Common Era Temperature Reconstructions vs. Solar and Volcanic Forcing

... because wiggle matching is so much fun.

Background

The original inspiration for doing these plots goes back a bit, but have recently become topical at Judith Curry's by way of a guest post, Impact of the ~ 2400 yr solar cycle on climate and human societies, written by a fellow called Javier.  It's a lengthy post, and I'm not going to attempt to dig into it here.

CFCs and Ozone

... yes, some people still have trouble accepting the inverse relationship they have.

Background

I was invited to respond to this comment:

climatereason | July 1, 2016 at 4:37 pm | Reply
Bit bemused by the ozone hole story. 2015 was the fourth largest ozone hole since the satellite record began. The peak size is generally reached in October as the sunlight and cold reach their maximum.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/ozone.php
Can somebody explain on what basis this claim has been made?

Comparing Individual CMIP5 Models To Observations

... because it just never gets old.

Background

One of the Denizens at Judy's writes in response to my question of Mike Flynn:

---------------------

PA | June 24, 2016 at 11:05 am | Reply

Again: Where is your CMIP5-compatible model which beats the present state of the art at its own game?

The Russian INMCM4 is arguably the most accurate or one of the most accurate in terms of predictive trend

The INMCM4 model predicts little future warming.

Question asked and answered.

---------------------

US Economic Indicators by Presidential Party

... or even more election year fodder for partisan sniping.

Background

I hate arguing politics on the Innert00bs, but sometimes I just can't resist:

Glenn Stehle | June 15, 2016 at 9:25 pm |

Ron Graf said:

Since then the Democrats have been perpetually promising a “New Deal,” always financed by the children of the future, catering compassionately to Dem voters.

Did you miss the part back in 1971 when Nixon proclaimed, “We’re all Keynesians now?”

The Proposition that Rising CO2 Cools Central Antarctica

... no, I haven't lost my mind.

Background

I've written about this topic previously, I think in conversations with Chic Bowdrie.  Rather than try to dig that up again, I give the present inspiration for writing this note dedicated to the concept.  From Dr. Curry's Climate Etc. blog, we read these two comments:

captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3 | May 7, 2016 at 3:13 pm |

[Steven Mosher] “C02 does it’s work ABOVE the ERL.”

What’s the effective temperature of that effective radiant layer again?

---------------------

captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3 | May 7, 2016 at 5:26 pm |

RiHo08, “Is this the battle ground where CO2 and Ozone duke it out; one for cooling and the other warming?”

All of the greenhouse gases have temperature and pressure “sweet spots” where they are most effective at doing the greenhouse thing. Below that sweet spot they become less and less effective as noted in the Antarctic where increasing CO2 likely increases cooling.

Fort McMurray Wildfire and Climate Change

... another example of the uneasy interface between policy politics and science.

Background

CTV in Calgary has what appears to be the grabbiest headline as well as some sobering numbers:

Wildfire near Fort McMurray grows to over 100,000 hectares

[...]

Thousands of people who became trapped after fleeing the fires in and around Fort McMurray earlier this week are being moved out of the area to safety by RCMP and air transport.

An evacuation order was issued for Fort McMurray and surrounding communities earlier this week and more than 80,000 people left the area.

About 25,000 evacuees headed north to oilsands camps and some became stranded after several roads in the area were closed. Approximately 7000 were air lifted out on Thursday by WestJet and other carriers.

Converting hectares to more familiar units, we get 386 square miles.  For comparison, the US State of Rhode Island weighs in at 1,212 square miles, so this fire has burnt an area equal to nearly 1/3 the size.  Including the endzones, that works out to 186,824 American Football fields.  I don't think I need to convert to Olympic-sized swimming pools; you get the point.

There have been larger wildfires; the main issue with this one is that it's threatening a sizable population center, prompting a large evacuation requiring airlifts due to road closures.

Well that, and the inevitable controversy when climate scientists go on record in the mainstream press saying climate change is a factor.

May the Fourth Be With You

Number 1138 on the list of things in Star Wars that is just not fair are not real:

Figure 1 - Probably not the best way to ... dialog ... with a climate contrarian, but let it not be said I haven't sometimes wished it.

Confessions of a Warmist Propaganda Artist

... or letting it all hang out for the sake of humanity's collective future.

Prologue

After long threatening to do so, I've finally waded into the fray over at Dr. Judith Curry's Climate Etc. blog.  After a year of slaying incognito Sky Dragon Slayers at WUWT and two weeks trying to be "nice" and failing at Lucia Liljegren's lukewarmist The Blackboard, I have apparently reached the fuckit bucket tipping point of my blogging career: I'm a climate propagandist towing the IPCC Consensus party line, Comrades.  Not even going to pretend to be otherwise, it's too much damn work.

A Simple Sea Level Rise Model

... because curve-fitting is so much fun.

Background

Mark Bofill raises an interesting question over at Lucia's:

SLR is evidence warming is occurring. It doesn’t put the A in AGW though, FWIW. It’s always seemed to me that sea level rise started a trifle early for CO2 increase to be the original cause.

There being a number of SLR reconstructions floating about, I asked which one(s) he's been looking at.  He proposed I we have a look at Jevrejeva et al. (2008), Recent global sea level acceleration started over 200 years ago?

Abstract: We present a reconstruction of global sea level (GSL) since 1700 calculated from tide gauge records and analyse the evolution of global sea level acceleration during the past 300 years.  We provide observational evidence that sea level acceleration up to the present has been about 0.01 mm/yr 2 and appears to have started at the end of the 18th century.  Sea level rose by 6 cm during the 19th century and 19 cm in the 20th century.  Superimposed on the long-term acceleration are quasi-periodic fluctuations with a period of about 60 years.  If the conditions that established the acceleration continue, then sea level will rise 34 cm over the 21st century.  Long time constants in oceanic heat content and increased ice sheet melting imply that the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates of sea level are probably too low.

Red Team Blue Team

... old team new team.  Or: why I would support publicly funding research into "legitimate, alternative hypotheses" to explain observation.

Background

Back in February of this year, Dr. John Christy of UAH -- and guru of retrieval algorithms for estimating bulk upper atmosphere temperatures from orbit -- went to Washington.  In his prepared testimony, tucked away near the end of his standard fare, he wrote something not so novel in terms of concept, but in the fact that he actually put some numbers to it:

We know from Climategate emails and many other sources that the IPCC has had problems with those who take different positions on climate change than what the IPCC promotes. There is another way to deal with this however. Since the IPCC activity and climate research in general is funded by U.S.taxpayers, then I propose that five to ten percent of the funds be allocated to a group of well-credentialed scientists to produce an assessment that expresses legitimate, alternative hypotheses that have been (in their view) marginalized, misrepresented or ignored in previous IPCC reports (and thus the EPA Endangerment Finding and National Climate Assessments).

Such activities are often called “Red Team” reports and are widely used in government and industry. Decisions regarding funding for “Red Teams” should not be placed in the hands of the current “establishment” but in panels populated by credentialed scientists who have experience in examining these issues. Some efforts along this line have arisen from the private sector (i.e. The Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change at http://nipccreport.org/ and Michaels (2012) ADDENDUM:Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States). I believe policymakers, with the public’s purse, should actively support the assembling all of the information that is vital to addressing this murky and wicked science, since the public will ultimately pay the cost of any legislation alleged to deal with climate.

Setting aside the editorializing (which is NOT easy for me to do -- "wicked and murky science" -- really?) and extracting the the essence of his proposal from his polemic, I'm very much open to putting my tax monies where his mouth is.

Poor Air Quality is Almost Certainly Unhealthy

... the question is one of quantity.

Background

This post comes out of one point I raised in the Partisan Snark blurb, which further evolved in discussion over at Lucia's in the current open thread.  My leading argument was my usual: nuclear fission has been historically less hazardous than coal-fired electricity generation.  Using statistics I've bookmarked at the ready, the worldwide mortality rate is fully two orders of magnitude different.  That's using the worst-case mortality estimate from nuclear against the best-case coal statistic.

Side note: Brandon Shollenberger finds that the Forbes article I so often cite has been silently changing the stats over time.  Not kewl.

My arguments have long rested on noting that while there's certainly slop in both estimates, a two-order of magnitude of difference leaves a room for a lot of slop.  A 95% confidence interval is 1.96 standard deviations under a Gaussian normal distribution.  Must I really do a significance test when the lower bound of the higher risk factor is 100 times larger than the upper bound of the smaller risk factor?

Maybe I do.

Creatively Interpreting the Exxon Dox

... or the ethics of letting your readers (if not yourself) know when you're doing it.

Background

This is a follow-up of sorts on my previous post, Exxon and AGU Funding, to which Shollenberger took exception in comments on my article throwing Cook et al. (2013) under the bus:

I actually think the latest post here on the oil companies is incredibly wrong, and I think blaming "industry liars" for anything is a foolish move that shows a very poor understanding of why the public doesn't call for any strong action to combat global warming.

I agree that the public's attitude toward CO2 mitigation is not simply explained by saying nothing more than "the oil companies diddit".  But arguing that they have not been influential is dubious.  Arguing that fossil fuel interests haven't been actively attempting to influence public opinion would be flat out bonkers.

I clearly don't have a ton of nice things to say about Shollenberger, but batshit crazy hasn't been on the list of taunts.  So I asked:

I would be pleased if you'd trot over to the post itself and describe in comments there which part of it is wrong. Whether it's "incredibly" wrong or right will have to be left to the individual to decide.

He wrote an article on his own blog.  Let's have a peek ...

Partisan Snark

... can be amusing:

Figure 1: Attributed to Daily Kos, but I can't find it on their website. (h/t "Uncle Z")

If you squint hard enough, you might see folks on my side of the argument doing their level best to rearrange the deck chairs.

I'm still getting a good chuckle out of this one:

Figure 2: Credit R. McKee, Augusta Chronicle

Unrealistically bizarre as that might seem, I think this not-pretend argument is even loopier:

End the nuclear age
Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants.

Apparently, someone didn't get the memo:

---------------

How Deadly Is Your Kilowatt? We Rank The Killer Energy Sources

[...]

Energy Source                 Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)
----------------------------  ---------------------------------------------------
Coal – global average         100,000    (50% global electricity)
Coal – China                  170,000    (75% China’s electricity)
Coal – U.S.                    10,000    (44% U.S. electricity)
Oil                            36,000    (36% of energy, 8% of electricity)
Natural Gas                     4,000    (20% global electricity)
Biofuel/Biomass                24,000    (21% global energy)
Solar (rooftop)                   440    (< 1% global electricity)
Wind                              150    (~ 1% global electricity)
Hydro – global average          1,400    (15% global electricity)
Hydro – U.S.                        0.01 (7% U.S. electricity)
Nuclear – global average           90    (17%  global electricity w/Chern&Fukush)
Nuclear – U.S.                      0.01 (19% U.S. electricity)

It is notable that the U.S. death rates for coal are so much lower than for China, strictly a result of regulation and the Clean Air Act (Scott et al., 2005). It is also notable that the Clean Air Act is one of the most life-saving pieces of legislation ever adopted by any country in history.  Still, about 10,000 die from coal use in the U.S. each year, and another thousand from natural gas.

---------------

Immediate disqualification due to it appearing in Forbes, perhaps?  I once vetted the figures, particularly the coal death numbers and they look legit having derived from sources like the WHO and NIH.

One way or the other, I think rigidly line-in-the-sand ideologies are humanity's biggest existential threat.  Laughing at it seems the only medicine.

OTOH, at least more of the US public seems to be getting the right idea:

Figure 3 - US public opinion of the cause of observed warming over time.  Credit: Gallup.

The Difference Beteween Fraud and Farce, Reflux

... because I must reverse my previously stated positions on Cook et al. (2013)  (hereinafter, C13).  I realize that I can no longer in good conscience defend its design, nor its conclusions as stated.

Summary

Following are some issues that I have previously discounted, but which I now consider serious flaws.  Detailed discussion of each, along with suggestions for improvements/alternatives, are in sections below the break:

1. AGW is inconsistently and therefore ambiguously defined across the eight endorsement categories.  As well, it is vaguely defined in several endorsement categories.
2. The paper reports results in the abstract and body by combining dissimilar AGW definitions into consolidated endorsement buckets, and nowhere reports statistics at the higher detail level of the original eight endorsement categories.

Update 3/27/2016

Brandon Shollenberger has published a reaction to this post here.  The punchline:

So Gates, you know that part where you made a huge fool of yourself by twisting into a pretzel to criticize me on points I was completely correct about? Yeah, suck it

Which hearkens back to a comment in this article:

No consensus? Confused about what "consensus" means? Suck it Shollenberger. At least one oil company grokked it in the early 1980s. Wake up.

Nothing about this ... episode ... doesn't suck for me.  Hence "reflux" not "redux" in the title of this article.  Like slightly bad fish for dinner, it keeps coming back up.  Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

Exxon and AGU Funding

... forgive us Father IF we have sinned?

Background

This note prompted by today's post by Prof. Rabett:

Contrary to the wisdom of many, continents do shift slowly with time, and learned societies do listen to the membership.  Recently a number of members (some very prominent, others not) wrote to the American Geophysical Union asking that the AGU divorce itself from Exxon sponsorship.

This was motivated by a series of articles which exposed Exxon's sponsorship of crank tanks opposing action on climate change, indeed, rejecting the idea that humans are driving climate change in ways that are not so good for the inhabitants, people and other critters.

Eli then quotes part of a letter he received from the Executive Director of the AGU:

In addition to comments on the post itself, over the past three weeks we have received more than 100 emails, letters and phone calls, and countless tweets and comments on Facebook. And the letter referenced in the post, which calls for AGU to sever our relationship with Exxon, has since received additional signatures, growing from 71 AGU members and 33 non-members, to 136 members and 81 non-members (as of 15 March).

This feedback, from AGU members and others in our community and beyond, expressed a wide variety of views, ranging from requests to completely sever the relationship immediately to suggestions for how the relationship could be expanded and made more productive to the view that severing the relationship would violate our scientific integrity. While the social media posts and public comments have tended to be one-sided, the emails received directly from members have been more nuanced and diverse in views expressed. A major theme that emerged is a strong desire among our members to see this issue is treated thoughtfully and with integrity, and to ensure that our discussions be representative of all sides of AGU’s community.

All links in original.

Gas in a Closed System Part 1

... does it maintain a temperature gradient after it comes to rest?

Background

As an extension of the conversation on the Competing Mechanism thread, Chic and I have been swapping e-mails behind the scenes.  Over the course of the exchanges, some thought experiments have been proposed which I think warrant an article of their own, and Chic has given me permission to publish whatever portions of our private communications as grist for that mill.

As some of these thought experiments get quite long, this will be a multi-part series.  First thought experiment is an actual experiment ...

PG&E's Solar Choice Program

... does it make sense?

Background

I'll let Wikipedia do the first part of the intro for me:

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, commonly known as PG&E, is an investor-owned utility that provides natural gas and electricity to most of the northern two-thirds of California, from Bakersfield almost to the Oregon border. It is the leading subsidiary of the PG&E Corporation.

PG&E was founded in 1905 and is currently headquartered in the Pacific Gas & Electric Building in San Francisco.

It's major "competitors" are Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.  Scare quotes because, like many public utilities, PG&E and its cohorts have had virtual monopolies in the regions they serve.  Being investor-owned (publicly traded on the NYSE, ticker = PGE) and not publicly owned, it not surprisingly has a history of dubiously taking advantage of California's ballot initiative system to maximize shareholder value at the expense of its customers' choices and pocketbooks.

The Difference Between Fraud and Farce

... because apparently some people don't recognize the difference.

Update 3/24/2016

Since writing this post, I have reversed my position on the reliablilty of Cook (2013).  The short version is that I no longer stand by its methods and don't have high confidence in its conclusions.  The long version may be found here.

Background

Much has already been written about Cook et al. (2013), Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, so a brief summary should suffice.  Taken directly from the abstract, the salient findings are:

Abstract

We analyze the evolution of the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, examining 11 944 climate abstracts from 1991–2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. For both abstract ratings and authors’ self-ratings, the percentage of endorsements among papers expressing a position on AGW marginally increased over time. Our analysis indicates that the number of papers rejecting the consensus on AGW is a vanishingly small proportion of the published research.

My bold added, because it's the source of much consternation.  Unpacking those particular statistics gives this expanded tally:

 62.7% support AGW
 35.5% no position
  1.8% reject AGW
------
100.0% total

Lapse Rate on Venus, Part 2

Review of Part 1

In the first post of this series I made two plots which warrant being shown sequentially without any intervening verbosity:

Figure 1 - Observed and (simplistically) modelled temperature profiles of Venus from the surface to 150 km altitude.

Figure 2 - Calculated blackbody radiant fluxes of the temperature curves shown in Figure 1.

As I see it, some takeaways from Figure 1 are:

1. The dry adiabatic lapse rate as modelled by -g/Cp explains most of the observed temperature profile up to 60 km with reasonable fidelity.
2. Extending the lapse rate curve much past 80 km altitude results in a physically ridiculous negative absolute temperature prediction and ..
3. ... it's obviously inconsistent with observation above 60 km.
4. As drawn, the dry adiabatic lapse rate curve intercepting observation at (261 K, 60 km) predicts a surface temperature of 887 K, or 148 K higher than the observed value.
5. According to some class notes I obtained from a quick Google session, dry adiabatic lapse rate should be less than observed lapse rate in a convective atmospheric regime.  In Part 1 I goofed: the other way of saying this is that when actual absolute temperature is greater than what -g/Cp would predict, the atmosphere is destabilized from below by the relative buoyancy of the warmer air, and convection is the result.
6. Above 60 km, stuff happens which -g/Cp cannot explain, but neither should it be ignored.

Point (5), being an egregious error on my part, needs to be sorted first ...

Lapse Rate on Venus, Part 1

... does it explain why the surface is so hot?

Background

One ... occupational hazard ... of invoking Venus as the Solar System's poster-child example of (runaway) CO2-induced global warming is that some folks (properly) don't take the proposed mechanism of its lead-melting surface temperature lying down.  Sometimes, they even raise (annoyingly) good questions.  Here's Chic Bowdrie from a comment in the Competing Mechanisms article:

The surface of Venus is 740K. The temperature is 310K at 53 km. That makes the lapse rate 8.2 K/km. This is pretty close to a value of 7.4 K/km calculated from g/Cp using 8.87 g/sec2 for the gravity on Venus and 1.2 J/g-K for the heat capacity of CO2. Radiative forcing is not required to explain the temperature profile of Venus.

 A visual may be of some help:

Figure 1 - Temperature profiles for Mars, Earth and Venus taken from Astronomy Notes by Nick Strobel.

MODTRAN Radiative Atmospheric Model Part 1

Introduction

MODTRAN is a spectral band radiative transfer code first developed in the late 1980s by Spectral Sciences, Inc. in partnership with Air Force Geophysics Laboratories.  It was essentially a higher resolution (1.0 cm-1) version of AFGL's LOWTRAN code which integrated radiation transfers over 20 cm-1 wavebands.

The most recent version, 5.2, was released in 2009 and is proprietary.  A single license runs $1200, technical support and updates are extra.  Too rich for this hacker.

Older versions are in the public domain with the full FORTRAN source code available for anyone to download, compile, and execute on a local machine.  Too much hacking for this poseur.

Some smart folks at U. of Chicago have been kind enough to host a web-enabled copy of MODTRAN3 Version 1.3 12/1/95, which sports a simple and mostly intuitive GUI and outputs some pretty pictures:

Figure 1 - The graphical output for a model run with default options set.  Isn't it purty?

Yes MOST Models Run Hot

... or, "Just what the world needs, another CMIP vs. Observation blog post".

Background

Arguments vary; this one touches on some of the common ones:

Peer-reviewed pocket-calculator climate model exposes serious errors in complex computer models and reveals that Man’s influence on the climate is negligible

Anthony Watts / January 16, 2015   

What went wrong?

A major peer-reviewed climate physics paper in the first issue (January 2015: vol. 60 no. 1) of the prestigious Science Bulletin (formerly Chinese Science Bulletin), the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and, as the Orient’s equivalent of Science or Nature, one of the world’s top six learned journals of science, exposes elementary but serious errors in the general-circulation models relied on by the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. The errors were the reason for concern about Man’s effect on climate. Without them, there is no climate crisis.

Thanks to the generosity of the Heartland Institute, the paper is open-access. It may be downloaded free from http://www.scibull.com:8080/EN/abstract/abstract509579.shtml. Click on “PDF” just above the abstract.

That link is now broken; fear not, co-author Briggs generously hosts the paper for us ...

On Competing Mechanisms for the Observed Temperature Gradients Between Surface and Upper Air

... or in other words, is it the purported longwave radiative gradient due to water vapour, CO2, methane, and other so-called greenhouse gasses?  Or something else?  Is the "greenhouse" effect real, but presently saturated at present levels of GHG atmospheric concentrations?  Or is the planet self-regulating to an extent that climate sensitivity to increased CO2 concentration is smaller than the present IPCC-published range of 1.5-4.5 K/2xCO2?

I promise only strong and (sometimes) well-argued opinions, no definitive answers.

Earth's Energy Balance as Seen in Ocean Heat Uptake

 ... or, "is it plausible that the 'missing heat' has gone deeper than 2 km?"

Background

What follows is a post from WUWT in response to Chic Bowdrie about a number of different things which I reproduce here in full mainly because of the number-crunching I do to justify at least a portion of various energy imbalance estimates seen in the likes of papers such as:


Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl (2009), Earth's Global Energy Budget
Stephens et al. (2012), An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations