Reader Alex Henney sends some comments on The Royal Society/National Academy of Sciences Report on Climate Change that he sent to the President of the Royal Society and the British authors of the report.1
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Richard Feynman
1. The document continues to espouse models which are flawed, see p. 5, even though the final draft of the 2013 SPM commented “Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years”. John Christy2 compared the performance of 39 climate model that were used in AR5 over the period 1975 to 2012 with measured temperature data. The models over back-cast temperature significantly in a range 0-0.7oC.
Global CMIP5 RCP45 39 models, annual Tas reference base 1979-1983, 7-yr running average
In 2007 a team of climate scientists from the Met Office wrote a paper “Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model” using their new modeling system which forecast:-
- There would be 0.3°C warming over the decade 2004-2014
- At least half of the years after 2009 would be warmer than the record year of 1998.
Vicky Pope of the Met Office gave a talk on these predictions, stating that " these are very strong statements about what will happen over the next 10 years". These predictions are wrong - there has been no warming at all since 2004; none of the years since 2009 have broken the record of 1998 according to HADCRUT3 data.
The failure of the models is very significant.3 According to the IPCC and Royal Society they are based on an understanding of the physics, chemistry, and biology of the climate. The failure demonstrates that the IPCC scientists do not understand the science of the climate. The failure also indicates that climate model forecasts are of no value.
If we were dealing with real science, and not politicized pseudo science reliant on public subsidies with both scientific and political face involved, the models would be scrapped and scientists would be looking around to attempt to explain the reality.
2. It fails to explain the pause. Page 12 is largely sophistry. So far 10 speculative stories have been advanced to explain the pause of which 9 are by warmists wanting to rescue the CO2 story.
3. It does not refer to the fudge over climate sensitivity, which is perhaps the key number in WG1’s material. The GWPF report, “A sensitive matter: how the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming” by Nicholas Lewis and Marcel Crok, shows how the IPCC massaged the presentation of the increasing number of observational estimates of lowering climate sensitivity as opposed to estimates derived from climate models. For the first time the IPCC avoided giving a best estimate for climate sensitivity – perhaps the most important number in the report - citing “a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”. Lewis and Crok observe that “AR5 lowers the 10–90% range for TCR4 of 1–3°C established in AR4 to a ‘likely’ range of 1–2.5°C ...we suggest that an observationally-based ‘likely’ range for TCR could reasonably be 1–2°C, with a best estimate of 1.35°C. The average TCR for global climate models is much higher, at just under 2°C. These lower, observationally-based estimates for climate sensitivity and TCR suggest that considerably less warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the future than the model projections imply”. Lewis and Crok used the data in AR5, which the IPCC authors danced around.
The climate models on average overestimate warming by 50% over the last 35 years; so their TCR estimates are inflated; so their forecasts are useless.
4. The report dismisses the significance of the sun by focusing on its irradiance, which varies little over the solar cycle, p. 7. NASA has recently published a press release commenting:
There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. A new report issued by the National Research Council (NRC), “The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate,” lays out some of the surprisingly complex ways that solar activity can make itself felt on our planet
Jasper Kirby, the head of the CLOUD project at CERN, gave a presentation “Cosmic rays and climate – to be or not to be”, available on wattsupwiththat on 6/11/13. The IPCC carefully avoids dealing seriously with the sun because it would spoil the CO2 storyline; the Royal Society/National Academy are following suit.
5. It is factually incorrect to claim that “The speed of the current climate change is faster than most of the past events” – the rate of temperature rise in the first decades of the last century was similar to that of the last two, see exhibit on p. 11.
6. Sea ice in the Arctic increased in 2013. But so what? In his seminar at the House of Commons on February 2012 Richard Lindzen noted the observations of the US Weather Bureau in 1922:
The Arctic is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
As Lindzen commented:
In fact, the Arctic is notoriously variable. Similar statements are available for 1957, and the US submarine Skate surfaced at the North Pole on 11 August 1958; so much for ‘unprecedented’! Whilst there really doesn’t appear to be that much going on, anecdotal information can be more dramatic.
7. When I read (p18) that scientists are very confident that earth will warm over the next century, when they have got the last 16 or so years wrong and numbers of solar physicists are predicting cooling, I am reminded of the saying in the Koran “He who professes to forecast the future lies, even if correct.” One would have thought that after the failure of recent forecasts, the Royal Society/National Academy would be more cautious.
8. I draw your attention to the Climate Change Statement Review Workshop of 8/1/14 which the American Physical Society undertook. This is grown up scientific discourse, not the glib dogma the Royal Society promotes. The Society has raised a number of trenchant questions about the pause, climate sensitivity, model accuracies, sea ice and the basis of confidence in identifying a possible small anthropogenic effect among others in influencing the climate.
On the principle of “follow the money” can it be that the Royal Society’s views reflect 1) that most of its climate members are on the public payroll directly or indirectly (along with Grantham’s payroll), and 2) the Society gets 68% of its income from HMG which turns it into a quasi quango. Or am I being too cynical?
An important point to recognize is that most – if not all – of the named British and all of the US authors have been involved in IPCC ARs. So the document is merely the same hymn sheet, but badge engineered. The situation is similar to that in 2005 when the Royal Society wrote a letter to the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs5 when it was considering The Economics of Climate Change. The letter could have been written by the IPCC’s press office. It claimed that “The IPCC is the world’s leading authority on climate change and its impacts” and its “work is backed by the worldwide scientific community”. It went on to rebut what it called “misleading arguments put forward by the opponents of climate change.” Its position is perhaps not surprising given that the letter was prepared by a group co-led by John Houghton FRS who played a leading role in the IPCC from 1988-2002. Given that the uninformed media might misinterpret the document as being the independent fruits of leading scientific minds, I suggest this is not a particularly praiseworthy piece of optics.
The consequence of the demonisation of carbon dioxide by the Met Office, Royal Society and others has been that for no useful purpose we have messed up our electric market and have generation policies which will increase costs significantly but will achieve absolutely nothing to mitigate CO2 emissions, while the Chinese, Indians, and others (including the Germans and Dutch) build coal stations galore. Our policies are to:
- Build the most expensive nuclear plant in the world at £16bn for 3200MW (for which one could build 27,000MW of gas turbines). The headline contract price of £92.5/MWh (compared with the current wholesale price of about £50/MWh) is misleading because the price is indexed. By the time the plant is finished the price will be about £120/MWh which compares with the current wholesale price of electricity of about £50/MWh.
- Support residential solar panels in our gloomy climate with subsidies which make nuclear look cheap.
- Support expensive (£95/MWh) - and for offshore, very expensive (£155/MWh) – wind. But these figures are only part of the story –there will be additional costs of up to £20/MWh for system balancing and additional transmission. Furthermore, in a system such as ours with little hydro, the vagaries of wind output have to be balanced by ramping gas or coal plant up and down. This reduces their thermal efficiency hence increases their CO2 emissions. Consequently wind farms do not achieve the mitigation of CO2 they claim on the tin.
- Throw money at wood chips from new cut trees which are imported at considerable cost from the US. But cutting down trees to burn them actually increases CO2 emissions.
I suspect that in the not too distant future if the "pause" continues, the signatories to the report, and past FRSs and PRSs who have actively and politically promoted anthropogenic climate warming/change will be thought to have discredited the Royal Society. Then members may remember the advice of its member the late New Zealander Charles Fleming, a distinguished ornithologist and avian palaeontologist; “Any body of scientists that adopts pressure group tactics is endangering its status as the guardian of principles of scientific philosophy that are worth keeping.” I suggest The Royal Society should leave pseudo science and “scientific” advocacy to green NGOs and politicians who know no better.
Notes
1 Slightly edited to tidy it up.
2 Christy is Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and is Alabama’s State Climatologist. He was a lead author in the 2001 IPCC Report and a “key” or “contributing” author on others. The University’s satellite based temperature dataset is one of the 5 data sets that are widely used. For his work on its development he received a Special Award by the American Meteorological Society and NASA’s Medal Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
3 “Bounding Greenhouse Gas Climate Sensitivity for Use in Regulatory Decisions”, A Report of the Right Climate Staff Research Team, which comprises 25 retired Apollo Program scientists and engineers. They claim they are “highly trained and experienced in making critical decision on complex issues where human safety is involved, and have the requisite education and experience to comprehend the critical issues in Anthropogenic Global Warming research.” They point out that the have experience in analyzing complex systems and in using computer models. But they lay stress again and again on using validated models – “In God we trust, all others bring data”. They note that although the climate models are not validated, they are the basis for the IPCC’s predictions – to which they give no credence.
The lead author commented “I believe in computer models. My whole career was about using computer models to make life or death decisions. In 1963 I had to use them to calculate whether, when the lunar module landed on a 12 degree slope it would fall over or not – and design the landing gear accordingly. But if you can’t validate the models – and the IPCC can’t – then don’t use them.”
4 Transient Climate Response, a measure of warming from a doubling of CO2 over a 70 year period.
5 P. 295 et seq, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we24.htm.