Norman Page @ Watts Up With That:
1 The IPCC’s Core Problem
The IPCC – Al Gore based Anthropogenic Global Warming scare has driven global Governments’ Climate and Energy Policies since the turn of the century. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted on uneconomic renewable energy and CO2 emission control schemes based on the notions that it is both necessary and possible to control global temperatures by reducing CO2 emissions. All this vast investment is based on the simple idea that as stated in the IPCC AR4 report:
“we conclude that the global mean equilibrium warming for doubling CO2, or ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’, is likely to lie in the range 2°C to 4.5°C, with a most likely value of about 3°C. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is very likely larger than 1.5°C.”
These values can only be reached by adopting two completely unfounded and indeed illogical assumptions and procedures:
1. CO2 is simply assumed to be the main climate forcing .This is clearly illogical because at all time scales CO2 changes follow temperature changes.2. Positive feedback from the other GHGs – notably water vapour and methane is then added on to the effects of CO2 and attributed to it. Obviously, in nature, the increase in CO2 and Humidity are both caused by rising temperatures. It is also impossible to have a net positive feedback because systems with total positive feed back are not stable and simply run away to disaster. We wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if it were true.
From its inception the IPCCs remit was to measure Anthropogenic Climate Change and indeed Climate Change was defined as Anthropogenic until the 2011 SREX report when the definition was changed.The climate science community simply designed their models to satisfy the political requirements of their funding agencies. – Publications ,acadmic positions,peer approval , institutional advancement and grants were unlikely to be forthcoming unless appropriate forecasts of catastrophic warming were dutifully produced. The climate models have egregious structural errors and ,what is worse, in their estimates of uncertainty the IPCC reports for Policymakers simply ignored this structural uncertainty and gave policy makers and the general public a totally false impression of the likely accuracy of their temperature forecasts.It is this aspect of the AGW meme which is especially unconscionable.
The inadequacy, not to say inanity, of the climate models can be seen by simple inspection of the following Figure 2-20 from the AR4 WG1 report.
Figure 1 from IPCC AR4
The only natural forcing is TSI and everything else is anthropogenic. For example under natural should come such things as eg Milankovitch Orbital Cycles,Lunar related tidal effects on ocean currents,Earths geomagnetic field strength and all the Solar Activity data time series – eg Solar Magnetic Sield strength, TSI ,SSNs ,GCRs ,( effect on aerosols,clouds and albedo) CHs, MCEs, EUV variations, and associated ozone variations and Forbush events. Unless the range and causes of natural variation are known within reasonably narrow limits it is simply not possible to calculate the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on climate.
The results of this gross error of scientific judgement is seen in the growing discrepancy between global temperature trends and the model projections. The NOAA SSTs show that with CO2 up 8% there has been no net warming since 1997, that ,the warming trend peaked in 2003 and that there has been a cooling trend since that time.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.datThe gap between projections and observations is seen below
Fig 2 ( From Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim (Oslo) )
2, The Real Climate Drivers.
Earths climate is the result of resonances between various quasicyclic processes of varying wavelengths. The long wave Milankovich eccentricity,obliquity and precessional cycles are modulated by solar “activity” cycles with millenial centennial and decadal time scales .These in turn interact with lunar cycles and endogenous earth changes in Geomagnetic Field strength ,volcanic activity and at really long time scales plate tectonic movements of the land masses.The combination of all these drivers is mediated through the great oceanic current and atmospheric pressure systems to produce the earths climate and weather.
To help forecast decadal and annual changes we can look at eg the ENSO PDO, AMO NAO indices and based on past patterns make reasonable forecasts for varying future periods. Currently the PDO suggests we may expect 20 – 30 years of cooling in the immediate future.Similarly for multidecadal, centenial and millennial predictions we need to know where we are relative to the appropriate solar cycles.The best proxies for solar “activity”are currently ,the Ap index, and the GCR produced neutron count. The solar indices are particularly important for their past history these can be retrieved from the 10 Be data.
