CLOUD experiment at CERN shows that the skies were much cloudier before the industrial revolution than previously thought.
Energy Balance Climate Sensitivity
The most important parameter in determining the economic impact of climate change is the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions. Climatologist Nicholas Lewis used an energy balance method to estimate the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) best estimate at 1.45 °C from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere with a likely range [17 – 83% confidence] of 1.2 to 1.8 °C. ECS is the global temperature change resulting from a doubling of CO2 after allowing the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium, which takes about 3000 years.
A more policy-relevant parameter is the Transient Climate Response (TCR) which is the global temperature change at the time of the CO2 doubling. A doubling of CO2 at the current growth rate of 0.55%/year would take 126 years. The analysis gives the TCR best estimate at 1.21 °C with a likely range [17 – 83%] of 1.05 to 1.45 °C.
The two periods used for the analysis were 1859-1882 and 1995-2011. They were chosen to give the longest early and late periods free of significant volcanic activity, which provide the largest change in forcing and hence the narrowest uncertainty ranges. The long time between these periods has the effect of averaging out the effect of short-term ocean oscillations such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), but it does not account for millennium scale ocean oscillations or indirect solar influences.
Looks like we’ll be stuck in an age of un-enlightenment at least until the planet cools down a bit.
Tim Cullen puts us in the picture.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, in the Green Corner, the caped crusaders fighting for climate justice and A New American Dark Age.
In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools.
“It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”
The resolution passed Tuesday evening calls for the school district to get rid of textbooks or other materials that cast doubt on whether climate change is occurring and that the activity of human beings is responsible. The resolution also directs the superintendent and…
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[From: Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times]
House Republicans launched Wednesday an investigation into the 17 attorneys general pursuing fraud allegations against climate change skeptics, citing concerns about the campaign’s impact on free speech and scientific inquiry.
“Americans are entitled to express their views on matters of science and public policy even if certain groups disagree,” said a statement from the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
Therein lies the problem – or one of them. How’s that cloud modelling going for instance?
By Paul Homewood
An interesting study from Pat Michaels and David Wojick:
Computer modeling plays an important role in all of the sciences, but there can be too much of a good thing. A simple semantic analysis indicates that climate science has become dominated by modeling. This is a bad thing.
What we did
We found two pairs of surprising statistics. To do this we first searched the entire literature of science for the last ten years, using Google Scholar, looking for modeling. There are roughly 900,000 peer reviewed journal articles that use at least one of the words model, modeled or modeling. This shows that there is indeed a widespread use of models in science. No surprise in this.
However, when we filter these results to only include items that also use the term climate change, something strange happens. The number of articles is only reduced to roughly…
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Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would look to renegotiate the landmark United Nations climate change deal if he’s elected president this year.
The deal, reached in Paris in December and signed by the United States last month, treats the U.S. unfairly compared to other countries, he told Reuters in a wide-ranging interview.
MICHAEL BIESECKER May 17, 2016 WASHINGTON (AP) — The full appeals court in Washington will hear arguments in the legal fight over President Barack Obama’s plan to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, potentially accelerating the case’s path to the Supreme Court.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order Monday scheduling oral arguments on the legality of the Clean Power Plan for September 27.
When it comes to climate matters the BBC’s claims of impartiality crumble to dust.
By Paul Homewood
A major new and serious complaint has been sent to the Director General of the BBC, regarding the Corporation’s persistent bias in reporting of climate change issues. The complaint is a massive 163 pages long, and is a joint submission from ten complainants. In addition, there are several technical annexes, totalling 125 pages.
Below is the letter sent to the DG:
22nd April 2016
The Director General
180 Great Portland Street
Dear Director General,
Complaint of BBC prejudice in covering of climate change and warning of potential judicial review
We enclose a complaint from all of us about persistent partiality in the BBC’s coverage of climate change. From the outset, on the climate question the BBC has tended to reflect only one view – that of the climate science establishment who are promoting a view that man is causing significant global…
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Scafetta, N.: High resolution coherence analysis between planetary and climate oscillations.
Advances in Space Research 57, 2121-2135, 2016.
To help access and share the article, there is the following article link, which will provide free access to the article until June 9, 2016.
Two things to consider are the general idea of the existence of such a cycle, which has often been proposed, and the prediction that we are entering (to quote the paper abstract) the ‘declining phase’ of it.
The World Bank has announced a new plan which it hopes will succeed in keeping up positive momentum towards a clean energy transformation as laid down in COP21.
Predictions that a warmer climate will lead to more rain for some but longer droughts for others might be wrong, according to a study of 12 centuries worth of data. The study, published today in science journal Nature, found there was no difference between 20th-century rainfall patterns and those in the pre-industrial era.
The findings are at odds with earlier studies suggesting climate change causes dry areas to become drier and wet areas to become wetter.
The North Atlantic Ocean played a key role in the last great tipping point in Earth’s climate system, pioneering new research has shown. An international research team has discovered ground-breaking new reasons why large continental ice-sheets first grew in North America and Scandinavia during the late Pliocene Epoch era, 2.7 millions of years ago.
A George Mason University survey of 4,092 members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) on climate change attitudes in the meteorological community has just been released.
It shows fairly general acceptance of the view that climate change is happening, that it is at least partly due to humans, and that we can mitigate it somewhat by our energy policies. Fully 37% of those surveyed (including me) consider themselves “expert” in climate science.
On January 8, 2014, the White House posted a controversial video claiming that global warming causes more severe winter cold. Called “The Polar Vortex Explained in 2 Minutes,” it featured the director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), claiming that a “growing body of evidence” showed that the “extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States” at the time was “a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”
JunkScience.com has turned up some research with a new way of looking at natural climate variations here.
Climate variations analyzed 5 million years back in time
The key phrase is…
Even though we do not know the climate variations in detail so far back…
But details matter. The media release is below.
Climate variations analyzed 5 million years back in time
UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – NIELS BOHR INSTITUTE
When we talk about climate change today, we have to look at what the climate was previously like in order to recognise the natural variations and to be able to distinguish them from the human-induced changes. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have analysed the natural climate variations over the last 12,000 years, during which we have had a warm interglacial period and they have looked back 5 million years to see the major features of the Earth’s climate. The research shows that not only is the weather chaotic, but the Earth’s climate is chaotic and can be difficult to predict. The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature Communications.
The Earth’s climate system is characterised by complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, landmasses and the biosphere (parts of the world with plant and animal life). Astronomical factors also play a role in relation to the great changes like the shift between ice ages, which typically lasts about 100,000 years and interglacial periods, which typically last about 10-12,000 years.
Climate repeats as fractals
Erl Happ explains: To understand how climate evolves we have to comprehend the ‘ozonosphere’.
In the 1920’s the inventor of the Dobson Spectrometer designed to measure ozone in the atmosphere, Gordon Dobson, quickly discovered that total column ozone maps surface pressure. Low pressure cells generated in high latitudes have fewer molecules in the atmospheric column because the upper portion is ozone rich, ozone absorbs infrared radiation from the Earth and the upper air is therefore more rarefied. The reduction in density aloft fully, and in fact over-compensates, for the coldness and density of the air at the surface. By contrast High pressure cells are dense above and relatively less dense below because they originate in the warmer ozone poor mid latitudes.
The ozone content of the air varies on all time scales.
Because the distribution of ozone is a secondary determinant of atmospheric pressure (along with the absorption of radiant energy from the sun as the primary determinant) its distribution is allied to wind…
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It looks like no job is immune to outsourcing, not even climate scientist jobs in Australia. The country’s science bureaucracy is considering having all climate modeling work done in Britain after announcing the firing of some 350 employees, including 100 climate scientists.
Alex Wonhas, executive of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) told Australian lawmakers the science agency “was considering contracting some work to counterparts in the British Met Office,” The Hepburn Advocate reported Wednesday.
Ian Wilson has just blogged this post, which should be a bit of a showstopper in the climate debate, but I expect it’ll be studiously ignored by mainstream climate scientists and lukewarm climate-sceptic blogs. By doing that, they’ll make themselves and their pet CO2 paradigm increasingly irrelevant to scientific progress. Key thing to note is that our work here at the talkshop and in PRP means we can now predict these quasi-cyclic natural variations. Over to Ian.
Abreu et al.  wrote:
“The parameter that best represents the role of the solar magnetic field in deflecting cosmic
rays [and hence, the overall level of solar activity] is the solar modulation potential , which can be derived from either the 10Be or the 14C production rates.”
“….spectral analysis [of the solar modulation potential over the last ~ 9400 years] identifies a number of distinct periodicities (Stuiver & Braziunas 1993), such as 88 yr (Gleissberg), 104 yr, 150 yr, 208 yr (de Vries), 506 yr, 1000 yr (Eddy), and 2200 yr (Hallstatt) [cycles]…”
The top figure in the following diagram shows the Fourier transform of the variation in the solar modulation potential time series over the last 9400 years [Abreu et al. 2012]. This figure shows that potential has distinct spectral peaks at 88 years (Gleissberg Cycle), 104 years, 133 years, 150 years, 210 years (de Vries Cycle), 232 years, 356 years and 504 years.
Below this is a second figure showing amplitude spectrum of variations in the North American temperature time series over the last ~ 7000 years. The temperature time series is obtained from tree ring data obtained from Bristle Cones on the Southern Colorado Plateau [for the details of the source of this data see: Could This Be The Climate Smoking Gun? and Salzer and Kipfmeuller (2005). The lower figure shows clear spectral peaks at approximately 88, 106, 130, 148, 209, 232, 353 and 500 years.
It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming ‘slowdown’ or ‘hiatus’, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented in a new commentary in Nature Climate Change by Fyfe et al. contradicts these claims.