Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome special guest David Freddoso to Episode 95 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We take a look at Tea Party politics in the next Congress, climate secrecy at the University of Virginia, consumers getting SLAPPed in court and the Blago corruption trial proceeding in Chicago.
Patrick Michaels
Cato’s Pat Michaels, one of the scientists attacked in the Climategate emails, has an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal today with examples of how the scientists promoting catastrophic global warming shut out dissident voices in supposedly peer-reviewed journals.
Michaels notes that the EPA finding of endangerment from CO2 emissions, based on the tainted research of the Climategate emailers, should be called into question. He writes:
The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.
Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.
Real Climate.Org is chief defender of ”consensus” climatology on the Internet. One of its enduring missions has been to defend the dubious, indeed discredited “Hockey Stick” reconstruction of Northern hemisphere temperature history. The Hockey Stick was the basis for the IPCC’s claim in its 2001 report that the 1990s were the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the past millennium.
That Real Climate (RC) should feel special solicitude for the Hockey Stick is no accident, comrade. Two of the five principals at RC — Michael Mann and Raymond Bradley — were among the three researchers (Mann, Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes) who authored the Hockey Stick.
All of the RC principals (Gavin Schmidt, Caspar Ammann, Rasmus Benestad, Mann, and Bradley) are frequent senders and recipients of the thousands of emails and other documents, now posted on many Web sites, that were hacked or leaked last week from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU).
The Wall Street Journal today published a selection of the leaked emails and an editorial concluding that the emails ”give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.”
Even eco-radical George Monbiot says he is “dismayed and deeply shaken” by the emails, because, “There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.”
So far, the only email on which RC has seen fit to comment is one from CRU director Phil Jones dated Nov. 16, 1999, 13:31. It’s gotten a lot of buzz on the Internet, because it appears to advocate the use of a “trick” to “hide” a “decline” in global temperatures.
In a post titled “The CRU Hack” (November 20), RC writes:
No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.
So a “trick” is just scientific shorthand for a “good way to deal with a problem,” not something “secret.” But RC ducks the real issue. Is the ”trick” Phil Jones learned from Hockey Stick author Michael Mann a form of trickery? Does it create a false impression, as an illusionist does on stage, right out in the open, in front of an audience?
The trick, according to RC, is to splice onto the end of a temperature reconstruction, built on proxy data going back several centuries, the data from instrumental records starting in 1960 and 1981.
Now this is quite a trick, because it involves comparing apples (proxy data) to oranges (instrumental data) and pretending that the composite forms a continuous record.
As the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change observed years ago, researchers attempting to construct long-term (centuries to millennia) temperature records should ”finish the dance” with the (proxy) data they started with.
Grafting instrumental data onto proxy data to produce a seemingly continuous record is trickery, because instrumental data, unlike proxy data, are massively influenced by land-use changes and site-specific quality control issues.
Urban heat islands and irrigated agriculture can inject false warming biases into instrumental data that are absent from proxy data taken from remote forests or sediment cores at the bottom of lakes, for example. Improper placement of temperature sensing equipment near local heat sources (e.g. air conditioning vents, asphalt parking lots, waste water treatment plants) also generates significant false warming signals, as retired meteorologist Anthony Watts documents in gory detail.
So RC’s “nothing to see here” argument based on the alleged insider meaning of “trick” raises rather than allays suspicion that CRU is attempting to fit data to a predetermined conclusion.
Note also that RC says nothing about Phil Jones’s advice to backdate correspondence (Sept. 12, 2007, 11:30 a.m.), to delete emails related to the 2007 IPCC report (May 29, 2008, 11:04), and to evade FOIA requests, if necessary by deleting files (Feb. 2, 2005, 9:41 a.m.). RC also says nothing about Mann’s call to delegitimize the Journal of Climate for publishing papers critical of his work (March 11, 2003, 8:14).
The Wall Street Journal editorial’s concluding comment is spot on: ”In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.”
Richard Morrison and Jeremy Lott welcome special guests Greg Conko and Iain Murray to the program for Episode 70 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the big Senate showdown on healthcare legislation and a shocking expose of climate science skullduggery. We then move on a double dose of Midwestern scandal and the curious cult-like organizing practices of major labor unions.
In “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” published yesterday in National Review Online, Cato Institute scholar and climatologist Patrick J. Michaels delivers a body blow to the “science is settled” dogma.
There are three core issues in climate change science: detection (Is it warming, and if so by how much); attribution (What’s causing the warming we observe?); and, sensitivity (How much warming will a given increase in greenhouse gas concentrations produce?). As I argue in a previous post, all of these issues remain unsettled, and more so today than at any time in the past decade.
Although climate sensitivity is the most important issue (because if climate sensitivity is low, then there is no “planetary emergency,” hence no need for “urgent action”), detection is in a sense primary, because without reliable temperature data it is impossible to resolve the other two issues.
The claim that the latter half of the 20th century was warmer than any comparable period during the past 1300 years is largely based on surface temperature records subject to several well-known warming biases. Urbanization generates artificial “heat islands.” Agriculture and irrigation in places like California’s Central Valley also produce local warming effects. Retired meteorologist Anthony Watts has documented that nearly nine out of every 10 U.S. weather stations fail to meet the U.S. Weather Service’s minimum requirement that temperature sensing equipment be placed at least 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from artificial heat sources such as air conditioner exhaust vents, waste water treatment plants, and parking lot pavements.
Michaels now exposes the shocking fact that the data allegedly underpinning the most influential surface temperature record are missing and apparently have been destroyed. The record is known as Jones-Wigley for its authors, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The IPCC relied exclusively on this record until its 2001 report.
For years, Jones and Wigley declined to share the raw data from which they constructed their record. Recently, however, Jones told University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. that they could not share their data with him, because the data no longer exist:
Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data.
Michaels says the “data storage availability” excuse is “balderdash,” since “All the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s.”
The bigger point, of course, is that if other scientists cannot examine the raw data, they cannot assess the accuracy and objectivity of the “value-adding” adjustments Jones and Wigley made to produce their global temperature record.
In addition to providing another reason to reject the “science is settled” dogma, disappearance of the Jones-Wigley data is of direct relevance to EPA’s pending endangerment finding. The Jones-Wigley temperature record is part of the evidence on which EPA bases its judgment that “air pollution” from greenhouse gas emissions “endangers public health and welfare.”
Use of the Jones-Wigley temperature record in a rulemaking clearly flouts federal data quality standards. Under OMB guidelines implementing the Federal Data Quality Act, data quality consists of four elements: objectivity, utility to users, integrity of information, and reproducibility in the case of “influential scientific or statistical information.”
Now, if the original Jones-Wigely data have been destroyed, then it is impossible to assure “integrity of information.” For all we know, Jones and Wigley goofed in their calculations or choice of methodologies, or even manipulated the data to produce a pre-determined result. By the same token, it is impossible to “reproduce” the Jones-Wigley temperature record, because there are no data to reproduce it from. Yet, as a factual basis of both the IPCC reports and the EPA endangerment finding, Jones-Wigley indisputably qualifies as “influential scientific or statistical information.”
Michaels’s terse conclusion speaks volumes: “No data, no science.” For decades, Jones-Wigley has been a mainstay of the alleged ”scientific consensus” supporting Kyoto-style energy rationing. Warmists have a lot of explaining to do.
Today’s excerpt from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, is on the global warming movement’s anti-coal campaign and the dangers it poses to U.S. consumers and the economy. To watch today’s clip, click here. To watch the entire film, click here.
The text of today’s excerpt follows. I provide additional commentary and links to supporting information in the footnotes.
Narrator: First and foremost, they want to ban construction of new coal-fired power plants. [1] Why? Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel. It releases the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced. [2]
More importantly, emissions from new coal plants are expected to swamp, by as much as five to one, all the emission reductions that Europe, Canada, and Japan might achieve under the U.N. global warming treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. Either global warming activists kill coal, or coal will bury Kyoto. [3]
Figure Source: Myron Clayton, New coal plants bury ‘Kyoto,’ Christian Science Monitor, 23 December 2004.
Narrator: To be fair, the activists say they’ll allow new coal generation, if the power plants deploy something called CCS, carbon capture and storage technology. [5] The idea is that instead of releasing CO2 into the air, the power stations would capture it, liquefy it, and then transport it to underground storage sites. [6] There’s just one problem. No commercial coal plants today have CCS technology. [7]
I asked Mary Hutzler, formerly head of analysis at the Energy Information Administration, how long it would take just to determine whether a CCS system would be economical for utilities to build.
Mary Hutzler, former Acting Acting Administrator, Energy Information Administration: It probably requires an immense amount of research and development. People have told me 1o to 15 years alone. [8]
Narrator: Mary also told me that building a national CCS pipeline network could take another decade. Developing the regulations would also take years. [9] So the proposed moratorium is really a ban on new coal plants for 20 years or more.
What’s the risk here? New coal generation is forecast to supply two-thirds of all new electric power over the next two decades. By 2030, new coal generation is expected to provide 15% of all our electricity. [10] So banning it, could create one heck of a power deficit. Frequent blackouts and power failures–an energy crisis would not be an unlikely consequence. At a minimum, our electric bills would go way up.
Narrator: But Al Gore is not content to ban new coal plants. He now proposes to scrap all existing coal plants and natural gas power plants too. He says we must replace all carbon-based electricity with carbon-free electricity in just 10 years–by 2018. [11]
Ben Lieberman (Heritage Foundation): The idea is absolutely off the charts, unrealistic. [12]
Dr. Patrick Michaels (Cato Institute): Al Gore is proposing the literally, physically impossible. [12]
Commentary
[1] James Hansen, the NASA scientist whose congressional testimony during the hot summer of 1988 launched the global warming movement, calls coal power plants ”factories of death“ and “the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” The “top priority of any climate policy must be to stop the building of traditional coal plants,” writes climate crusader Joe Romm. He continues: “A climate policy that does not start by achieving at least the first goal, a moratorium on coal without CCS, must be labeled a failure.” “The silver bullet [for global warming] is no more coal,” says Architecture 2030. “Kill Coal. Coal is the enemy of the human race,” declares the Sustainable Development Issues Network. My Google search shows that global warming and coal are discussed on some 4,470,000 Web sites. It’s a safe bet most of those sites share the Gorethodox sentiments quoted above.
[2] Different fossil (carbon-based) fuels emit different amounts of CO2 in relation to the energy they produce. For a variety of fuels, the U.S. Energy Information Administration compares pounds of CO2 emitted per energy output measured in British thermal units (Btu).
Fuel Pounds/Btu
Natural Gas 117
Liquefied petroleum gas 139
Gasoline 156
Coal (bituminous) 205
Coal (subituminous) 213
Coal (lignite) 215
Petroleum coke 225
Coal (anthrocite) 227
From these numbers, we can calculate the emission ratios (or relative CO2 intensity) of the fuels. For example, bituminous coal is 1.37 times more CO2-intensive than gasoline, and 1.75 more CO2-intensive than natural gas.
[3] The Christian Science Monitor chart shown above and in the film clip is based on late 2004 estimates by UDI-Platts, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and unspecified industry sources. David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), in a February 2005 speech, presented a similar bottom line, based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data. He said:
The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that 1400 GW of new coal plants will be built worldwide in the next 25 years alone. To put that in context, current U.S. coal capacity is about 330 GW and global capacity is 1000 GW. This enormous increase in coal capacity will lock us into a huge additional commitment to global warming unless we use technologies that reduce CO2 emissions to minimal levels; marginal efficiency improvements will not prevent this lock-in.
The lifetime emissions from just this next wave of coal investment will be about 580 billion tons of CO2. That amount is more than half the total loading of the atmosphere with CO2 from all forms of fossil fuel combustion in the past 250 years!
Build scores or hundreds of new coal plants, and the Kyoto CO2 reductions barely amount to a drop in the bucket. As has been widely reported, China is building coal power plants at the rate of one a week.
[5] A wide-ranging coalition of environmental groups called “Coal Moratorium Now“ demands that no new coal-fired power station be built unless it is equipped with carbon capture and storage. In 2008, Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA)–the authors of the 2009 Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill (H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act)–introduced legislation (H.R. 5575) to impose a moratorium on new coal plants lacking CCS. In March 2009, state legislators introduced a similar bill in Texas. In April 2009, the UK Government proposed regulations requiring new coal plants to install CCS on at least 400 MW of output–about 25% of the output of an average power station. In addition, the power stations would have to capture 100% of their emissions by 2025–if the applicable technology exists by then. That’s a big “if.”
[6] A wealth of both basic and technical information on CCS is available in studies by MIT, the U.S. Government Accounting Office, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Congressional Research Service, the Department of Energy (DOE), and Glaser et al. (2008).
[7] Oil companies sometimes inject CO2 into wells to squeeze more petroleum out of them–a technique called enhanced oil recovery (OER). Sometimes people talk as if a CCS system could piggy-back on EOR projects. But, as MIT’s Future of Coal report points out, CO2 injection for EOR has “limited significance for long-term, large-scale CO2 sequestration–regulations differ, the capacity of EOR projects is inadequate for large-scale deployment, the geologic formation has been disrupted by production, and EOR projects are usually not well instrumented [monitored for CO2 leakage; p. xiii].”
The Department of Energy (DOE), citing rising costs, pulled the plug on FutureGen, a $1.5 billion government-industry partnership to build the world’s first commercial scale CCS power plant. In July 2009, however, FutureGen Alliance, Inc. announced it had reached an agreement with DOE to begin “construction of the first commercial-scale, fully integrated carbon capture and sequestration project in the country in Matton, Ill.” So there is still not even a commercial-scale demonstration project, though there may be in the next few years.
[8] MIT’s March 2007 Future of Coal report calls for large demonstration projects in 3-4 sites in different regions of the country costing “$500 million over eight years.” Better still, MIT argues, “Five large tests could be planned an executed for under $1 billion, and address the chief concerns for roughly 70% of U.S. [coal generation] capacity. Information from these projects would validate the commercial scalability of geologic carbon storage and provide a basis for regulatory, legal, and financial decisions needed to ensure safe, reliable, economic sequestration” (p. 54).
EPRI’s Bryan Hannegan estimated in March 2007 that CO2 capture (including compression, transportation, and storage) would increase the levelized cost of an Integrated Gassification Combined Cycle (IGCC) coal power plant by ”about 40-50%” (p. 5). IGCC is already more costly than the more common pulverized coal (PC) power plants. EPRI is confident that additional RD&D will lower carbon capture costs. But by how much and how soon is uncertain.
A February 2009 Stanford University study, citing a September 2008 McKinsey & Co. study and other sources, says that CCS is projected to increase the capital costs of new coal power plants by almost 50%. “On the basis of avoided emissions, the cost of CCS ranges from $30-$90/ tonne CO2, which translates into a 60-80% increase in the levelized cost of electricity ($/MWh).”
A July 2009 Harvard University study estimates that early adopters of carbon capture technology will incur a cost of $100-$150/ton of CO2 avoided (equivalent to 8-12 cents/kWh). Once the technology matures, the additional cost will fall to $35-$50/ton of CO2 avoided (equivalent to 2-5 cents/kWh), the researchers estimate. For comparison, in 2009, residential electric rates were 20.9 cents/kWh in Connecticut, 9.2 cents/kWh in Kansas, and 14.6 cents/kWh in California.
How long between early adoption and technological maturity? According to the researchers, increasing scale, learning by doing, and technological innovation “are expected to reduce abatement [CO2 capture] costs by approximately 65% by 2030, although such estimates are inevitably uncertain” (emphasis added).
In plain speak, it may take many years to sort out the economics of CCS.
[9] The scale of the network of pipelines and storage sites required to transport and bury CO2 from U.S. coal power plants is staggering. According to MIT’s Future of Coal report (p. ix):
- The United States produces about 1.5 billion tons per year of CO2 from coal-burning power plants.
- If all of this is CO2 is transported for sequestration, the quantity is equivalent to three times the weight and, under typical operating conditions, one-third the annual volume of natural gas transported by the U.S. gas pipeline system.
- If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed into a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.
- At present the largest sequestration project is injecting one millions tons/year of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Sleipner gas field into a saline aquifer under the North Sea.
Even if Congress approves such a system, and major environmental groups support it, NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) protests and litigation could block or delay implementation for many years. Some people just don’t like energy projects, regardless of how “green” the projects purport to be. For the gory details, check out the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s ”Project No Project“ Web site.
[10] Two-thirds of all new generation and 15% of total U.S. electric supply–these estimates came from the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) 2008 Annual Energy Outlook. See the figure below.
Coal’s estimated share of new generation and total generation are lower in EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2009. EIA forecasts that from 2007 to 2030, new coal generation will provide 64% of all new generation and 9% of total U.S. electric supply. See the figure below.
Actually, it’s remarkable that EIA still forecasts a robust increase in electric generation from coal. Coal increasingly operates in a politically hostile, litigious environment. The Sierra Club, for example, claims that its activists, lawyers, and allies, working with state and local leaders, have prevented 100 planned coal power plants from being built over the past eight years. Click here for a partial list.
For example, even in Texas, an energy-producing state, environmental activists stopped TXU Corp. from building eight of 11 planned new coal power plants, despite estimates by the Perryman Group that investment in the new plants, over five years, would add $25.8 billion to state GDP, $17.3 billion to in-state personal income, and 389,000-plus person-years of employment.
[11] I’m not making this up. The text and video of Gore’s speech calling for carbon-free electricity by 2018 are available here.
[12] According to the EIA, in 2008, renewable sources generated 356 billion kWh, of which 259.7 billion kWh, or 73%, came from conventional hydro-electric dams. Total net generation by the electric power sector was 3852 billion kWh. So renewables provided only 9% of total generation, which means that only about 2.4% came from the politically-correct renewables–wind, biomass, solar, and geothermal.
Note that non-hydro renewable sources would provide even less electricity but for a plethora of market-rigging federal and state tax breaks and subsidies and Soviet-style production quotas known as renewable portfolio standards.
Coal and natural gas provided 2654 billion kWh, or about 69% of total U.S. electric generation in 2008. Gore and his allies would undoubtedly oppose the construction of new large hydroelectric dams even if suitable sites were available. So what Gore and “We Can Solve It” are proposing to do, is replace the 69% of our electricity that comes from coal and natural gas with the non-hydro renewables that currently supply only 2.4%–all in 10 years.
This plan would fail–dismally. Our electricity rates would skyrocket, because the demand for renewable electricity, ramped up by mandates, would vastly exceed supply. No transition that big and that fast would be smooth. Service disruptions and blackouts would likely be frequent and perversive–a chronic energy crisis.
Gore’s plan would also set a world record for government waste, since hundreds of profitable coal and natural gas power plants would have to be decommissioned long before the end of their useful lives.
To read previous posts in this series, click on the links below:
- Policy Peril: Looking for antidote to An Inconvenient Truth? Your search is over.
- Policy Peril Segment 1: Heat Waves
- Policy Peril Segment 2: Air Pollution
- Policy Peril Segment 3: Hurricanes
- Policy Peril Segment 4: Sea-Level Rise
- Policy Peril Segment 5: Is the Science Debate Over?
- Policy Peril Segment 6: Cap and Trade
- Policy Peril Segment 7: Fuel Economy Standards
Today’s post in my series of commentaries on excerpts from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, challenges the Gorethodox dogma that the science debate on global warming is “over.”
There are three basic issues in the climate change science debate:
- Detection – Has the world warmed, and if so, by how much?
- Attribution – How much of the observed warming (especially since the mid-1970s) is due to increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations?
- Sensitivity – How much additional warming should we expect from continuing increases in greenhouse gas concentrations?
Despite what you’ve heard over and over again, these basic issues are unsettled, and more so now than at any time in the past decade. The science debate is not “over.” Reports of the death of climate skepticism have been greatly exaggerated.
Because of time constraints (Policy Peril runs under 40 minutes), the film briefly explores only the most important of the three basic issues: climate sensitivity. Today’s clip comes from that part of the film: an interview with University of Alabama in Huntsville atmospheric scientist Dr. Roy Spencer. To watch the Spencer interview, click here. To watch the entire movie, click here.
Here’s how this post is organized. First, I’ll reproduce the text of Spencer’s interview. Then, I’ll review some recent research bearing on the three fundamental science issues: detection, attribution, and sensitivity.
Text of today’s film clip:
Narrator: All the IPCC models assume that a CO2-induced warming will produce more high-altitude cirrus clouds, which then trap even more heat in the atmosphere. This is what’s called a positive climate feedback. Roy Spencer and his colleagues use satellites to study cirrus cloud behavior.
Dr. Roy Spencer (University of Alabama in Huntsville): Last August, August of 2007, we published research which showed from a whole bunch of satellite data that when the tropical atmosphere heats up–there are these periods when the atmosphere heats up from more rain activity or cools down from less rain activity–that when it heats up, the skies actually open up. The cirrus clouds that are up high, in the troposphere, in the upper atmosphere, open up and let more cooling infrared radiation escape to space. And it was a very strong effect.
Narrator: Spencer says that if climate models incorporated the negative feedback his team discovered, the models might forecast 75% less warming.
This is definitely not the Al Gore view of climate sensitivity. In fact, in An Inconvenient Truth (p. 67), Gore suggests we could get “three times as much” warming by mid-century as has occurred since the “depth of the last ice age.” That would mean a warming of 10ºC-12ºC by mid-century! Gore’s implicit warming forecast goes way beyond the IPCC best-estimate forecast range of 1.8ºC to 4.0ºC (IPCC WWI AR4, Summary for Policymakers, p. 13). As we’ll see below, several strands of evidence suggest that the IPCC models are also too “hot.”
Detection
The world has warmed overall during the past 130 years, as evidenced by melting glaciers, longer growing seasons, and both proxy and instrumental data. However, the main era of “anthropogenic” global warming supposedly began in the mid-1970s, and ongoing research by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts leaves no doubt that in recent decades, the U.S. surface temperature record–reputed to be the best in the world–is unreliable and riddled with false warming biases.
Watts and a team of more than 650 volunteers have visually inspected and photographically documented 1003, or 82%, of the 1,221 climate monitoring stations overseen by the U.S. Weather Service. In a report summarizing an earlier phase of the team’s investigation (a survey of 860+ stations), Watts says, “We were shocked by what we found.” He explains:
We found stations located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations–nearly 9 of every 10–fail to meet the National Weather Services’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 or every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.
“It gets worse,” Watts continues:
We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also have caused them to report a false warming trend. We found gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.
How big a problem is this? According to Watts, “The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7ºC (about 1.2ºF) during the twentieth century.” Based on analysis of 948 stations rated as of May 31, 2009, Watts estimates that 22% of stations have an expected error of 1ºC, 61% have an expected error of 2ºC, and 8% have an expected error of 5ºC.
Watts concludes that, “this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century.” He further concludes: “Since the U.S. record is thought to be ‘the best in the world,’ it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.”
A related issue is the influence of urban heat islands on long-term temperature records. Climate Change Reconsidered, a report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), written by Drs. Craig Idso and S. Fred Singer with 35 contributors and reviewers, reviews more than 40 studies on urban heat islands. For example, a study by Oke (1973) of the urban heat island strength of 10 settlements in the St. Lawrence Lowlands of Canada found that a population as small as 1,000 people could generate a heat island effect of 2ºC-2.5ºC. From this study and the others reviewed, the NIPCC concludes:
It appears almost certain that surface-based temperature histories of the globe contain a significant warming bias introduced by insufficient corrections for the non-greenhouse-gas-induced urban heat island effect. Furthermore, it may well be impossible to make proper corrections for the deficiency, as the urban heat island of even small towns dwarfs any concommitant augmented greenhouse effect that may be present [p. 95; emphasis in original].
In a comment submitted to EPA regarding its proposed endangerment finding, University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) atmospheric scientist John Christy notes two additional reasons to conclude that the IPCC surface data records exaggerate warming trends:
As a culmination of several papers and years of work, Christy et al. (2009) demonstrates that popular surface datasets overstate the warming that is assumed to be greenhouse related for two reasons. First, these datasets use only stations that are electronically (i.e. easily) available, which means the unused, vast majority of stations (usually more rural and representative of actual trends but harder to find) are not included. Secondly, these popular datasets use the daily mean surface temerpature (TMean) which is the average of the daytime high (TMax) and nighttime low (TMin). In this study (and its predecessors, Christy 2002, Christy et al. 2006, Pielke Sr. et al. 2008, Walters et al. 2007 and others) we show that TMin is seriously impacted by surface development, and thus its rise is not an indicator of greenhouse gas forcing. Some have called this the Urban Heat Island effect, but, as described in Christy et al. 2009, it is much more than this and encompasses any development of the surface (e.g. irrigated agriculture).
For example, the UK Hadley Center, relying on two electronic surface stations, computed a TMax temperature trend in East Africa of 0.14ºC per decade during 1905-2004. Christy, using data from 45 stations, found a trend of only 0.02ºC per decade.
In California, Christy found that the only significant warming trend is for TMin in the irrigated San Joaquin Valley. Note, in the non-irrigated Sierra mountains, where models project a greenhouse gas-induced warming should occur, there is actually a decreasing temperature trend.
Obviously, temperature data are the starting point of any analysis of global warming. But if we can’t trust the U.S. and IPCC temperature records, how do we know how much global warming has actually occurred?
Satellite observations are not influenced by heat islands and irrigation, or subject to the quality control problems detailed by Watts. Moreover, satellite records tally well with weather balloon observations–an independent database. So maybe detection should be based solely on satellite data, which do show some warming over the past 30 years. However, the “debate is over” crowd is unlikely to embrace this solution. The satellite record shows a relatively slow rate of warming–about 0.13ºC per decade–hence a relatively insensitive climate.
Moreover, as can be seen in the above chart of the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) satellite record, some of the 0.13ºC/decade ”trend” comes from the 1998 El Nino warming pulse. Remove 1998, and the 30-year satellite record trend drops to 0.12ºC/decade.
Attribution
The IPCC, the leading spokesman for the alleged scientific consensus, claims that, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” How does the IPCC know this? The IPCC offers three main reasons.
First, according to the IPCC, “Paleoclimate reconstructions show that the second half of the 20th century was likely the warmest 50-year period in the Northern hemisphere in 1300 years” (IPPC AR4, WGI, Chapt. 9, p. 702). The warmth of recent decades coincided with a rapid increase in GHG concentrations. Therefore, the IPCC reasons, most of the recent warming is likely due to anthropogenic GHG emissions.
This argument is unconvincing if the warming of recent decades is not unusual or unprecedented in the past 1300 years. As it happens, numerous studies indicate that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)–roughly the period from AD 800 to 1300, with peak warmth occurring about AD 1050–was as warm as or warmer than the Current Warm Period (CWP).
The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has analyzed more than 200 peer-reviewed MWP studies produced by more than 660 individual scientists working in 385 separate institutions from 40 countries. The Center divides these studies into three categories–those with quantitative data enabling one to infer the degree to which the peak of the MWP differs from the peak of the CWP (Level 1), those with qualitative data enabling one to infer which period was warmer (Level 2), although not by how much, and those with data enabling one to infer the existence of a MWP in the region studied (Level 3). An interactive map showing the sites of these studies is available at CO2Science.org.
Only a few Level 1 studies determined the MWP to have been cooler than the CWP; the vast majority indicate a warmer MWP. On average, the studies indicate that the MWP was 1.01ºC warmer than the CWP.
Figure Description: The distribution, in 0.5ºC increments, of Level 1 studies that allow one to identify the degree to which peak MWP temperatures either exceeded (positive values, red) or fell short of (negative values, blue) peak CWP temperatures.
Similarly, the vast majority of Level 2 studies indicate a warmer MWP:
Figure Description: The distribution of Level 2 studies that allow one to determine whether peak MWP temperatures were warmer than (red), equivalent to (green), or cooler than (blue), peak CWP temperatures.
The IPCC’s second main reason for attributing most recent warming to the increase in GHG concentrations is that climate models “cannot reproduce the rapid warming observed in recent decades when they only take into account variations in solar output and volcanic activity. However . . . models are able to simulate observed 20th century changes when they include all of the most important external factors, including human influences from sources such as greenhouse gases and natural external factors” (IPCC, AR4, WGI, Chapt. 9, p. 702).
This would be decisive if today’s models accurately simulate all important modes of natural variability. In fact, models do not accurately simulate the behavior of clouds and ocean cycles. They may also ignore important interactions between the Sun, cosmic rays, and cloud formation.
Richard Lindzen of MIT spoke to this point at the Heartland Institute’s recent (June 2, 2009) Third International Conference on Climate Change:
What was done [by the IPCC], was to take a large number of models that could not reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation), claim that such models nonetheless adequately depicted natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that models could not replicate the warming episode from the mid seventies through the mid nineties, to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man. The argument makes arguments in support of intelligent design seem rigorous by comparison.
“Fingerprint” studies are the third basis on which the IPCC attributes most recent warming to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Climate models project a specific pattern of warming through the vertical profile of the atmosphere–a greenhouse “fingerprint.” If the observed warming pattern matches the model-projected fingerprint, that would be strong evidence that recent warming is anthropogenic. Conversely, notes the NIPCC, “A mismatch would argue strongly against any signficant contribution from greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing and support the conclusion that the observed warming is mostly of natural origin” (NPICC, p. 106).
Douglass et al. (2007) compared model-projected and observed warming patterns in the tropical troposphere. The observed pattern is based on three compilations of surface temperature records, four balloon-based records of the surface and lower troposphere, and three satellite-based records of various atmospheric layers–10 independent datasets in all.
“While all greenhouse models show an increasing warming trend with altitude, peaking around 10 km at roughly two times the surface value,” observes the NIPCC, “the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result; no increasing warming, but rather a slight cooling with altitude” (p. 107). See the figures below.
The mismatch between the model-predicted greenhouse fingerprint and the observed pattern is profound. As the Douglass team explains: “Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean. In layers near 5 km, the modeled trend is 100% to 300% higher than observed, and above 8 km, modeled and observed trends have opposite signs.”
Figure description: Temperature trends for statellite era (ºC/decade). HadCRUT, GHCH and GISS are compilations of surface temperature observations. IGRA, RATPAC, HadAT2, and RAOBCORE are balloon-based observations of surface and lower troposphere. UAH, RSS, UMD are satellite-based data for various layers of the atmosphere. The 22-model average comes from an ensemble of 22 model simulations from the most widely used models worldwide. The red lines are the +2 and -2 standard errors of the mean from the 22 models. Source: Douglass et al. 2007.
The NIPCC concludes that the mismatch of observed and model-calculated fingerprints “clearly falsifies the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)” (p. 108). I would put the state of affairs more cautiously. In view of (1) significant evidence that the MWP was as warm as or warmer than the CWP, (2) the inability of climate models to simulate important modes of natural variability, and (3) the failure of observations to confirm a greenhouse fingerprint in the tropical trosophere, the IPCC claim that “most” recent warming is “very likely” anthropogenic should be considered a boast rather than a balanced assessment of the evidence.
Climate Sensitivity
The most important unresolved scientific issue in the global warming debate is how sensitive (reactive) the climate is to increases in GHG concentrations.
Climate sensitivity is typically defined as the global average surface warming following a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC says a doubling is likely to produce warming in the range of 2ºC to 4.5ºC, with a most likely value of about 3ºC (IPCC, AR4, WGI, Chapt. 10, p. 749). The IPCC presents a range rather than a specific value because of uncertainty regarding the strength of the relevant feedbacks.
In a hypothetical climate with no feedbacks, positive or negative, a CO2 doubling would produce 1.2ºC of warming (IPCC, AR4, WGI, Chapt. 8, p. 631). In most climate models, the dominant feedbacks are positive, meaning that the warmth from rising GHG levels causes other changes (in water vapor, clouds, or surface reflectivity, for example) that either increase the retention of outgoing long-wave radiation (OLR) or decrease the reflection of incoming short-wave radiation (SWR).
In his speech at the June 2 Heartland Institute conference, Professor Lindzen summarized his research on climate sensitivity, which has since been accepted for publication by Geophysical Research Letters. Lindzen argues that climate feedbacks and sensitivity can be inferred from observed changes in OLR and SWR following observed changes in sea-surface temperatures. For fluctuations in OLR and SWR, Lindzen and his colleagues used the 16-year record (1985-1999) from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), as corrected for altitude variations associated with satellite orbital decay. For sea surface temperatures, they used data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. For climate model simulations, they used 11 IPCC models forced with the observed sea-surface temperature changes.
The results are striking. All 11 IPCC models show positive feedback, “while ERBE unambiguously shows a strong negative feedback.”
Figure description: ERBE data show increasing top-of-the-atmosphere radiative flux (OLR plus reflected SWR) as sea surface temperatures rise whereas models forecast decreasing radiative flux. Source: Lindzen and Choi 2009.
The ERBE data indicate that the sensitivity of the actual climate system “is narrowly constrained to about 0.5ºC,” Lindzen estimates. ”This analysis,” says Lindzen in a recent commentary, “makes clear that even when all models agree, they can be wrong, and that this is the situation for the all important question of climate sensitivity.”
At the Heartland Institute’s Second International Conference on Climate Change (March 2009), Dr. William Gray of Colorado State University presented satellite-based research that may explain the low climate sensitivity the Lindzen team infers from the ERBE data.
The IPCC climate models assume that CO2-induced warming significantly increases upper troposphere clouds and water vapor, trapping still more OLR that would otherwise escape to space. Most of the projected warming in the models comes from this positive water vapor/cloud feedback, not from the CO2. Satellite observations do not support this hypothesis, Gray contends:
Observations of upper tropospheric water vapor over the last 3-4 decades from the National Centers of Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis data and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) data show that upper tropospheric water vapor appears to undergo a small decrease while Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) undergoes a small increase. This is the opposite of what has been programmed into the GCMs [General Circulation Models] due to water vapor feedback.
The figure below comes from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis of upper troposphere water vapor and OLR.
Figure description: NCEP/NCAR renalysis of standardized anomalies at 400 mb (~7.5 km altitude) water vapor content (i.e. specific humidity — in blue) and OLR (in red) from 1950 to 2008. Note the downward trend in moisture and upward trend in OLR.
Gray’s paper deals with water vapor in the upper troposphere. What about high-altitude cirrus clouds, which climate models also predict will increase and trap more OLR as GHG concentrations increase?
Spencer et al. (2007), the study Dr. Spencer spoke about in today’s Policy Peril film clip, found a strong negative cirrus cloud feedback mechanism in the tropical troposphere. Instead of steadily building up as the tropical oceans warm, cirrus cloud cover suddenly contracts, allowing more OLR to escape. As mentioned, Spencer estimates that if this mechanism operates on decadal time scales, it would reduce model estimates of global warming by 75%.
A 2008 study by Spencer and colleague William D. Braswell examines the issue of climate feedbacks related to low-level clouds. Lower troposphere clouds tend to cool the Earth by reflecting incoming SWR. Observations indicate that warmer years have less cloud cover compared to cooler years. Modelers have interpreted this correlation as positive feedback effect in which warming reduces low-level cloud cover, which then produces more warming.
Spencer and Braswell found that climate modelers could be mixing up cause and effect. Random variations in cloudiness can cause substantial decadal variations in ocean temperatures. So it is equally plausible that the causality runs the other way, and increases in sea-surface temperature are an effect of natural cloud variations. If so, then climate models forecast too much warming. For more on this, visit Spencer’s Web site.
In a study now in peer review for possible publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Spencer and colleagues analyzed 7.5 years of NASA satellite data and “discovered,” he reports on his Web site, “that, when the effects of clouds-causing-temperature-change is accounted for, cloud feedbacks in the real climate system are strongly negative.” “In fact,” he continues, “the resulting net negative feedback was so strong that, if it exists on the long time scales associated with global warming, it would result in only 0.6ºC of warming by late in this century.”
In related ongoing satellite research, Spencer finds new evidence that “most” warming of the past century “could be the result of a natural cycle in cloud cover forced by a well-known mode of natural climate variability: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).”
Whether or not the PDO proves to be a major player in climate change, Spencer has identified a potentially serious error in all IPCC modeling efforts:
Even though they never say so, the IPCC has simply assumed that the average cloud cover of the Earth does not change, century after century. This is a totally arbitrary assumption, and given the chaotic variations that the ocean and atmosphere circulations are capable of, it is probably wrong. Little more than a 1% change in cloud cover up or down, and sustained over many decades, could cause events such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.
Finally, recent temperature history also suggests that most climate models are too “hot.” Dr. Patrick Michaels touched on this topic in Policy Peril (albeit not in today’s excerpt).
Carbon dioxide emissions and concentrations are increasing at an accelerating rate (Canadell, J.G. et al. 2008). Yet, there has been no net warming since 2001 and no year was as warm as 1998.
Figure description: Observed monthly global temperature anomalies, January 2001 through April 2009, as compiled by the Climate Research Unit. Source: Paul C. Knappenberger.
Paul C. Knappenberger (“Chip” to his friends) quite reasonably wonders, “[H]ow long a period of no warming can be tolerated before the forecasts of the total warming by century’s end have to be lowered?” After all, he continues, “We’re already into the nineth year of the 100 year forecast and we have no global warming to speak of.” It is instructive to compare these data with climate model projections.
A good place to start is with the climate model projections that NASA scientist James Hansen presented in his 1988 congressional testimony, which launched the modern global warming movement.
The figure below, from congressional testimony by Dr. John Christy, a colleague of Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, shows how Hanesn’s model and reality diverge.
Figure description: The red, orange, and purple lines are Hansen’s model forecasts of global temperatures under different emission scenarios. The green and blue lines are actual temperatures from two independent satellite records. Source: John Christy.
“All model projections show high sensitivity to CO2 while the actual atmosphere does not,” Christy notes. “It is noteworthy,” he adds, “that the model projection for drastic CO2 cuts still overshot the observations. This would be considered a failed hypothesis test for the models from 1988.”
What about the models used by the IPCC in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)? How well are they replicating global temperatures?
This figure, also from Dr. Christy’s testimony, is adapted from Dr. Patrick Michaels’s testimony of February 12, 2009. The red and orange lines show the upper and lower significant range (95% of all model runs are between the lines) of global temperature trends calculated by 21 IPCC AR4 models for multi-year segments ending in 2020. The blue and green lines show observed temperatures ending in 2008 from satellite (University of Alabama in Huntsville) and surface (U.K. Hadley Center for Climate Change) records.
Christy comments:
The two main points here are (1) the observations are much cooler than the mid-range of the model spread and are at the minimum of the model simulations and (2) the satellite adjustment for surface comparisons is exceptionally good. The implication of (1) is that the best estimates of the IPCC models are too warm, or that they are too sensitive to CO2 emissions.
Christy illustrates this another way in his comment on EPA’s endangerment proposal.
Figure description: Mean and standard error of 22 IPCC AR4 model temperature projections in the mid-range (A1B) emissions scenario. From 1979 to 2008, the mean projection of the models is a warming of 0.22ºC per decade. HADCRUT3v (green) is a surface dataset, UAH (blue) and RSS (purple) are satellite data sets.
Christy comments:
. . . even with these likely spurious warming effects in HADCRUT3v and RSS, the mean model trends are still significantly warmer than the observations at all time scales examined here. Thus, the model mean sensitivity, a quantity utilized by the IPCC as about 2.6ºC per doubled CO2, is essentially contradicted in these comparisons.
Michaels, in his testimony, shows that if year 2008 temperatures persist through 2009, then the observed temperature trend will fall below the 95% confidence range of model projections. In other words, the models will have less than a 5% probability of being correct.
Although the IPCC AR4 models have not failed yet, they are, in Michaels’s words, “in the process of failing,” and the longer the current temperature regime persists, the worse the models will perform.
Conclusion
The climate science debate is not “over.” In fact, it is just starting to get very, very interesting. All the basic issues–detection, attribution, and sensitivity–are unsettled and more so today than at any time in the past decade.
A final thought–anyone who wants further convincing that the debate is not over should read the marvelous NIPCC report. On a wide range of issues (nine main topics and 60 sub-topics), the report demonstrates that the scientific literature allows, and even favors, reasonable alternative assessments to those presented by the IPCC.
P.S. Previous posts in this series are available below:
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warns that global warming could raise sea levels by 20 feet, and he implies that this could happen quite suddenly–in our lifetimes or those of our children.
Specifically, on pp. 204-206 of the book version of AIT, Gore warns that if half the Greenland Ice Sheet and half the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, some 100 million people living in Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh would “be displaced,” “forced to move,” or “have to be evacuated.” Is there any truth to it?
Today’s clip from CEI’s film Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, again features Dr. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, former Virginia State Climatologist, author of several superb books (most recently, Climate of Extremes: The Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know), and prolific blogger on World Climate Report.
Here are my previous posts in this series:
- Policy Peril: Looking for an antidote to An Inconvenient Truth? Your search is over
- Policy Peril Segment 1: Heat Waves
- Policy Peril Segment 2: Air Pollution
- Policy Peril Segment 3: Hurricanes
To watch today’s video clip, click here. To watch Policy Peril from start to finish, click here.
The text of today’s excerpt immediately follows. It includes some graphics from the film and footnotes to the pertinent scientific literature.
Dr. Patrick Michaels: This even as there is a purported large melt of ice from Greenland. It turned around — the thermohaline circulation became stronger. [1]
Narrator: Hmm. These facts are inconvenient only for the makers of An Inconvenient Truth. But who can forget the scenes where a 20-foot wall of water rolls across the world’s coastal communities. In the book version [of AIT], Gore says, “If Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea–or if half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea–sea levels worldwide would increase by 18 to 20 feet.” Reality check! How much ice is Greenland shedding?
Dr. Michaels: The actual loss of ice from Greenland is about 25 cubic miles per year. [2] Now, if that seems like a lot, there are about 700,000 cubic miles of ice on Greenland. The loss rate is four-tenths of one percent of its ice mass, per century. I didn’t say per year. I didn’t say per decade. I said four-tenths of one percent per century. [3]
Narrator: That translates into how much sea-level rise?
Dr. Michaels: If you take a look at the IPCC’s latest volume, by the year 2100, they have two inches of sea-level rise resulting from the loss of Greenland ice. Not two feet. Not 20 feet. Two inches! [4] That’s the “consensus of scientists,” okay. Whether or not we believe in consensus science, that’s what they say.
Narrator: Gore says global warming could melt half of Greenland. Is that plausible?
Dr. Michaels: The United Nations [IPCC] projects that if we raise carbon dioxide to four times the background level–that would be about 1,100 parts per million, right now we’re at about 385 parts per million–and maintain that for 1,000 years, that Greenland would lose about half its ice in a millennium. [5] Now, we don’t have enough fossil fuel to maintain that concentration for 1,000 years.
Narrator: Gore also says half the ice sheet could break off because of “moulins.” For me, this was the scariest part of An Inconvenient Truth. Moulins are cracks that channel meltwater from the surface of the ice sheet to the bedrock below. By lubricating the bedrock, moulins could destabilize the ice sheet, Gore says. [6]
Well, a recent study in Science magazine lays that fear to rest. A small meltwater lake poured down a moulin at a flow rate exceeding that of Niagara Falls. [7] Yet, Science magazine reports, “For all the lake’s water dumped under the ice that day, and all the water drained into new moulins in the following weeks, the ice sheet moved only an extra half meter near the drained lake.” [8] An extra half meter. [9]
Notes
[1] The thermohaline circulation “became stronger.” Dr. Michaels (Pat to his friends] just finished debunking Gore’s claim that ice melt from Greenland will inject enough fresh water into the North Atlantic to disrupt the thermohaline circulation (THC, a.k.a. oceanic “conveyor belt”), which most scientists–though not Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory–believe is responsible for Europe’s mild winters. There was a brief scare about THC shutdown a few years ago when Bryden et al. (2005) reported that the Atlantic branch of the conveyor belt slowed by 30% between 1957 and 2004. But one year later, Richard Kerr of Science magazine reported on new data showing that the Bryden study was a “false alarm.” In fact, Dr. Michaels says, alluding to Boyer et al. (2006) and Latif et al. (2006), the THC became stronger. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change reviews Latif et al. (2006) here, and reviews many other THC studies. I discuss Gore’s warming-causes-cooling fantasy on pp. 11-12 of my April 2007 testimony before the Colorado Republican Study Committee.
[2] The estimate of 25 cubic miles of Greenland ice loss per year comes from Luthcke et al. (2006), a study summarized here on NASA’s Web page.
[3] Greenland has approximately 3 million cubic kilometers of ice. To convert cubic kilometers into cubic miles, you multiply the number of cubic kilometers by 0.2399. Hence, Greenland has about 719,000 cubic miles of ice. It is losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year, which translates into a rate of 2,500 cubic miles per century. 2,500 is 4/10ths of 1% of 719,000.
[4] In the IPCC’s mid-range emissions scenario (A1B), Greenland ice loss contributes between 1 centimeter (cm) and 8 cm of sea-level rise in the 21st Century; in the IPCC’s high-end emissions scenario (A1FI), Greenland ice loss contributes between 2 cm and 12 cm per year (IPCC AR4 WGI, Chapter 10: Climate Change Protections, Table 10.7, p. 820). Translating into inches, Greenland ice loss contributes between 0.4 and 3.1 inches in mid-range A1B emissions scenario and between 0.7 and 4.7 inches in A1FI high-end emissions scenario.
[5] Pat here refers to Ridley et al. (2005), as reviewed in Chapter 10 of IPCC AR4 WGI, on p. 830. The figure below shows what the researchers project would happen to Greenland’s ice if carbon dioxide concentrations increase to four times pre-industrial levels and stay there for 3,000 years.
[6] Gore’s photograph and diagram of moulins come from Zwally et al. (2002), published in Science magazine.
In AIT, Gore animates the diagram so that the ice sheet begins to break apart at the E.Q. (equilibrium) line. This is thoroughly misleading. The E.Q. line of an ice sheet is the elevation at which glacier melting and snow accumulation are equal. Above the E.Q. line, snow accumulation exceeds ice melt; below it, ice melt exceeds snow accumulation. The E.Q. line is not a fault line or fissure in the ice.
More importantly, Zwally et al. (2002) is not evidence of an impending ice sheet crackup. The researchers found that moulins associated with summer ice melt accelerate glacial flow, but only by a few percent. For example, the flow rate of one outlet glacier increased from 31.3 cm/day in winter to 40.1 cm in July, falling back to 29.8 cm in August, increasing annual movement by about 5 meters. Apocalypse not!
[7] In a study updating the Zwally team’s research, Joughin et al. (2008) found somewhat more glacier acceleration associated summer ice melt and moulins. However, the study’s bottom-line conclusion is pointedly non-apocalyptic:
Surface-enhanced basal lubrication has been invoked previously as a feedback that would hasten the ice sheet’s demise in a warming climate. Our results show that several fast-flowing outlet glaciers, including Jakobshavn Isbrae, are relatively insensitive to this process . . . Our results thus far suggest that surface-melt enhanced lubrication will have a substantive but not catastrophic effect on the Greenland Ice Sheet’s future evolution.
[8] In a companion article (cited in this Policy Peril excerpt), Science magazine reporter Richard Kerr quotes Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley on moulin-induced ice sheet lubrication:
“Is it run for the hills, the ice is falling into the ocean?” asks Alley. “No, it matters but it’s not huge.”
Kerr goes on to observe, as noted above, that an entire 4 km-long, 8 m-deep melt-water lake disappeared down a moulin in about 1.4 hours–at an average rate of 8,700 cubic meters per second, “exceeding the average flow rate of Niagara Falls.” Yet, despite all the water dumped under the ice that day and all the water drained into new moulins in the following weeks, the ice sheet moved only “an extra half meter near the drained lake.”
[9] To put the extra half meter of glacial movement in perspective, consider that the Greenland Ice Sheet extends 2,530 kilometers (1,570 miles) North-South and has a maximum width of 1094 kilometers (680 miles) near its northern margin.
In a segment of Policy Peril immediately following today’s film excerpt, Pat also discusses studies in Science magazine indicating that the West Antactic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is more stable than scientists previously believed. The researchers found that outlet glaciers drag debris under the ice that piles up into “wedges.” These hidden land forms then prop up and stabilize the ice shelf.
The significance? Scientists once worried that sea-level rise of just a few feet could lift the WAIS off its island moorings, hastening its break up and demise. However, as Anderson (2007) reports in Science magazine, in a review of Anandakrishnan et al. (2007) and Alley et al. (2007) and their discovery of stabilizing land forms under the WAIS, “At the current rate of sea level rise, it would take several thousand years to float the ice sheet off its bed.”
A more recent study by Pollard and DeConto (2009), reviewed by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, concludes that “the WAIS will begin to collapse when nearby ocean temperatures warm by roughly 5ºC.” How long would that take?
In a companion article, Huybrechts (2009) estimates that, “The required ocean warmings, on the order of 5ºC, may well take several centuries to develop.” He asserts that “such an outcome could result from the accumulation of greenhouse-gas emissions projected for the twenty-first Century, if emissions are not greatly reduced.” His source here, however, is simply the IPCC report with its questionable assumptions about climate feedbacks and sensitivity. Huybrechts continues:
The implied transition time for a total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet of one thousand to three thousand years [in Pollard and DeConto (2009)] seems rapid by Antarctic standards. But it is nowhere near the century timescales of West Antarctic ice sheet decay based on simple marine ice-sheet models.
And one to three thousand years is certainly nowhere near the years-to-decades innundation of the world’s coastal communities that Al Gore conjures up in An Inconvenient Truth.
Is global warming making hurricanes more destructive? Did global warming contribute to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina? Would Kyoto-style energy rationing help avert future weather-related catastrophes?
Well, just ask Al Gore! In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims there’s a “strong new emerging consensus” that global warming is increasing the duration and intensity of hurricanes (AIT, p. 81), he depicts New Orleans as a global warming victim (pp. 94-95), and the threat of increasingly powerful storms is a major part of the alleged “climate crisis” that Gore proposes to solve by restricting our access to carbon-based energy. [click to continue…]
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