A critical look at “The uncertainty has settled” documentary by Marijn Poels

(Zie de Nederlandse versie door Jos Hagelaars op ons Klimaatverandering blog)

The documentary “The uncertainty has settled” from Dutch filmmaker Marijn Poels follows him on his journey in rural Austria and Germany to witness how energy policies impact traditional agriculture. That is the stepping stone to also look into different ideas about how and why the climate is changing. Unfortunately Poels has no clue how to distinguish fact from fiction, and by his own admission he has no interest in making that distinction. As a result the documentary offers a mix of basic scientific insights, plain falsehoods, and misleading statements regarding climate science. As an unwitting viewer you are left utterly confused –cued by Poels’ facial expression at those times- how to reconcile these seemingly opposing viewpoints. Creating confusion was apparently his objective (as he acknowledges on his website), but it makes for a surreal experience if you know you’re being fooled. I think spreading falsehoods is doing a disservice to the public, as I’ve said to Marijn Poels during a radio-debate (in Dutch).

Let’s look more closely at some of the things being said about climate change in the documentary.

Marijn Poels meets another Dutchman in rural Germany, who laments how climate policies have led to the disappearance of local nature. He says it’s insane to think that a CO2 concentration as low as 0.035% (currently 0.04%) could have any impact on climate. That’s clearly fallacious reasoning (argument from incredulity): there are plenty of examples of compounds that have serious impacts at the same or lower concentrations (e.g. a CO detector will sound the alarm at such a concentration and you had better leave the premises). Without any CO2 in the air the globe would quickly become a frozen ball of ice, since the main air constituents (nitrogen 78%, oxygen 21%, argon 1%) don’t impede the infrared heat loss to space.

Later in the documentary he meets with climate scientist Hans von Storch, astrophysicist Piers Corbyn and physicist Freeman Dyson. Those in the loop will immediately recognize that this is not at all a fair representation of the scientific debate, but rather provides a very skewed vision thereof by emphasizing outlier views that are demonstrably false.

Hans von Storch accurately describes our current knowledge about climate change: We know that the earth has warmed and we can’t explain this warming without considering the human-induced increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. He also distinguishes how scientific knowledge may be very uncertain in specific details, while the core tenets are robustly known: “The fact that CO2 has a significant influence on climate is indisputable.”

It’s astonishing how many falsehoods and conspiracy theories Piers Corbyn mentions over the course of few minutes.  Some of the things he said:

FALSE: The increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is coming from the oceans

If Corbyn were right, the concentration in the ocean should have decreased in order to explain the increased atmospheric concentration (a simple consequence of conservation of mass). However, CO2 concentrations have been observed to increase both in the atmosphere and in the ocean. In reality, the excess CO2 in both atmosphere and ocean originates from fossil fuel burning, as is evident from the isotopic signature and the concomitant decrease in atmospheric O2 concentration.

FALSE: CO2 only follows temperature

During the ice age cycles CO2 acted as an amplifying feedback on the warming which was initiated by changes to the earth’s orbit. During those times of relatively slow warming the temperature indeed started to increase before the CO2 concentrations did, after which the CO2 caused even more warming. Hence it’s a bit of a chicken-egg issue with CO2 and temperature, but Corbyn’s statement is misleading. The current CO2 increase is unequivocally anthropogenic and ~100 times faster than it was in glacial to interglacial transitions. Moreover, we have known since the mid-nineteenth century that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and thus acts as a greenhouse gas which impedes planetary heat loss and thus warms up the surface.

FALSE: Termites produce more CO2 than human activity does

Termites produce less CO2 than human activity does. Moreover, while anthropogenic emissions have led to the increased CO2 concentration, there’s no sign of tremendous changes in termite populations or emissions. In general, CO2 uptake and release by the biosphere (through assimilation and respiration/decomposition, respectively) approximately balance over multi-annual timescales. Termites also emit methane, another greenhouse gas, though around 40 times less than is released through human activity.  [Text about termite emissions has been updated 17-07]

FALSE: A new mini-ice age cometh

Corbyn has been predicting this for a while now (at least since 2010), but reality so far has been going in the opposite direction compared to his predictions. Scientists have investigated the potential consequences of a quieter sun in the near future, but generally find that increased greenhouse gas concentrations will dwarf any realistic decrease in solar activity, and hence the globe will continue to warm for the foreseeable future.

CONSPIRACY THEORY: The increased temperatures are a result of fraud with the observations

Globally averaged temperatures are computed independently by a number of different research group and they all agree within a close margin of each other. The raw data are available, so everyone who’s interested and who has the requisite skill can try to reproduce (or falsify) these calculations. A number of ‘skeptical’ people have indeed done so, and lo and behold, they found the same result: the globe really is warming.

Corbyn continues with his conspiracy theories and doesn’t even seem bothered that they’re mutually inconsistent with each other: on the one hand he claims that the ‘climate ideology’ has been made up by international big business interests, on the other hand he also claims that the ‘myth of climate change’ is a scheme to de-industrialize the West. How can you possibly take someone like this seriously?

Next up is renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who is very skeptical of the ability of climate models to make accurate projections of future warming. In the documentary he paints a false dichotomy between observations on the one hand and models on the other hand, whereas in modern science they really go hand in hand and models form an integral part of science. Model simulations agree very well with observations, despite Dyson’s claims to the contrary. For good measure he also throws in a conspiracy theory by claiming that climate modelers only want to scare people, because they wouldn’t get money for their research otherwise. This goes to show that otherwise brilliant people can still make silly claims about a field of science that they don’t know much about.

So why did Marijn Poels chose to interview people who are demonstratively wrong (and who are not actually climate scientists)? His whole idea with the documentary was as a personal quest in which he listened to various viewpoints without judgment or evaluation. In a radio-debate I did with him on Dutch Radio NPO1 he proclaimed that he doesn’t feel any responsibility to figure out who’s talking sense and who’s talking nonsense. On twitter he has since confirmed that he doesn’t care what true and what’s not. I find that a very strange attitude for a documentary-maker, as I tried saying at the end of the radio-debate:

Scientists are seeking a better understanding of the world around us. What I hear Marijn Poels say is that it doesn’t matter to him what’s true and what’s not. That goes against everything I value as a scientist.

He also tweeted that “if there are multiple scientific perspectives, then it’s worthy of debate”. So the problem is not only that he doesn’t care about whether something is true or not; he doesn’t see that some of what he calls “scientific perspectives” are plain untruths. Claiming that the CO2 might just have come out of the ocean is no more a ‘scientific perspective’ than claiming that vaccines cause autism or that smoking is not linked to cancer. Science has conclusively shown these statements to be false.

In a public debate about smoking regulation there’s no point in discussing whether smoking is really bad for you: we know that by now, based on scientific evidence.

Likewise, in a public debate about climate policies  there’s no point in discussing whether CO2 really contributes substantially to climate change: we know that by now, based on scientific evidence.

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Earth’s temperature over the past two million years

A new reconstruction of global average temperature over the past two million years has recently appeared in Nature (Snyder, 2016). That is quite a feat and a first for this duration. The figure below, made by Jos Hagelaars, shows Snyder’s temperature reconstruction, combined with the observed warming since 1880 and projected warming until the year 3000 for two IPCC scenarios, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5.

The RCP8.5 can be viewed as a “no mitigation” scenario, whereas RCP6.0 would be a “limited mitigation” scenario. It is clear that in both scenarios global warming over the next centuries will take us out of the temperature realm of the past two million years. A similar figure (which I tweeted yesterday) but then with temperature projections stopping in the year 2100 can be found here.

Even though lauded as a very valuable and novel contribution to the field, Snyder’s reconstruction has also been criticized because the temperature amplitude between glacial and interglacial states appears relatively large (~6 degrees) compared to other recent reconstructions, e.g. by Shakun et al (2012) (~4 degrees). Somewhat related, Snyder estimates the global average temperature during the previous interglacial (Eemian) to be warmer than now, whereas e.g. Hansen et al (2016, under review) argue that they are similarly warm. By the way, sea levels were 6 to 9 metres higher in the Eemian than now. Sea level responds very slowly to a change in temperature, yet another sign of the vast inertia in the climate system.

Somewhat overshadowing the actual temperature reconstruction that Snyder presented was her calculation of an earth system sensitivity (ESS) based on a correlation between temperature and CO2 over the past few glacial cycles. The earth system sensitivity denotes the long-term temperature response to a doubling in CO2 concentrations, including e.g. the response of ice sheets (which is typically excluded from the more often used equilibrium climate sensitivity, ECS). She then applied the ESS value of a whopping 9 degrees, obtained from this simple correlation, to the current warming, stating in the abstract:

This result suggests that stabilization at today’s greenhouse gas levels may already commit Earth to an eventual total warming of 5 degrees Celsius (range 3 to 7 degrees Celsius, 95 per cent credible interval) over the next few millennia as ice sheets, vegetation and atmospheric dust continue to respond to global warming.

Where “commit” means that this level of warming would be eventually expected based on current CO2 concentrations.

As Gavin Schmidt wrote, this is simply wrong.

The reason why I think it’s wrong is that in her calculation of ESS she takes the radiative forcing caused by albedo changes (resulting from the massive change in ice coverage between a glacial and interglacial state) and assumes it to be a feedback on the CO2 induced temperature-change.

There are two issues with this:

1) In reality both the changes in albedo (reflectivity) and CO2 concentration are feedbacks on the orbital forcing, and the relation in the one direction (a change in earth’s orbit causing a temperature change which in turn causes albedo and CO2 levels to change) is not necessarily the same as the relation in the reverse direction, as is currently happening with human-induced increases in CO2. Gavin Schmidt makes this point in two consecutive posts at RealClimate (here and here), though you might also want to read Hansen’s take, who has used a similar approach as Snyder did).

2) The ESS value obtained would (ignoring the more complex first point) perhaps be applicable to a glacial-interglacial transition, but decidedly not to an interglacial-‘hyperinterglacial’ transition, where the ice-albedo feedback would of course be much smaller because of the much smaller ice-covered surface area.

This second point was also made by James Annan in response to Hansen’s 2008 Target CO2 paper, where he essentially used the same method as Snyder is using (but came to a smaller ESS value of 6 degrees, because Snyder uses a greater temperature-amplitude between glacial-interglacial). Hansen noted in his paper though that “The 6°C sensitivity reduces to 3°C when the planet has become warm enough to lose its ice sheets.”

In other words, using Snyder’s very (and probably too) high ESS value to project future warming is unwarranted and wrong.

Climate inertia

Imagine you’re on a supertanker that needs to change its direction in order to avoid a collision. What would you do? Would you continue going full steam ahead until you can see the collision object right in front of you? Or would you try to change course early, knowing that changing a supertanker’s course takes a considerable amount of time?

The supertanker’s inertia means that you have to act in time if you wish to avoid a collision.

The climate system also has a tremendous amount of inertia built in. And like with the supertanker, this means that early action is required if we want to change the climate’s course. This inertia is a crucial aspect of the climate system, both scientifically but also societally – but in the latter realm it’s a very underappreciated aspect. Just do a mental check: when did you last hear or read about the climate’s inertia in mainstream media or from politicians?

The inertia of the climate system could be compared to that of a supertanker: if we want to change its course, it’s important to start steering the wheel in the desired direction in time.

Why is it so important? Because intuitively many people might think that as soon as we have substantially decreased our CO2 emissions (which we haven’t), the problem will be solved. It won’t, not by a very long shot. Even if we reduce CO2 emissions to zero over a realistic timeframe, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere – and thus also the global average temperature- will remain elevated for millennia, as can be seen in the figure below. The total amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere over the course of a few hundred years will affect life on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. And if we want to reduce the amount of warming that we commit the future to, we need to reduce our carbon emissions sooner rather than later. The longer we postpone emission reductions, the stronger those emissions reductions would need to be in order to have the same mitigating effect on long-term warming.

That’s why climate inertia is so important.

Modeled response of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (panel b) and surface air temperature compared to the year 2000 (panel c) to prescribed CO2 emissions (panel a). The CO2 concentration remains elevated long after CO2 emissions have been reduced, because the long-term sinks for CO2 operate very slowly (see e.g. IPCC FAQ 6.2 for an explanation of these carbon sinks). Since CO2 impedes infrared heat loss, for millennia the globe will remain warmer than it was before CO2 concentrations rose. The temperature lags behind the CO2 concentration because of the time it takes for the oceans to warm up. Figure from Zickfeld et al (2013).

As I wrote before: Postponing meaningful mitigation action until the shit hits the fan comes with considerable risk, because many changes in climate are not reversible on human timescales. Once you notice the trouble, it’s only the beginning, because of the inertia in the various systems (energy system, carbon cycle and climate system). The conundrum is thus that those who caused the problem are in the best position to solve it, but since the full consequences will not materialize until much later, they have the least incentive to do so.

Over at Bits of Science two Dutch science journalists, Rolf Schuttenhelm and Stephan Okhuijsen, published an interesting piece that focuses on the same issue: we only see a portion of the warming that we have committed ourselves to, due to the thermal inertia provided by the oceans. Just as a pot of water doesn’t immediately boil when we turn on the stove, the oceans take time to warm up as well. And since there’s a lot of water in the oceans, it takes a lot of time.

They included the following nifty graph, with the observed surface temperature but also the eventually expected temperature at the corresponding CO2 concentration (which they dub the ’real global temperature’), based on different approaches to account for warming in the pipeline:

Observed and eventually expected (“real”) temperature at concurrent CO2 concentration, via Bits of Science

This is a nice way to visualize the warming that’s still in the pipeline due to ocean thermal inertia. From a scientific point of view the exact execution and framing could be criticized on certain aspects (e.g. ECS is linearly extrapolated instead of logarithmically; the interpretation that recent record warmth are not peaks but rather a ‘correction to the trend line’ depends strongly on the exact way the endpoints of the observed temperature are smoothed; the effect of non-CO2 greenhouse gases is excluded from the analysis and discussion), but the underlying point, that more warming is in store than we’re currently seeing, is both valid and very important.

Timescales, timescales, timescales. Why art thou missing from the public discussion about global warming?

Update: ClimateInteractive has a good simulation of how this inertia works out in practice. By moving the slider at the bottom the figure you can choose between different emission scenarios. In the graphs above you then see the effect this has on the CO2 concentration, the global average temperature, and the sea level, and how this response is damped. The further down the cause-effect chain, the more damped – or better: the more slowed down- the response is. The sea level will continue to rise the longest (even long after the temperature has stabilized or even starts decreasing), but will take a while to get going. This simulation only runs to the year 2100 though.

A Dutch version of this post can be found on my sister blog KlimaatVerandering.

A warm 2015 and model –data comparisons

Guest post by Jos Hagelaars. Dutch version is here.

Discussions on the Internet regarding climate change are sometimes about scientific details, sometimes about the climate sensitivity regarding the equilibrium situation hundreds of years from now, but the most prevalent discussion topic is probably: the global average temperature. Will it get warmer or colder, is there a temporary slowdown or acceleration in the rise in temperature, are the models correct or not, will the eventual warming of our earth in the future be large or small? New numbers are released on a monthly basis and every month megabytes of text are generated about them. My forecast is that 2015 again will lead to a discussion-spike.

The graph above shows the evolution of the global surface temperature anomaly for three datasets, where the average of the period 1981-2010 is defined as 0. For the year 2015 only data are presented up to and including June. So far 2015 exceeds all other years and the evolving El Niño makes it likely that 2015 will set a new world record.

Climate researcher Bart Strengers wins wager with climate sceptic Hans Labohm

Guestpost by Bart Strengers. Originally appeared as a news item on the PBL website.

Late 2009, in the run-up to the international climate conference in Copenhagen, PBL climate researcher Bart Strengers had an online discussion with climate sceptic Hans Labohm on the website of the Dutch news station NOS (in Dutch). This discussion, which was later also published as a PBL report, ended in a wager. Strengers wagered that the mean global temperature over the 2010–2014 period would be higher than the mean over 2000 to 2009. Hans Labohm believed there would be no warming and perhaps even a cooling; for example due to reduced solar activity.

At the request of Labohm, it was decided to use the UAH satellite temperature data set on the lower troposphere (TLT) (roughly the lowest 5 km of the atmosphere). These data sets are compiled by the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Satellites are used to measure radiation in the atmosphere, after which the temperature of the various layers of the atmosphere is derived using a complex algorithm.

According to the UAH today, temperatures appear to have been an average 0.1 °C warmer over the past five years than over the 10 years before that. Thus, Strengers has won the wager. The stakes: a good bottle of wine.

The UAH temperature series since 1979 (no satellites were available for the period before then). The green lines represent the mean over periods of 10 years. The purple line on the far right is the mean over the 2010–2014 period.

UAH satellite data series shows the greatest warming

Precisely these UAH data, incidentally, show by far the most warming. The 4 other main global temperature series also show warming over the last 5 years, but one that is markedly lower (between 0.03 and 0.05 °C).

What causes the differences between the data series?

The table below shows the global warming, in °C, over the past 5 years, compared to the 10 years before that, for the five main global temperature series: the satellite series of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and of the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and the surface temperature series of NASA, Climate Research Unit (CRU) and the National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC). CRU’s series are based on surface temperature measurements up to and including November 2014, as data on December were not yet available.

The large difference (by more than a factor of 3!) between the UAH and RSS satellite series is remarkable (also see the graph below). According to the UAH team, in which two well-known climate sceptics are involved, the difference is mainly caused by the fact that RSS partly bases its series on an old satellite (NOAA-15) with an increasingly lower orbit around the earth. This causes an error in measurements that is insufficiently corrected by RSS. All in all, it is a technical and complex issue, which possibly causes the differences, but it mainly shows how complicated the procedure is for determining global temperatures on the basis of satellite measurements. The three surface measurement series provide a much more consistent image of between 0.04 °C and 0.05 °C warming.

Satellite temperature measurements difficult to compare with surface measurements

In addition, it is important to note that satellite and surface measurements are difficult to compare. This is due to the fact that satellite series are based on the temperature of the entire lower troposphere (the lowest 5 km of the atmosphere). The temperature of this atmospheric layer is, for example, much more sensitive to El Niños than surface temperatures are. This is illustrated in the graph below by the relatively high peak for the two satellite series at the time of the super El Niño in 1997–1998 and the less strong El Niño of 2010. The reverse is the case for La Niñas, such as the strong one of 2008; here, satellite series typically show a lower temperature.

Temperatures according to 2 satellite series (UAH and RSS). The purple line indicates the mean of the three surface temperature series. The satellite series show peaks in 1998 and 2010, as a result of El Niño, which are greater than those in the surface temperature series. The low satellite value for 2008 coincides with the opposite of an El Niño: La Niña. Note how the last 4 years in the RSS series are far below those in the other series. According to the surface temperature measurements, 2014 was the warmest year on record!

The graph shows that the last years in the RSS series clearly deviate from the other temperature series, with lower values of over 0.1 °C. This suggests that RSS rather than UAH is too low (as also claimed by the UAH team). The outcome of this discussion may lead to adjustments to one or both satellite series, as has been done in the past, particularly to the UAH series, on numerous occasions.

The surface temperature series further indicate that 2014 was the warmest year on record, even without an El Niño!

Contribution by cooling and warming influences.

Strengers indicated at the time that ‘in light of the scientific uncertainties, I may lose, but this is not likely to happen’. He gave four reasons why a possible reduction in warming, or even a cooling could occur. Bold indicates that the related reason more or less became a reality over the past 5 years.

• a continued (relatively) low solar activity;
• a relatively high heat absorption by the (deep) oceans;
• a period of cooling due to incidental variations in the climate;
• lower climate sensitivity than expected.

In addition, Strengers gave three reasons why he nevertheless expected to win:

• a further increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere;
• the ‘best-estimate’ by the IPCC is that of a warming of 0.2 °C per decade;
• the chances of overestimating climate sensitivity are smaller than those of underestimation.

The sum of all factors, thus, has led to continued warming. Below each of these factors is explained in more detail.

Continued (relatively) low solar activity

Over the past 5 years, the reduced solar activity has continued and, thus, likely also has slightly reduced global warming over that period. In the discussion at the time, Strengers wrote: ‘astrophysics […] cannot rule out the possibility of a long period of relatively low activity. This could lead to a reduction in warming of up to 0.4 °C (although 0.2 °C is more likely) over the coming 20 to 30 years.’ The past 5 years, therefore, are in keeping with the idea that such a period of relatively low activity is a fact, but the degree to which this reduction will actually continue over the coming years, or for how long it will go on, is still very uncertain.

Relatively high heat absorption by the (deep) oceans

Over 90% of the heat that is added to the climate system, particularly caused by the increase in greenhouse gases, ends up in the oceans. Only a few per cent is stored in the atmosphere. The remainder is absorbed by the land surface and ice sheets (which are therefore steadily melting). Variations in heat absorption can have a large impact on surface temperatures. According to a recent study by England et al., published in December 2013 in Nature, there has been increased heat absorption by the oceans since 2001, which since then has reduced warming by 0.1 to 0.2 °C. The added heat seem to be concentrated largely around the equator in the western part of the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of around 125 to 200 metres, which means it remains ‘hidden’ from the atmosphere. England and his team do not expect this heat storage effect to continue in this way and they project that, at a certain moment, temperatures at the surface level will begin to increase more rapidly. This could happen, for example, due to an El Niño with large amounts of heat being released suddenly, possibly causing temperatures to jump, as happened in 1997–1998 during the so-called super El Niño. Over the past months, a new El Niño seems to be developing. If this continues into 2015, this year may end up being even warmer than the record year of 2014.

A period of cooling due to incidental variations in the climate

The climate knows random variations. Strengers wrote that these may lead to longer periods of no warming or even cooling, even under a steady increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. During the discussions, Strengers pointed to a study which shows on the basis of climate models that periods of up to 16 years of random cooling or non-warming may occur, even in an overall warming climate. Recent research shows that a combination of random factors likely has led to a reduction in temperature increases over the past 15 years (see the section below, ‘IPCC’s ‘best-estimate’ is that of a warming of 0.2 °C per decade’, for more details). However, this reduction in warming was not high enough for the past 5 years to be cooler than the decade before that.

Lower climate sensitivity than expected

The IPCC – the scientific body that inventories all knowledge on climate change every 5 to 7 years –stated in 2007 in its fourth assessment report (AR4) that climate sensitivity was likely (i.e. with a likelihood of 66%) between 2.0 and 4.5 °C, with a ‘best estimate’ of 3 °C. The fifth assessment report (2013) stated a range of 1.5 to 4.5 °C without giving a ‘best estimate’. The reason for the downward adjustment of the lower limit to 1.5 °C (at which it had been estimated since 1990) originated from a number of studies that pointed to the possibility of a low climate sensitivity. The ‘best estimate’ was not provided “because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies” (i.e. based on all studies up to and including July 2012). All this, however, does not mean that climate sensitivity was ‘less than expected’. In fact, the only thing that can be concluded is that the value of climate sensitivity has become more uncertain.

Further increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere

Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have steadily increased over the past 5 years. By late 2014, CO₂ concentrations were at 399 ppm (399 molecules of CO₂ per million molecules of air). Five years ago this level was 388 ppm. The increase is a direct result from an ever faster increase in CO₂ emissions, particularly in countries such as India and China.

IPCC’s ‘best-estimate’ is that of a warming of around 0.2 °C per decade

At the time of IPCC’s fourth assessment report, in 2007, a global warming of 0.2 °C was assumed for the current decade (2010–2019), particularly on the basis of climate model results. As discussed above, the degree of warming according to the UAH series, which is based on satellite measurements, was 0.1 °C over the last 5 years, compared to the mean of the 10 years before that. If this trend continues over the coming 5 years, our current decade will register a warming of around 0.15 °C – slightly less than the ‘best estimate’, but well within the projected range by the IPCC. However, all surface temperature series show a lower degree of warming, between 0.04 and 0.05 °C, over the past 5 years (see the section on ‘What causes the differences between the data series?’). Extrapolation over the 2010–2019 decade shows a total maximum warming of 0.08 °C [typo fixed]. This is in line with the discussion on the ´hiatus´ or the finding that the rate of warming over the past 15 years has been lower than in the 20 years before that, and also lower than the average outcome of many climate models. Note though that there is no significant change in trend from 1998. If climate model calculations take into account the ´random factors´ that cannot be predicted, such as the occurrence of El Niños, solar activity, and volcano eruptions, then models and observations seem much more in agreement.

The chances of overestimating climate sensitivity are smaller than those of underestimation

The IPPC’s fifth assessment report (2013) states that climate sensitivity is likely (66% probability) to be between 1.5 and 4.5 °C. It subsequently states that it is extremely unlikely (less than 5% probability) to be smaller than 1, and very unlikely (less than 10% probability) to be higher than 6.  In other words, very low values are less likely than very high values, which substantiates the above statement.

[Note: hyperlinks added by Bart Verheggen]

ClimateDialogue on Climate Sensitivity

After a bit of a “hiatus”, ClimateDialogue (CD) has re-opened again with a discussion on climate sensitivity. On the one hand this site is unique in bringing together ‘mainstreamers’ and ‘contrarians’ (both in the organization and in the discussions), hopefully leading to both enhanced clarity on what the (dis)agreements are really about and to decreased polarization. On the other hand it’s controversial because a ‘false balance’ is embedded in its structure (by purposefully inviting contrarian scientists to the discussion, rather than e.g. randomly inviting experts).

Whether the positives or negatives dominate is in the eye of the beholder (opinions about that vary wildly), but also depends very strongly on the participation of the mainstream (both as invited experts and as contributing to the public discussion). See also my initial reflections at the time of the first launch. Discussions on ClimateDialogue will be facilitated and moderated by Bart Strengers (NL Environmental Assessment Agency, PBL) and Marcel Crok (freelance journalist), where the former has a mainstream view of climate science and the latter a contrarian view. I am still involved in the background, as is KNMI (NL Meteorological Institute). ClimateDialogue is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment.

In the current ‘dialogue’ James Annan, John Fasullo and Nic Lewis are discussing their views about climate sensitivity (the equilibrium warming after a doubling of CO2 concentrations, ECS). In the latest IPCC report (AR5) the different and partly independent lines of evidence are combined to conclude that ECS is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C with high confidence. The figure below shows the ranges and best estimates of ECS in AR5 based on different types of studies, namely:

– the observed or instrumental surface, ocean and/or atmospheric temperature trends since pre-industrial time

– short-term perturbations of the energy balance such as those caused by volcanic eruptions, included under “instrumental” in the figure

– climatological constraints by comparing patterns of mean climate and variability in models to observations

– ECS as emergent property of global climate models

– temperature fluctuations as reconstructed from palaeoclimate archives

– studies that combine two or more lines of evidence

John Christy, Richard McNider and Roy Spencer trying to overturn mainstream science by rewriting history and re-baselining graphs

Who are the Flat Earthers?

Before the advent of modern climatology, common wisdom had it that we tiny humans couldn’t possibly influence climate. Modern science shows we can. Yet John Christy and Richard McNider claim the exact opposite in a recent WSJ op-ed, in which they claim that their outdated views on climate somehow make them modern-day Galileo’s (or in their words: Why they are the ones declaring that the earth is round while the vast majority of the climate scientists persist in thinking the earth is flat). They couldn’t be more wrong.

Back then, scientific evidence slowly overturned the religious-cultural notion that the Earth was the centre of the universe. This resulted in a scientific consensus that the Earth revolves around the sun. More recently scientific evidence has started overturning the notion that humans can’t possibly influence something as gigantic as the Earth’s climate. This too has resulted in a scientific consensus  (though a public consensus is still lagging behind). In both cases, the pre-scientific notion was mostly culture-based, as opposed to being evidence-based.

As Jeff Nesbit tweeted: “Being the last scientist to accept established climate science doesn’t make you Galileo.” Quite the opposite indeed.

The Galileo-complex also suggests a rather simplistic view of how science progresses. Rather than a lone skeptic overthrowing a scientific (rather than a cultural) consensus, scientific progress is a usually a gradual process. New evidence has to be reconciled with the existing mountain of evidence; it doesn’t simply replace it. Observing a bird in the air doesn’t disprove gravity. “Skeptics” and their supporters often bring up Galileo as an example of that the scientific consensus can also be wrong, and has been wrong in the past. True enough, though as Carl Sagan said: “they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown”.

Hot spot

Besides their entirely misplaced Galileo-framing, Christy and McNider also make a range of unsupported and/or incorrect statements. One argument deals with the so-called tropical tropospheric hot spot. This refers to the expected stronger warming of the tropical troposphere as compared to the surface. This “hot spot” is independent of the cause of the warming. But what do Christy and McNider write in the WSJ:

(the warming of the deep atmosphere is) the fundamental sign of carbon-dioxide-caused climate change, which is supposedly behind these natural phenomena

But hang on, didn’t Christy admit to the basic science that this hot spot is not specific to a greenhouse effect? Yes, he did (at the ClimateDialogue discussion in which he participated):

“Yes, the hot spot is expected via the traditional view that the lapse rate feedback operates on both short and long time scales. (…) it [the hot spot] is broader than just the enhanced greenhouse effect because any thermal forcing should elicit a response such as the “expected” hot spot.”

So why is he claiming something in the WSJ that he knows to be untrue?

Model-observation comparison

It almost goes without saying that any climate model-observation mismatch can have multiple (non-exclusive) causes (as succinctly summarized at RC):

1. The observations are in error
2. The models are in error
3. The comparison is flawed

But rather than doing a careful analysis of various potential explanations, McNider and Christy, as well as their colleague Roy Spencer, prefer to draw far reaching conclusions based on a particularly flawed comparison: They shift the modelled temperature anomaly upwards to increase the discrepancy with observations by around 50%. Using this tactic, Roy Spencer showed the following figure on his blog recently:

So what did he do? Jos Hagelaars tried to reproduce the different steps involved. A comparison of annual data, using a 1986-2005 baseline, would look as follows:

Spencer used a 5 year running mean instead of annual values, which would (should) look as follows:

The next step is re-baselining the figure to maximize the visual appearance of a discrepancy: Let’s baseline everything to the 1979-1983 average (way too short of a period and chosen very tactically it seems):

Which looks surprisingly similar to Spencer’s trickery-graph. But critiquing Roy Spencer comes at a risk: He may call you a “global warming Nazi”. Those nasty CO2 molecules, that’ll teach them!

Many thanks to Jos Hagelaars for the data analysis and figures.

Is Climate Science falsifiable?

Guest post by Hans Custers. Nederlandse versie hier.

A very, ehhrmm… interesting piece on
Variable Variability, Victor Venema’s blog: Interesting what the interesting Judith Curry finds interesting. And I don’t mean interesting in a rhetoric, suggestive way; I mean it is a well-written and well-reasoned article, worth reading.

Victor writes about the meme regularly used by the anti climate science campaign, often supported by some straw man arguments, that the science of human impacts on climate would not be falsifiable. He shows it’s nonsense, by giving some examples of how it could be falsified. Or, more likely, already would have been falsified, if the science would be wrong. Victor’s post inspired me to think of more options to falsify generally accepted viewpoints in climate science. If there are any ‘climate change skeptics’ who want to contribute to real science, they might see this as a challenge. Maybe they can come up with a research proposal, based on one of the options for falsification. Like proper scientists would do.

First, a few more things about falsifiability in general. Bart wrote a concise post about the subject four years ago, explaining that a bird in the sky does not disprove gravity. What looks like a refutation at first, might on second thoughts be based on partial or total misunderstanding of the hypothesis. Natural climate forcings and variations do not exclude human impacts. Therefore, the existence of these natural factors in itself, cannot falsify anthropogenic climate change. A real skeptic is cautious about both scientific evidence and refutations. ‘Climate change skeptics’ like to mention the single black swan, that disproves the hypothesis that all swans are white. Of course that is true, unless that single black swan appears to be found near some oil spill.

Some of the falsifications that I mention later on might be somewhat cheap, or far-fetched. It is not very easy to find options to falsify the science of human impacts on climate. Not because climate scientists don’t respect philosophical principles of science, but simply because there’s such a huge amount of evidence. There are not a lot of findings that would disprove all the evidence at once. A scientific revolution of this magnitude only happens very rarely. Whoever thinks differently, doesn’t understand how science works.

Andrew Dessler’s testimony on what we know about climate change

In his recent testimony, Andrew Dessler reviewed what he thinks “are the most important conclusions the climate scientific community has reached in over two centuries of work”. I think that’s a very good choice to focus on, as the basics of what we know is most important, “at least as to the thrust and direction of policy” (Herman Daly). This focus served as a good antidote to the other witness, Judith Curry, who emphasizes (and often exaggerates) uncertainty to the point of conflating it with ignorance.

Dessler mentioned the following “important points that we know with high confidence”:

1.  The climate is warming.

Let’s take this opportunity to show the updated figure by Cowtan and Way, extending their infilling method to the entire instrumental period (pause? which pause?):

2. Most of the recent warming is extremely likely due to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by human activities.

This conclusion is based on several lines of evidence:

– Anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases

– Physics of greenhouse effect

– Observed warming roughly matches what is expected

– Important role of CO2 in paleoclimate

– No alternative explanation for recent warming

– Fingerprints of enhanced greenhouse effect (e.g. stratospheric warming cooling, which was predicted before it was observed)

Dessler:

Thus, we have a standard model of climate science that is capable of explaining just about everything. Naturally, there are some things that aren’t necessarily explained by the model, just as there’re a few heavy smokers who don’t get lung cancer. But none of these are fundamental challenges to the standard model.

He goes on to explain that the so-called “hiatius” is not a fundamental challenge to our understanding of climate, though it is “an opportunity to refine and improve our understanding of [the interaction of ocean circulation, short-term climate variability, and long-term global warming].”

What about alternative theories? Any theory that wants to compete with the standard model has to explain all of the observations that the standard model can. Is there any model that can even come close to doing that?

No.

And making successful predictions would help convince scientists that the alternative theory should be taken seriously. How many successful predictions have alternative theories made?

Zero.

3. Future warming could be large 

On this point I always emphasize that the amount of future warming depends both on a combination of factors:

– the climate forcing (i.e. our emissions and other changes to the earth’ radiation budget)

– the climate sensitivity (the climate system’s response to those forcings)

– the climate response time (how fast will the system equilibrates).

Internal (unforced) variability also plays a role, but this usually averages out over long enough timescales.

4. The impacts of this are profound.

In the climate debate, we can argue about what we know or what we don’t know. Arguing about what we don’t know can give the impression that we don’t know much, even though some impacts are virtually certain.

The virtually certain impacts include:

• increasing temperatures

• more frequent extreme heat events

• changes in the distribution of rainfall

• rising seas

• the oceans becoming more acidic

Time is not our friend in this problem.

Nor is uncertainty.

The scientific community has been working on understanding the climate system for nearly 200 years. In that time, a robust understanding of it has emerged. We know the climate is warming. We know that humans are now in the driver’s seat of the climate system. We know that, over the next century, if nothing is done to rein in emissions, temperatures will likely increase enough to profoundly change the planet. I wish this weren’t true, but it is what the science tells us.

Peter Sinclair posted a video of Andrew Dessler’s testimony. Eli Rabett posted Dessler’s testimony in full.

A key distinction in the two senate hearings was that Andrew Dessler focused on what we know, whereas Judith Curry focused on what we don’t know (though “AndThenTheresPhysics” made a good point that Curry goes far beyond that, by e.g. proclaiming confidence in certain benign outcomes (e.g. regarding sensitivity) while claiming ignorance in areas where we have a half-decent, if incomplete, understanding, e.g. regarding the hiatus). I have argued before that emphasizing (let alone exaggerating) uncertainties is not the road to increase people’s understanding of the issue, where what we do know is much more important to convey (if your goal is to increase the public understanding of scientific knowledge). Alongside that I argue that much more attention is needed to explain the nature of science, which is needed to e.g. place scientific uncertainties in a proper context.

Herman Daly said it as follows, in a quote I’ve used regularly over the past few years:

If you jump out of an airplane you need a crude parachute more than an accurate altimeter.

Arguing whether the altimeter might be off by a few inches is interesting from a scientific/technological perspective, but for the people in the plane it’s mostly a distraction.

Cowtan and Way global average temperature observations compared to CMIP5 models

It is well known that the Arctic is warming up much faster than the rest of the globe. As a consequence, datasets which omit this region (HadCRUT and NOAA) underestimate the global warming trend. A new paper by Cowtan and Way addresses this cool bias by using satellite data to fill in these data gaps. They make a good case that this method also improves upon the NASA GISS dataset, which uses extrapolated data from surface stations to partly fill in the data sparse regions. Combining their new method of infilling with the most up-to-date sea surface temperatures gives a substantially larger trend over the last 15 years than the abovementioned datasets do. The temporary slowdown in global surface warming (also dubbed “the pause”) nearly disappears. As Michael Tobis notes:

This demonstrates is how very un-robust the “slowdown” is.

The corrections don’t amount to a huge change in absolute temperature change, and the new data actually fall inside the uncertainty envelope provided by HadCRUT4. As the paper correctly states:

While short term trends are generally treated with a suitable level of caution by specialists in the field, they feature significantly in the public discourse on climate change.

In the figure below (made by Jos Hagelaars) the global average temperature as calculated by Cowtan and Way (“C&W hybrid”) is compared to both the HadCRUT4 dataset and the CMIP5 multi-model mean as well as its 5% and 95% percentile values (RCP8.5): [Update: The figure below has
been replaced, since the original was found to be in error during discussions on CA). The confidence interval of this corrected graph is substantially narrower than the erroneous original one. Note that the current graph shows the 5 to 95 percentile range of model runs (i.e. the 90% confidence interval), whereas the previous ones showed the 95% confidence interval. At the bottom of the post a similar figure with both confidence intervals as well as the two sigma range is shown.]

Also with these data improvements, recent observations are at the low side of the CMIP5 model range. The comparison of observations to models has to be interpreted with caution however. Some people like to jump to preferred conclusions, but it’s good to keep in mind that the expected warming at a specific point in time depends on a combination of factors. Any of these factors -as well as shortcomings in the observational data, such as those discussed by Cowtan and Way- could contribute to a mismatch between observations and models:

– radiative forcing

– equilibrium climate sensitivity

– climate response time

– natural unforced variability

The last factor means that one shouldn’t expect the multi-model mean (in which most variability is cancelled out) to be identical to the observations (which are the result of a particular realisation of natural variability).

Cowtan and Way made a very clear video in which the main results of their paper are explained in just a few minutes. Highly recommended watching:

More commentary on the paper on e.g. RC (Rahmstorf), SkS (Cowtan and Way), Guardian (Nuccitelli), P3 (Tobis), Victor Venema, Neven. See also this very useful background information provided by the authors.

[some typos corrected and clarifications added, 16-11. Erroneous figure replaced 21-11.]

Update: Below a similar figure as above, with different confidence intervals for the model runs shown. 

Update 2 (Feb 2014):

Jos Hagelaars added Cowtan and Way’s data for 2013 to a figure comparing observations to model projections: