity of perspectives and unwilling to engage in strong-arm tactics to enforce a narrow perspective. Any such committee should be charged with summarizing all relevant literature, even if inconvenient, or which presents a view not held by certain members of the Committee.

Assessment Committees should not be an opportunity for members to highlight their own research and that which supports their personal scientific conclusions without properly placing into perspective the diversity found in the peer literature. When the Chair of such a committee seeks to limit the focus of an assessment Report in a specific direction, such as was the case with this Committee, the advancement of our understanding of the scientific issues involved suffers.”
“….Unfortunately, the Report advocates a narrow perspective on science shared by the majority of the committee, rather than dealing comprehensively with the issues under its charge and found in the broader scientific literature. As such it does a disservice to those interested in a comprehensive review of the relevant science.”

We need recognition among the scientific community, the media, and policymakers that the IPCC process is obviously a real conflict of interest, and this has resulted in a significantly flawed report.

Real Climate has sought to argue that the IPCC process is transparent (see). They clearly contradict themselves in their post, however, where they write
“The authors of the report used the input from the reviewers to improve the report. In some cases, the authors may disagree with the comments - after all, it is them who are the authors of the report; not the reviewers.”

This means that the authors are gatekeepers who can prevent alternative perspectives from being presented. They did exercise that power in preparing the 2007 (and earlier) IPCC Reports. The conflcit of interest reported on in the current Climate Science weblog can be shown clearly in this admission from Real Climate.

Finally, as reported last week, this will be the last weblog on Climate Science. I invite everyone, however, to read the large archive of weblogs that have been posted over the last two years!
The url for the weblog’s archive will be posted Monday. Thank you again for your participation and spending time on Climate Science. I look forward to other climate scientists starting such a weblog!