Data Suggests Climate Entering 30 Year Cooling Period, Perhaps Longer

Ongoing sea temperature readings suggest that global heat content has stabilised over the past 15 years -- despite an 8.5% rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. Ongoing observations are diverging significantly from James Hansen's IPCC model projections, as seen below. Some observers of climate data are expecting the Earth to pass through at least a 30 year climate cooling period.

The apparent "decoupling" of global heat from atmospheric CO2 concentrations -- with the clear divergence of observed temperatures from projected temperatures -- provides mounting evidence for falsification of IPCC climate models.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Dr. Norman Page, which uses empirical data to contradict IPCC climate model-based projections (via WUWT):

1. Check the Temperature Trends and Data.

Because of the Urban Heat Island effect ,the built in local variability of the NH land data and the thermal inertia of the oceans, Sea Surface Temperatures are the best measure of global temperature trends. These show that the global warming trend ended in about 2003. THERE HAS NOW BEEN NO NET WARMING SINCE 1997 -15 YEARS WITH  CO2 RISING 8.5% WITH NO GLOBAL TEMPERATURE INCREASE.  SINCE 2003 THE TREND IS NEGATIVE. 
To check the past years go to
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
and for monthly updates go to.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

The 2012 average NCDC SST anomaly thru Sept was .4438 versus the 1997 annual anomaly of  .4575.
The peak anomaly was .5207 in 2003.

An excellent site for reviewing all the basic temperature data is http://www.climate4you.com/

2. Check the current phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Here  is a plot and suggested projection based on the Hadley SST3  from Tallbloke.

Fig 2

(See:  http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/the-carbon-flame-war-final-comment/)  He says “I have put together a simple model which replicates sea surface temperature (which drives global lower troposphere temperature and surface temperatures a few months later). The correlation between my model and the SST is R^2=0.874 from 1876 FOR MONTHLY DATA.” The model is shown  with predictions to 2050 (blue) along with the HADsst3 (red).

I included Fig 2  because an approximate 60 year cycle is obvious by inspection and this coincides well with the  30 year +/- positive (warm) and  30year +/ negative (cold) phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.  Figure 2 shows warming from about 1910 -  1940-45  , cooling from then to about 1975 -.warming to about 2003-5 and cooling since then. Total warming during the 20th century was about 0.8 degrees C. For a complete discussion and review of the data relating the PDO to the other oceanic cycles and temperatures see
http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/aleo-easterbrook_ch5Relationship-multidecadal-global-temps-to-oceanic-oscillations.pdf

For latest PDO data see  http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest

IT IS CLEAR THAT WE ARE IN THE EARLY STAGES OF A THIRTY YEAR NEGATIVE  (COOLING ) PDO CYCLE.

Fig3    ( from http://www.climate4you.com/)

3. Check Solar Activity – where are we at?

The major ice age  climate cycles are controlled by the sun – earth orbital eccentricity,and the earth’s obliquity and precession. These cycles are approximately 100,000, 41,000 and 21000 years  in length respectively and are well documented in the ice core and geological record. It is useful to keep in mind that the warmest temperatures in the current interglacial occurred about 7500+/- years ago and the GENERAL TREND IS NOW A COOLING TOWARDS THE NEXT ICE AGE.

                                Fig 4  http://colli239.fts.educ.msu.edu/1999/07/11/vostok-1999/

These long term cycles are modulated by quasi cyclic trends in solar activity  which may be decadal ,centennial or millennial in length.Of particular interest in deciding where we are with regard to the solar cycles is the approximately 1000 +/- year cycle which produced succesively the Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages,the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the recent 20th century warming.

Fig 5  (From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/10/global_warming_undermined_by_study_of_climate_change/ )

The red line shows the continuing cooling trend from the Holocene optimum and the 1000yr +/- solar cycle is clearly seen.
NOTE –  A REASONABLE CASE CAN BE MADE THAT THE WARMING PEAKS OF A 60 YEAR  PDO CYCLE AND THE 1000 YEAR SOLAR CYCLE COINCIDED AT 2000 +/- AND WE ARE LIKELY ON THE COOLING SLOPE OF BOTH.
The clearest empirical measure of  solar activity is the solar magnetic field strength. On an empirical basis Livingston and Penn have shown that the decline in solar magnetic field strength suggests that sunspots could disappear by about 2015 signalling THE START OF A NEW  MAUNDER MINIMUM WITH SIGNIFICANT COOLING.
For a semi-empirical estimate of the possible cooling if a Maunder Minimum does develop see http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2001/2001_Shindell_etal_1.pdf

__WUWT Near Future Cooling

Of course no one has a perfect lock on predicting the future of climate or anything else. But there is more than sufficient doubt concerning IPCC model projections to block any large scale implementation of massive redistribution of funds -- ultimately in the $trillions of dollars -- based upon IPCC model output. Particularly since the IPCC and its sister UN organisations would be among the main beneficiaries of this extorted largesse.

In the eyes of faux environmental greens, there is no doubt that humans are bringing doom to the planet -- one way of the other. If they are forced to give up carbon hysteria doom, they will simply reach down into the muck of their own doom-seeking minds and scoop up another imaginary flavour of doom with which to terrify the dumbed down masses.

Best to keep on your toes with this lot.

A Few Ways in Which Climate Models Fail to Account for What is Happening in the Real World

Modern climate models are huge conglomerations of matched and mis-matched computer code. These models require powerful supercomputers and must ingest massive amounts of well-massaged data in order to regurgitate multi-decadal projections of global climate parameters.

But with all the sophistication and massiveness of these modern models, is it possible that they are leaving a few things out -- a few critical things which could make all the difference?

Here is a very short list of a few important omissions from modern climate models.

Climate Models Will Need to be Substantially Revised (cosmic rays and clouds)

Negative Feedbacks from Clouds (PDF)

Misconceptions in the models about Earth's radiation energy balance (PDF)

Underestimation by models of effects of ocean dynamics

Insufficient accounting of effect of ocean waves and storms

Insufficient testing of the models themselves against real world observations

There are also valid questions about the effects of black soot on climate, and a wide range of negative feedbacks which are being ignored.

Global temperature readings have diverged significantly from climate model temperature projections. This is a troubling phenomenon for more honest climate scientists. Fortunately for the field, there do not seem to be many climate scientists who fit into that category. Most of them are blissfully floating down a river in Egypt. It is a sad fact that climate modelers do not actually wish to take their art to its logical conclusion, because they are afraid of what they may find. Up until this point, carbon hysteria and greenhouse mania have been highly beneficial to any scientists and computer modeler who can tie himself to the global carbon crusade. Job security and remuneration will remain stable as long as politicians and funding agencies remain convinced that these models and modelers serve a useful political purpose.

As for the taxpayers in the developed world who are expected to foot the bill for what is turning out to be a multi-$trillion payoff to be channeled through the IPCC, governments and inter-governments have never particularly cared about them. So long as they pay their taxes, follow the rules, and don't make waves, they can be safely ignored by the higher powers.

Personally, like the wind, I have always enjoyed making waves. Particularly in the faces of arrogant policy makers, academics, and journalists who are steeped in ignorance and misinformation, and who seem determined to destroy the modern human world in order to save a fantasy utopia that never existed.

More -- Example of climate model fail: James Hansen 1988 misses target by 150%.

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO 2 increase (blue), constant increase in CO 2 emissions (green) and stagnant CO 2 emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO 2 emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) ._WUWT

As long as no one calls the hucksters on their mistaken assumptions, sloppy methods, and outright fraud, they will continue escalating the grand and destructive utopian crusade.

$100 Billion And All I Got Was This Lousy Climate Model?!?

Since 1989 the US government has spent almost $100 billion on climate studies, modeling, prediction, regulations and more. In the end, the best models developed so far do 2 - 3 X worse than chance alone! As real world temperatures continue to diverge wildly from climate model projections, US taxpayers are starting to wonder where there money is going.

Jo Nova IPCC Consensus Vote

Joanne Nova's report, Climate Money, documents $79 billion spent by the US on climate science up until the year 2009. Since then, over the past 3 + years the Obama government has expanded spending on climate science, regulation, enforcement, and all aspects of the carbon orthodoxy. Almost no area of US government, academia, or media is left untouched by the agenda of carbon hysteria.

Random Walk Examples

Scientists and institutes associated with the IPCC receive many billions of US dollars per year to accomplish results which could be achieved by a 3 year old child with a random walk generator.

in 2008 and 2010, a team of hydrologists at the National Technical University of Athens published a pair of studies comparing long-term (100-year) temperature and precipitation trends in a total of 55 locations around the world to model projections. The models performed quite poorly at the annual level, which was not surprising. What was more surprising was that they also did poorly even when averaged up to the 30-year scale, which is typically assumed to be the level they work best at. They also did no better over larger and larger regional scales. The authors concluded that there is no basis for the claim that climate models are well-suited for long-term predictions over large regions.

A 2011 study in the Journal of Forecasting took the same data set and compared model predictions against a “random walk” alternative, consisting simply of using the last period’s value in each location as the forecast for the next period’s value in that location. The test measures the sum of errors relative to the random walk. A perfect model gets a score of zero, meaning it made no errors. A model that does no better than a random walk gets a score of 1. A model receiving a score above 1 did worse than uninformed guesses. Simple statistical forecast models that have no climatology or physics in them typically got scores between 0.8 and 1, indicating slight improvements on the random walk, though in some cases their scores went as high as 1.8.

The climate models, by contrast, got scores ranging from 2.4 to 3.7, indicating a total failure to provide valid forecast information at the regional level, even on long time scales. The authors commented: “This implies that the current [climate] models are ill-suited to localized decadal predictions, even though they are used as inputs for policymaking.” _FinancialPost

Jo Nova (PDF)

This table shows US government climate related expenditures up until the year 2009. But as you can see below, President Obama has expanded climate spending steadily year to year. This is even true for agencies such as NASA, whose primary mission is supposed to be outer space exploration. Something odd happened to NASA during the 1990s, when US VP Al Gore took a special interest in the agency . . . .

The table above illustrates the year on year spending increases in various US government departments, in the Obama years.

But these tables do not reveal the amount of spending related to climate policy which may go under different names in the department budgets. They likewise do not reveal the amount of climate spending at other levels of US government, or by other member governments participating in the IPCC. And they certainly do not reveal the $trillions slated to be routed through the IPCC in redistributive ransom payoffs from the developed world to the third world.

The largest costs from climate change policies will never be measured, since they are not truly measurable. These are the "opportunity costs" and the "opportunity destruction" brought about by the prevention of vital energy, commercial, industrial, and residential projects around the world. We are entering an era of climate agenda caused energy starvation and a consequent economic decay.

This is taking place at the same time that much of the developed world is experience a demographic implosion, likely to reduce the available brainpower and manpower which will be needed for humanity to work its way out of this carbon hysteria morass.

Climate Money PDF report by Joanne Nova

Validation and Forecasting Accuracy in Models of Climate Change (PDF)

The credulous attitude of academics, journalists, politicians, and media personalities toward the IPCC "consensus" reminds me of a raunchy scene from the movie "Idiocracy." The movie theatre is packed with patrons comically enchanted and amused by a single image on the giant screen: a rather ugly arse farting.

Welcome to the Idiocracy.

Why Are Carbon Hysterics Going Cuckoo Trying to Explain A Cold and Snowy Winter as Another Sign of Climate Catastrophe?

Willis Eschenbach WUWT
It looks as if the January 2011 global temperature anomaly may be a full degree Fahrenheit below "average." And the brutal winter snow assaults against North America and Europe are probably not over yet. It was winter in the Northern Hemisphere the last time I checked, so why are carbon hysterics going out of their minds trying to explain cold and snow as a sign of catastrophic global warming?!!?

Willis Eschenbach takes a look at some of the mathematical prestidigitation upon which the global enterprise of climate catastrophism rests, and begins to suspect that the catastrophists are stuck in a dark, airless compartment of their own construction. In other words, the mathematically modeled construction of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) finds itself "locked in." It has no choice but to continue to argue -- more and more frantically as believed necessary -- that the construct is the only possible valid way to view the climate.

Certainly many of the superstars of climate catastrophe are finding themselves being discredited by ClimateGate and any number of other ongoing discoveries of dishonest, dishonourable, and unscientific shenannigans that have been perpetrated by the IPCC's first team players -- in the attempt to keep the bandwagon of CAGW orthodoxy from crashing and burning entirely.

Fortunately, there is light at the end of the highly politicised IPCC tunnel of obfuscation. Alternative means of publication are springing up for honest climate researchers, far out of the reach of the carbon hysteric overlords and overseers. Even President Doombama Obama of the USA neglected to mention climate change or promote carbon trading in his most recent State of the Union address to the nation.

The future will demand the best and most honest efforts from science, technology, economics, and politics, which the human species can produce. This is no time to get stuck in a blind box and go cuckoo.

More 29Jan11: Did government agencies lie about 2010 being the "warmest year ever?"

Climate Models Get Blindsided by Halo Effect

It's getting harder every day for climate modelers to explain why their models predict more warming than actually occurs. One of their excuses recently turned to vapour thanks to NASA GSFC scientists' work.

In their current analysis, Marshak and Varnai found that the bright sky effect was stronger on the sunlit sides of clouds or when the clouds were denser.

Because more light reflects off a denser or sunlit cloud, this suggests that the clear sky brightness near clouds is caused by extra light reflecting off the clouds sideways and then scattering again between the particles in the clear sky area before reaching the satellite. "It's essentially extra energy bouncing off the clouds that enhances the glow of the clear sky," he says.

This effect – called 3D radiative interaction – had been previously identified as a factor cranking up the sky's brightness, but the new data elevates it to the most important factor. This, in turn, means that many estimates of aerosol density may be plain wrong, because most clear sky analyses are close enough to clouds to be affected by the effect, says Marshak.

"Overestimating aerosol density means that climate models will be wrong if they assume a certain amount of aerosol is needed, when in fact it is less," says Varnai. "Given how much climate modelling relies on satellite data such as this, it is important that we figure out how to interpret it correctly." _NS

What this really means is that climate modelers do not understand the dynamics of Earth's heat balance well enough to model climate accurately. Richard Lindzen has an idea or two about where they may be going wrong.

The earth’s climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCMs) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. Climate sensitivity is on the order of 0.3°C, and such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself. _WattsUpWithThat

In other words, climate models over-predict heating because they have the feedbacks of Earth's normal heat dynamics completely backward. Modelers try to hide their mistake behind phantom particulates. But climate model predictions are diverging from real temperature observations more wildly every year. The grifters cannot obscure the real science forever -- even with clowns in the White House.

H/T Tom Nelson

New Study Revolutionises Atmospheric Science

All of those billion dollar atmospheric circulation models financed by NASA, the IPCC, and other big money funding agencies are now as good as garbage. A new study from Imperial College London is forcing a complete re-thinking of atmospheric science and the entire infant science of climatology.

New research suggests that scientists may have to radically rethink their understanding of how air circulates in the atmosphere. The study, published in the journal Science, reveals that warm, moist air rising in the mid latitudes plays an important role in the circulation of air around the globe....

'With more attention than ever before being focused on understanding our planet's climate, weather systems and atmosphere, it's important that scientists challenge their own assumptions and current theories of how these complex processes work,' commented Dr Arnaud Czaja of Imperial College London in the UK, one of the authors of the paper.....

Previously, scientists thought there were two major air circulation 'cells' in the atmosphere: one in the northern hemisphere, the other in the southern hemisphere....According to Dr Czaja, previous theories failed to take into account the important role water vapour plays in mid-latitude weather systems. By allowing for this factor, the scientists found that much more air rises in the mid-latitudes than was previously thought, and as much as half of the air rising into the upper reaches of the atmosphere comes from the mid-latitudes...

The findings have important implications for our understanding of climate change. 'As Earth's temperature rises, the amount of water vapour present in the atmosphere is extremely likely to increase as well,' the article concludes. 'Understanding how changes in temperature and humidity affect the dynamics of [...] circulation is a critical issue for better predicting mid-latitude climate in a warmer world.'

_Cordis

Of course, informed persons already understood that the huge gaps in understanding of atmospheric processes made current climate models worse than worthless. It is only those who stood to profit from climate alarmism--along with the supremely gullible and academically lobotomised--who carried the alarmist banner so belligerently.

As the infant science of climatology slowly becomes a bona fide science, a better understanding of the authentic processes of climate will emerge.

Also covered in PO

Climate Models Struggling for Credibility

Barak Obama and John McCain want to bet the future of the US economy on the credibility of climate models. How stupid is that? Pretty stupid.

A recent paper in the Journal of Hydrological Sciences examines the reliability and validity of current climate models, and finds them deficient.

An update of the predictions of climate alarmist and Al Gore mentor, James Hansen, reveals that Hansen is batting 0 for 3 in his long term climate model predictions (see graphic above).

Just how badly are climate modelers missing the mark?

The IPCC and the models on which it premises its version of reality are wrong on rainfall. They are wrong on GHG concentrations and behavior. Models are wrong on Antarctica, on Andean snowpack, on Bangladesh, on ocean temperatures, and wrong on the Northwest Passage. Roy Spencer�s research appears to have affirmed that models are demonstrably and fatally wrong on the threshold question of climate sensitivity. _PGNROvia_Icecap

It makes you wonder why Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and the rest of the Democratic Party led US Congress are willing to force the US to walk the plank wrapped in anchor chains, based upon faulty climate models? The policies of the Pelosi/Boxer insure the US will be forced to depend upon OPEC oil imports for the foreseeable future.

Why do Americans put up with this garbage from their politicians? Who elected those fools?

H/T Tom Nelson and Icecap

Things Your Climate Model Never Told You

Image Source

Not a single IPCC sanctionedclimate model predicted the current ongoing downturn in global temperatures. A rousing debate centering on whether the current extended global cooling constitutes a falsification of climate models or not is happening at a number of climate sites, including statistician Lucia's and Roger Pielke Jr's. Whether 8 years of global cooling is enough to falsify the Hansen/Gore hypothesis or not, you will never find such a thing as global cooling--even temporary cooling--in the projections of any climate model approved by the orthodoxy of holy warmers.

There has no doubt been some cyclical warming from 1979 to 1998, but it has been exaggerated by the poor station data. The state records as documented by Bruce Hall in 2007 tell the story. Scroll down to see the monthly records by state and link to other states. Most all of the heat records were set in the early half of the 1900s. A plot of Des Moines, Iowa June and July record highs by decade graph says it all. These tables and chart show that the current warming is clearly not unprecedented as alrmists claim, not even in the last century.

I believe that if we had satellite monitoring for the last 120 years, we would see the recent warming though real, fell short of that in the 1930s and that the changes are cyclical and thus primarily natural in origin. That is not to say that cities have not grown warmer as they have grown and some warming through the population growth from 1.5 to 6.5 billion since 1900 has taken place nor that we shouldn’t be better stewards of our environment, only that man-made greenhouse warming as portrayed by the agenda driven alarmists, the mainstream media and the IPCC is a fraud. __Icecap

Climate is a chaotic phenomenon. We are learning that natural climate cycles pre-dominate over any "artificial" or "anthropogenic" forcings. It is expected that natural climate cycles will trend alternately upward (warming) and downward (cooling). Other "natural" forcings--such as large volcanic eruptions, wandering of the solar system out of the galactic plane, or bombardment from outer space asteroids or comets--should also predominate easily over any anthropogenic forcings short of all-out nuclear war. Even then, nature easily contains more ultimate power.

Climate Models Fail To Match Climate Reality

Thousands of people have built their reputations and futures on the bet that Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) would drive Earth's climate for the foreseeable future. Doom for Earth meant solid gold for them and their careers. But lately, the climate picture has not been looking like doom for Earth at all. In fact, the better information we get about the climate (Argos, Jason, etc etc), the less reliable the models of anthropogenic climate doom appear.

First, climate predictions of warming across Antarctica have failed miserably. Next, temperature trends across the North Atlantic have failed to produce any "human fingerprint" on the climate of the past 150 years. Then, more and more distinguished scientists are braving the climate inquisition to point out that uncertainties in climate modeling make predictions beyond 5 years completely meaningless. Even the very basic underpinnings of NASA and IPCC climate models have come under question.

As the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation both appear to be shifting into cool phase, Earth's temperatures as measured by satellite appear to have taken an abrupt downward plunge.

All of these phenomena are inexplicable to climate models and climate modellers. Over at realclimate.org, the bureaucrats are reduced to bluff and bluster, threat and bullying. Now that their predictions have jumped the shark, and their funding for next year's season is appearing less and less certain, they can only hope that the US elects a particularly stupid president in November, who will join with the EU in enacting suicidal carbon cap legislation.

Because once the legislation is passed and signed, and the fix is in, it will be too late even for Jupiter and Neptune to stop the lemming's march downward.

H/T Tom Nelson, Green Watch

Confusing Computer Fantasies With Reality

Lately, it is not just the science journalists who are confused about what science is. More and more, the "scientists" themselves appear to be confusing hypotheses with research. Computer models are hypotheses--attempts to generate hypothetical data that can be tested by real world observation and experiment. Computer models should not be viewed as research studies. Consider:

The study results are published today in the journal Science Express. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's principal sponsor, as well as by NASA and other agencies.

"Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet may be a perilous endeavor," Tilmes says. "While climate change is a major threat, this solution could create severe problems for society." NSFNews

But what was this "research", what was this "study?"

To determine the relationship between sulfates and ozone loss, the authors used a combination of measurements and computer simulations.

They then estimated future ozone loss by looking at two geoengineering schemes--one that would use volcanic-sized sulfates, and a second that would use much smaller injections.

In other words, they did runs of a computer model. They generated hypotheses--they did not do a research study. The same "bait and switch" technique is used to breathlessly report on "climate change", "ocean acidification", dangers to coral reefs, and many other areas of environmental research. This deception becomes particularly dangerous when political decision-making is unduly influenced by these shenanigans.

If the National Science Foundation allows itself to be fooled by a vacuous "non-science science", how can the public be expected to know any better?

If you would rather see data than to self-stimulate over a computer climate fantasy, take a look at the graphs here. If university students are being taught to hand over their critical thinking functions to computer models, the scientists of the future will reflexively continue to do so. And since they are all oscillating to the same computer models, they will be in perfect consensus.

The perfect "ex cathedra" computer models. Something to look forward to.

H/T Tom Nelson

Climate Science in Disarray: Fraying at the Seems

Image Source

Recent revelations that the oceans are no longer warming, and satellite readings showing that Earth land temperatures have stabilised over the past ten years, have caused much concern among believers of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Skeptics of the catastrophic climate interpretation have begun to grow bolder in looking at alternative climate forcings besides CO2. The catastrophic branch was in need of rescue from malignant moderates. Imagine their relief, when Lancaster scientists Sloan and Wolfendale announced that they had proven that there is no sun-climate link! The celebration in orthodox circles was jubilant, and much publicized. But then, scientists began pointing out that what Sloan and Wolfendale claim to have proved, was not proven at all.

Image Source

The basic theory as promoted by Svensmark is illustrated in the image above. Galactic cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere to promote formation of low level clouds--which reflect sunlight away from earth before it can heat the oceans and land. An active solar wind will deflect many of the galactic cosmic rays so that they cannot instigate Terran cloud formation. The lack of low level clouds allows more sunlight to heat the land and seas, thus heating the Earth more. Sloan and Wolfendale (PDF) claimed to have refuted Svensmark's hypothesis, and the news media believed them. Unfortunately, the Lancaster scientists looked at the wrong type of cosmic ray, so they seem to have missed the mark.

Sloan and Wolfendale raised three critiques which supposedly discredit the CRF/climate link. A careful check, however, reveals that the arguments are inconsistent with the real expectations from the link. Two arguments are based on the expectation for effects which are much larger than should actually be present. In the third argument, they expect to see no phase lag, where one should actually be present. When carefully considering the link, Sloan and Wolfendale did not raise any argument which bares any implications to the validity or invalidity of the link.

One last point. Although many in the climate community try to do their best to disregard the evidence, there is a large solar-climate link, whether on the 11-year solar cycle (e.g., global temperature variations of 0.1°C), or on longer time scales. Currently, the cosmic-ray climate link is the only known mechanism which can explain the large size of the link, not to mention that independent CRF variations were shown to have climatic effects as well. __Source__via__Lubos

In addition, the new Solar Cycle 24 is still reluctant to come out to play. The longer cycle 24 takes to commence in full, the lower its eventual activity is expected to be. We are already expecting cycle 25 to be of extremely low activity. If the low activity begins earlier, with cycle 24, we may see global cooling of earlier onset, greater extent, and longer duration than anyone expected.

To top it off, some very public figures in climate science are beginning to defect from the up-till-now well managed "consensus herd." Kerry Emanuel, hurricane modeler and researcher, has expressed public doubts about the GCM's ability to predict severe weather activity.

The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet. __Source

More on Emanuel here

And here

More on the great unraveling here

H/T Tom Nelson


At this time the alarmist CAGW movement is the politically correct interpretation of climate science. That means that research that follows the PC line are more likely to be funded, and more likely to be published and cited by mainstream media.

As long as the research is politically correct, it is passed through the checkpoints almost automatically, with little scrutiny.

Only when the research begins to question the politically popular viewpoints does it come under the microscope, and every small blemish is magnified in an attempt to disqualify the challenging viewpoint.

Under the government of the USSR, all challengers to Lysenkoist biology were put in their place by the powers of the state. As the EU and other inter-governmental agencies gain more power, and approach the authoritarianism of the old USSR, perhaps we will see similar punishments meted out to skeptics of CAGW? It is quite likely to happen, unless a new renaissance of enlightenment thinking descends upon the university and society at large. But don't hold your breath.

Yet Another Problem with IPCC Climate Models

IPCC GCM climate models have poor results in the real world. Clearly there are many real-world climate forcings that go unaccounted for in IPCC GCMs. Yet another deficiency of IPCC models has come to light recently--biological particles that play a big role in cloud seeding.

"Our motivation was the inability of climate models to reproduce the climate of the supergreenhouse episodes of the Cetaceous and Eocene adequately," said Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. "People have tried increasing carbon dioxide in the models to explain the warming, but there are limits to the amounts that can be added because the existing proxies for carbon dioxide do not show such large amounts."

In general, the proxies indicate that the Cretaceious and Eocene atmosphere never exceeded four times the current carbon dioxide level, which is not enough for the models to create supergreenhouse conditions. Some researchers have tried increasing the amount of methane, another greenhouse gas, but there are no proxies for methane. Another approach is to assume that ocean currents changed, but while researchers can insert new current information into the models, they cannot get the models to create these ocean current scenarios.

... According to the researchers, changes in the production of cloud condensation nuclei, the tiny particles around which water condenses to form rain drops and cloud droplets, decreased Earth's cloud cover and increase the sun's warming effect during supergreenhouse events.

Image Source

Normal cloud cover reflects about 30 percent of the sun's energy back into space. Kump and Pollard were looking for a scenario that allowed in 6 to 10 percent more sunlight....When there are large numbers of CCN, there are more cloud droplets and smaller droplets, consequently more cloud cover and brighter clouds. With fewer CCN, there are fewer droplets and they are larger. The limit to droplet size is 16 to 20 microns because the droplets then are heavy enough to fall out as rain.

..."The model reduces cloud cover from about 64 percent to 55 percent which lets in a large amount of direct sunlight," Kump says. "The increased breaks in the clouds, fewer clouds and less reflective clouds produced the amount of warming we were looking for."
__Source

The ad hoc nature of climate research is quite interesting. Try this model. Don't get the result you want? Tweak this parameter. No? Try this . . . Most fascinating. You may notice the veiled attempt to claim that biological seeding of clouds is no longer meaningful in the world of man. But that is yet another unproven assumption to add to a long list of unproven assumptions employed by biased bureaucrats and others with vested interests in maintaining liberal levels of funding for global warming catastrophe research.

We know that cloud feedback is a huge deficiency of IPCC models. Most of the alarmist predictions made by James Hansen and "colleague" Al Gore are based upon unproven assumptions about cloud and water vapour feedbacks.

Soot effects, land use effects, poorly placed ground station monitors providing biased temperature measurements--all of these and more can be added to the failure of the IPCC to properly account for cloud and water vapour feedbacks. The IPCC is clearly not ready for primetime.

Supplementary:

Why Climate Model Agreement is Not That Exciting
Flaccid Peer Reviewing in Climate Science

For the unfortunate people who put their trust in the integrity of the IPCC, the only cure is a harsh dose of a wake-up kick in the rump. If they are not willing to look more closely into the morass of the interlocking inner circle of "climate consensus", they probably deserve the greater shock they will eventually receive.

Update Supplementary Materials 12 April 08:

From ClimateScience blog:

What are climate models?
Climate Models are unfalsifiable

Climate models are not science. They are highly tunable tautological pieces of computer code that too often amount to nothing more than glorified circular jerkular hoopla.

IPCC Climate Models Not Holding Up Well

Image Source

The image above shows a plot of solar cycle length against global temperature. As many of you know, we are still in solar cycle 23, waiting for solar cycle 24 to begin. As you can see from the graphic above, the longer the solar cycle, the cooler the global climate.
Current data from the Argos ocean monitoring buoys points to an ongoing cooling trend in Earth's heat content--instead of global warming.

The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90% of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But if the oceans aren't warming, then (please whisper) perhaps the models are wrong.

The supercomputer models also can't explain the interaction of clouds and climate. They have no idea whether clouds warm the world more by trapping heat in or cool it by reflecting heat back into space.___NP

A world-class MIT climatologist who possesses perhaps the highest wattage brain in the field, has already suggested that the IPCC climate models have been falsified by the last 10+ years of satellite data.

This is a time of turmoil within all fields of climate science--although you would never know it from the public front as reflected by the popular media. The orthodoxy is circling the wagons, with the unquestioning assistance of global media and national governments, inter-governments, and non-governmental lobbyist organisations.

Under a Stalinist world government, the climate orthodoxy might have a chance of pulling the wool over the global public's eyes long enough to put an irrevocable "climate change economic regime" into place. Under such an economic regime, market mechanisms would be so painfully and dysfunctionally distorted that even in the case of a significant climate cooling--equivalent to a Maunder Minimum--the ability of human science and technology to respond in a timely or effective fashion will have been hamstrung.

Top-level climate scientists are reaping significant rewards from the alarmist message. It is not in their interest to introduce any element of doubt into the scenarios. The same applies to investors and financiers who are neck-deep in climate cap and trade schemes. Even the world's number 1 polluter--China--is demanding massive technology transfers to its state-owned enterprises, as a condition for considering reducing its greenhouse gas output. Not a bad scam, if you can get in on it before it all collapses.

Update 25March08: IPCC on increasingly shaky ground
The study of the multiple drivers of Earth's climate has just barely begun. The premature identification of mainstream media conglomerates with the catastrophist extreme view of climate reveals the political underpinnings of both the media, and the catastrophist wing of climate modeling. Non-catastrophist climate mavericks--who want to study all the mechanisms of climate and climate change--have a tougher time getting financing, tenure, and publication. But that situation is subject to very rapid and radical change, as the oncoming deluge of better data begins to hit the windscreen.

Is Climatology Pseudoscience?

Not exactly a pseudoscience. Climate statistician William Briggs, specializing in forecast evaluation, explains why climatology deserves our respect, until--until it doesn't.

The short answer, I will disappoint many of you by saying, is no. Like I wrote before, climatologists are generally nice people genuinely struggling with understanding the immense complexities of the oceanic-atmospheric (and space!) system. It might be that many of them are misleading themselves by custom tailoring models to show them what they expect (or desire?) to see, but this has not reached a level where it is done with intent. Most mistakes that are made are honest ones. And it is also true that much has been learned while examining climate models. Still, while scientists are in general noble creatures, there does exists the possibility of them sliding into the abyss.

So suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external forcings, such as those caused by changes in solar output. Just suppose all this is true for the sake of argument.

Now put yourself in the place of a climatologist, one of the many hundreds, in fact, who was involved with the IPCC and so shared in that great validator, the Nobel Peace Prize*. You have spent a career devoted to showing that mankind, through various forms of naughtiness, has significantly influenced the climate, and has caused temperatures to grow out of control. Your team, at a major university, has built and contributed to various global climate models. Graduate students have worked on these models. Team members have traveled the world and lectured on their results. Many, many papers were written about their output, and so forth.

But something has gone wrong. The actual temperature, predicted to go up and up, has not cooperated and has instead stayed the same and even has gone down. What do to? Let’s take a “What would a scientist do” quiz and find out.

Your model has predicted that temperatures will go up because CO2 has, but unfortunately temperatures have gone down. Do you:

1. Abandon the model and seek a new career
2. Discover where the model went wrong; publish results admitting why and how you were wrong
3. Sit and wait: after all, the temperature is bound to increase sooner or later, hence validating your model
4. Believe that the model cannot be wrong, else so many people wouldn’t believe it, and so posit some new source that is “holding back” warming, and only if that new source weren’t there, your model would be perfect.

____William M. Briggs, Statistician

And that is where the scientist co-authors of the IPCC reports find themselves currently. The scientific approach would be to choose number 2. But statistician Briggs goes on to explain the actual choices being made by different climatologists--mostly 3 and 4.

Of course, the ongoing divergence of temperatures from IPCC and NASA models does not disprove a long-term warming trend. All it does is to call into question the current models being used by the IPCC. So what does a real scientist do, when his models--his hypotheses--fail to prove true?
H/T Green Watch
Image tip Icecap

Climate "Science"--Still Not Ready for Prime Time

Satellite data suggests that the tropospheric temperature anomaly may be inconsistent with the global surface temperature anomaly calculated from surface station temperature data.

Greenhouse theory states that CO2 exerts its effect high in the atmosphere--absorbing infrared emitted from the surface. If such atmospheric greenhouse absorption was truly the source of CAGW, why does the data not support the theory? Why the divergence between surface station data and satellite data?Some data seem to suggest that over the past 4 years much of the world's oceans have also stopped warming. Given the lack of data support for alarmist GCM models, you would think that the IPCC would encourage the exploration of alternative hypotheses--such as solar variation, alternative anthropogenic forcings, various negative feedback mechanisms affecting climate, etc.



I began as a climate skeptic questioning previously dominant "global cooling" scenarios. It seemed obvious to me that all the CO2 that humans were producing was bound to exert a warming affect on climate. Then, as the greenhouse theory of global warming heated up, I began to look more carefully at the actual quantities and multiple forcings and feedbacks involved. Although it was still obvious to me that humans were influencing some of the forcings involved in climate, it became clear that the human components of forcing could not possibly be the dominant component.

Then, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) became fashionable in the media, among scientific funding organisations, the UN etc. CAGW became the new politically correct dogma--the orthodoxy. Nothing raises my skeptical curiosity more than a dogmatic orthodoxy that tries to take over a branch of science. I began to wonder if there were any objective climatologists left? "Green science" had become PC science, and most of the grants for climate scientists were going toward the orthodox view.

The largest problem with "politically correct science" and "green science" is that they are not really science at all. They are the ideologically motivated suppression of any science that diverges from the "correct" conclusion or hypothesis. Unfortunately, realclimate.org never had a chance to be an objective science blog. From its very beginning, realclimate was forced to fight a rearguard defensive battle--motivated by a rather unscientific desire to protect status and grant funds earned by previous findings called into question by superior data analyses.

I am still looking for objective climate scientists. Steve McIntyre is certainly as objective as any human, but he is not a climate scientist, and does not have access to the big research money that the more PC "scientists" have. Roger Pielke Sr. is quite objective, and deserves wider readership. David Smith appears fairly objective. No doubt there are many more that I have yet to discover.

More Inconvenient Truths: When Models do not Match Observations

The interesting graphic above was taken from this article. Full sourcing for this and other fascinating graphics (including one posted here yesterday) is given at the above link.

Other fascinating graphs illustrating discrepancies between temperature trends in models vs. observations are given here (see figures at bottom).

What does it mean when models do not correlate well with observations?

We are therefore faced with two alternatives.

1. The models are correct and account for all relevant forcings. If so, then we must conclude that the observational data sets -- MSU, NNR and Radiosondes -- are all incorrect.

2. The models do not fully capture the multitudinous climate effects (including various feedbacks) of an increase in greenhouse gases. Since the observed surface temperature trends (ST) agree with the models, then they too must be questioned.

It seems improbable that results from satellites (MSU), NCAR/NCEP reanalysis (NNR), and Radiosondes, which agree with each other, would all be wrong. Therefore, it seems more likely that both the models and observed surface trends are problematic. Their apparent agreement may be a coincidence or perhaps reflect a “tuning” of the models to the surface temperature trends.

Source

Climate scientists will attempt to reconcile models with observations, as they should. Climate grifters, on the other hand, will deny any differences whatsoever. Their livelihood is at stake. Climate grifters must maintain a pretense of invincibility--something reputable scientists generally avoid like the plague. The grifters must claim that all debate is over, since they can only lose ground in an objective examination of the issues.

The Map Is Not the Territory

Climate Model Prediction left, vs. actual readings at right (latitude x, altitude y)

It is sometimes easy to confuse the map with the territory. One can easily become lost if he believes the territory must absolutely conform to the map he is reading. It is good to make allowances.

The media and general public do the same thing with climate models--confusing the climate models and the reality. As we have learned from Surface Stations, Climate Science, and Climate Audit, the data that the models are based upon is less than stellar. Garbage in, garbage out.

While many branches of science engage in the study of climate--geologists, ocean scientists, atmospheric scientists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, dendroclimatologists, computer modelers etc--it is the modelers who get the most attention. These are the "scientists" who predict the alarmist futures that are written up in the media and trumpeted by political opportunists such as Al Gore. But as you can see from the graphic above, the model is not the reality.

Even among the computer modelers, the "consensus" is much less than is being presented to the (mostly) gullible public.

The media and policy-makers with their own vested interests, would like for the public to live on a razor's edge of anxiety over climate. This makes their work easier and more profitable. But what is good for the media is not always good for everyone else. Think for yourself.

Hat tip Lubos Motl, by way of Green Watch.

Rethinking Climate Forecasts: IPCC Climate Models Take Hit in Credibility

Here is a fascinating Wharton Business School audit of the reliability of climate forecasting by GCM models. The image of climate modelers becomes more tarnished, the closer one looks at their methods, apparently.

In apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides “projections” and not “forecasts, the word “forecast” and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and “predict” and its derivatives occur 90 times in the body of Chapter 8. Recall also that most of our respondents (29 of whom were IPCC authors or reviewers) nominated the IPCC report as the most credible source of forecasts (not projections) of global average temperature.

....Global climate is complex. Scientific evidence on many key relationships is weak or absent; e.g., does increased CO2 in the atmosphere cause high temperatures or do high temperatures increase CO2 (e.g. Jaworowski 2007)? Measurements of key variables such as local temperatures and a representative global temperature are contentious in the case of modern measurements, because of possible artifacts such as the urban heat island effect, and often speculative in the case of ancient ones, such as those climate proxies derived from tree ring and ice-core data (Carter 2007). Finally, it is difficult to forecast the causal variables.
The already high level of uncertainty rises rapidly as the forecast horizon increases.

While the authors of Chapter 8 claim that the forecasts of global mean temperature are well-founded, their language is imprecise and relies heavily on such words as “generally,” “reasonable well,” “widely,” and “relatively” [to what?]. The report makes many explicit references to uncertainty. For example, the phrases “. . . it is not yet possible to determine which estimates of the climate change cloud feedbacks are the most reliable” and “Despite advances since the TAR, substantial uncertainty remains in the magnitude of cryospheric feedbacks within AOGCMs” appear on p. 593. In discussing the modeling of temperature, the authors wrote, “The extent to which these systematic model errors affect a model’s response to external perturbations is unknown, but may be significant” (p. 608), and, “The diurnal temperature range… is generally too small in the models, in many regions by as much as 50%” (p. 609), and “It is not yet known why models generally underestimate the diurnal temperature range.” The following words and phrases appear at least once in the Chapter: unknown, uncertain, unclear, not clear, disagreement, uncertain, not fully understood, appears, not well observed, variability, variety, difference, unresolved, not resolved, and poorly understood.
Given the high uncertainty, the naïve method for this situation would be the “no-change” model. Remarkably, nowhere does the IPCC Report address the issue of forecastability. It should have been addressed prior to spending enormous sums on complex forecasting models.

In effect, given the current state of uncertainty regarding climate, prior evidence on forecasting methods suggests that attempts to improve upon the naïve model might increase forecast error. To reverse this conclusion, one would have to produce validated evidence in favor of certain methods. Such evidence is not provided in Chapter 8 of the IPCC report.

....It is not clear to what extent the models produced by the IPCC are either based on, or have been tested against, sound empirical data. However, some statements were made about the ability of the models described in Chapter 8 to fit historical data, after tweaking of their parameters. Extensive research has shown that the ability of models to fit historical data has little relationship to forecast accuracy (See “Evaluating Methods” in Armstrong 2001.) It is well known that fit can be improved by making the model more complex. The consequence of increasing complexity to improve fit, however, is to decrease the accuracy of forecasts. The 12 authors of Chapter 8 appeared to be unaware of this principle.

....A list of the 72 violations of forecasting principles by the authors of IPCC Chapter 8 is provided on the Public Policy Special Interest Group Page at forecastingprinciples.com. The many violations provide further evidence that the authors were unaware of evidence-based principles for forecasting. If they were aware of them, it would have been incumbent on them to present evidence to justify their departures from best forecasting practice. They did not do so. We conclude that because the forecasting processes described in the Chapter overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific.

...History is filled with the poor treatment of those who attempt to introduce science into arenas where emotions are high and vested interests are threatened. Galileo springs to mind. Scientists in the West at least no longer face death when presenting their findings. Nevertheless, the scientific review system currently acts to prevent the publication of research findings that conflict with commonly held beliefs (for a review of research on this matter, see Armstrong 1997).
We recommend the use of objective evidence-based (scientific) procedures to assess the validity of global warming forecasts. Our belief is that science will win out in the long run. The problem is that we may waste enormous resources over a short-run that might last for the next few decades.

Read much more at the Source

For a closer look at this audit of the recent IPCC report, and for a particularly lively discussion in comments, go here.

None of this incriminating information is news to those who follow the more credible climate sites, such as Climate Science and Climate Audit. But for those who pliantly believe that RealClimate.org is the final word on all things climate, the future is rife with disillusionment. Many billions of dollars are at stake, in research grants, carbon credits, Al Gore movies and rock concerts, and other areas.

This is not a time to place your faith in another corrupt UN agency. Although most recent university graduates (last 10 to 15 years) are academically lobotomised, thus compromised in their ability to think independently, this is definitely a time to think for yourself.