Articles Tagged "Doug L. Hoffman"

The debate over anthropogenic global warming—a theory propounded by the UN IPCC—is often portrayed as an argument between deniers and true believers. The deniers supposedly claim that there is no global warming, man made or otherwise, and that the whole theory is a plot by left-wing agitators and closet socialists bent on world domination. The true believers, conversely, accept every claim of pending future disaster uttered by scientists and activists alike. As with most controversies both extreme positions are wrong and the truth lies somewhere in-between. As a scientist, I have studied the evidence and find the case for imminent, dangerous, human caused global warming unconvincing—here is why I am an AGW skeptic.

According to www.dict.org, a skeptic is “one who is yet undecided as to what is true; one who is looking or inquiring for what is true; an inquirer after facts or reasons”.* This is a much more accurate description of the stand taken by Al and myself in our book, The Resilient Earth. Specifically, I am skeptical of the claim that human produced carbon dioxide will have the dramatic effect on Earth's temperature projected by the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers. To understand why I have reached this conclusion requires starting with some basic science.

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A new report in Science underscores what many scientists have been saying for years, it's water vapor, not CO2, that has been driving global temperature changes in recent decades. Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000, slowing the rate of global surface temperature increase over the past 10 years. It also seems likely that water vapor in the stratosphere increased between 1980 and 2000, causing surface temperatures to warm by an extra 30% during the 1990s. These findings show that stratospheric water vapor represents an important driver of decadal global surface climate change, yet the IPCC crowd continues to focus on CO2.

The new report, “Contributions of Stratospheric Water Vapor to Decadal Changes in the Rate of Global Warming,” by Susan Solomon et al. states that from 2000 to 2009 diminished water vapor levels in the upper atmosphere depressed global warming by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% compared to estimates neglecting this change.

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With all the predictions of short term climate catastrophes proffered by global warming alarmists it is hard to look forward to a future time on Earth. What does the future hold a thousand, ten thousand, a million years from now? Science has some predictions about that as well, though the news media have not picked up on them. What environmental changes await us on the long road ahead?

The Northern Hemisphere has been hammered by the coldest winter in decades. Chinese provinces prepared to introduce power rationing as electricity supplies lagged behind demand amid harsh winter weather. In the UK things have been so bad that Keith Mitchell, the leader of the Oxfordshire County Council, accused county residents of lacking the “British spirit that defeated Hitler” in the wake of the freezing weather. Just to confuse things, a new report in report in Science says NASA's GISS proclaimed “2009 Hottest Year on Record in Southern Hemisphere.”

In the US, AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi reports: “The coldest start to an El Niño winter since the '70s, in the wake of the thaw, may have a top 10-15 cold February nationwide.” Outlook India's headline proclaimed “North India Reels Under Cold Wave, 154 Dead.” There were reports of frozen sheep in Scotland, and snow fell Down Under during the Australian summer.

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One well accepted definition of the “Three Pillars of Science” lists the three as theory, experimentation and computation. For climate science this translates into climate theory, gathering climate data, and climate modeling. The three pillars are due a update in this post Copenhagen, post Climategate world. After reviewing the past year's crop of discoveries and disclosures, it seems that all three pillars are still wobbly at best—even without questionable conduct on the part of warm-mongering researchers.

No doubt about it, it has been a hard year for the global warming true believers—a frigid cold winter, Climategate, and faltering political support, all capped off by the yawn-in at Copenhagen. Among the public, global warming fatigue continues to spread while global warming boosters become ever shriller. But what about the actual science behind the global warming theory? In The Resilient Earth we based our evaluation of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) on the three pillars of climate science given above. This article revisits the evaluation of each pillar starting with the state of climate theory.

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There have been a number of strange theories regarding the conditions deep within Earth's interior circulating around the internet. Claims that solar flares will cause nuclear reactions deep below our feet are perhaps the most ludicrous, but fairly easy to dismiss. More timely, perhaps, is the sudden conversion of global warming guru Al Gore into a geothermal energy booster. Evidently Gore thinks it's bad to drill for oil, but good to drill for heat. TV documentaries threaten mega-volcano and talk about mantle plumes underneath Hawaii, but just what does science tell us about our planet's interior?

Gore, trying to explain geothermal energy to Conan O’Brien, stated that geothermal energy is plentiful because the Earth’s core temperature is millions of degrees. That's not quite accurate, the inner core calculates out at about 4100 to 4200°C. Kei Hirose, from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Tokyo Institute of Technology, points out that the rocks and minerals of the deep mantle are not accessible in nature, except those occurring infrequently as inclusions in diamond. Writing in a perspective article in the January 8th issue of Science, Dr. Hirose explains that a paper by Tetsuo Irifune et al. in that same issue could have profound implications for predicting the properties and dynamics of the deep mantle.

“Recent such experimental investigations, as well as theoretical calculations, have suggested that the properties of lower-mantle minerals vary with increasing depth much more than was previously thought,” states Hirose. Irifune et al. report changes in mantle composition for conditions corresponding to depths below 1100 km involving iron (Fe) partitioning between the two main lower-mantle constituents, iron-magnesium silicate perovskite (Pv) and iron-magnesium oxide (ferropericlase, Fp).

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A number of recent papers analyzing the nature of climate models have yielded a stunning result little known outside of mathematical circles—climate models like the ones relied on by the IPCC contain “irreducible imprecision.” According to one researcher, all interesting solutions for atmospheric and oceanic simulation (AOS) models are chaotic, hence almost certainly structurally unstable. Further more, this instability is an intrinsic mathematical property of the models which can not be eliminated. Analysis suggests that models should only be used to study processes and phenomena, not for precise comparisons with nature.

The ability to predict the future state of the Earth climate system, given its present state and the forcings acting upon it, is the holly grail of climate science. What is not fully appreciated by most is that,in the prediction of the evolution of that system, we are severely limited by the fact that we do not know with arbitrary accuracy the evolution equations and the initial conditions of the system. By necessity climate models work with a finite number of equations, from initial data determined with finite resolution from a finite set of observations. These limitations are further exacerbated by the addition of structural instability due to finite mesh discretization errors (the real world isn't divided into boxes 10s or 100s of kilometers on a side; the impact of changing mesh size has been well documented in a number of recent studies).

In an essay adapted from his 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting keynote address, James J. McCarthy has produced a fairly concise statement of the anthropogenic global warming believer's world view. After a self-serving review of climate science history, McCarthy trots out the usual litany of climate change troubles: increased cyclones, rain and floods, rising sea levels and, of course, those pesky tipping points. The tone of the article is set early on, when research is cited stating that mankind's impact on Earth is “sufficiently profound to declare that we have transitioned from the Holocene era of Earth history to the Anthropocene.”

McCarthy, professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard and outgoing president of the AAAS, has done an admerable job in summarizing the main stream, “concensus view” version of climate science. His article, titled “Reflections On: Our Planet and Its Life, Origins, and Futures,” appeared in the December 18, 2009, issue of the AAAS journal Science. He begins with a quick rundown of how the CO2 centric AGW theory developed—a history that could have been cribbed from The Resilient Earth.

Once again the leaders in the fight against anthropogenic global warming have come together to hold an international fear fest, supposedly to save mankind from the ravages of climate change—or to save the planet from mankind, depending on who you talk to. The predictable result: more strident warnings of disaster, pledges of more far reaching actions from politicians, and no real change. After jetting into Denmark, expending the carbon equivalent of more than 200,000 trees, the carping climate crowd has jetted back home until the next act of this farce takes place in Mexico City in 2010.

The traveling circus that is the anti-AGW movement began with the 1992 Rio climate summit, which set the tone for all subsequent global warming passion plays. “It is a tale … full of sound and fury; signifying nothing,” to quote from Macbeth. Kyoto, in 1997, kept the tradition alive by also being long on promises but falling short on real world results. It, like Copenhagen, was rescued from total failure by producing a weak final agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, mostly due to last-minute intervention by then American Vice President Al Gore.

The Kyoto Protocol was an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The major feature of the Kyoto Protocol was that it sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These amounted to an average of five per cent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012. The Clinton-Gore administration never submitted Kyoto's agreement for ratification, the US Senate having denounced its terms 95 to 0. The US was not alone in not ratifying the treaty, most of the signatories have managed to procrastinate for 12 years.

While climate skeptics have gleefully pointed to the past decade's lack of temperature rise as proof that global warming is not happening as predicted, climate change activists have claimed that this is just “cherry picking” the data. They point to their complex and error prone general circulation models that, after significant re-factoring, are now predicting a stretch of stable temperatures followed by a resurgent global warming onslaught. In a recent paper, a new type of model, based on a test for structural breaks in surface temperature time series, is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. This statistical model predicts no temperature rise until 2050 but the more interesting prediction is what happens between 2050 and 2100.

David R.B. Stockwell and Anthony Cox, in a paper submitted to the International Journal of Forecasting entitled “Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts,” have applied advanced statistical analysis to both Australian temperature and rainfall trends and global temperature records from the Hadley Center's HadCRU3GL dataset. The technique they used is called the Chow test, invented by economist Gregory Chow in the early 1960s. The Chow test is a statistical test of whether the coefficients in two linear regressions on different data sets are equal. In econometrics, the Chow test is commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break.

Recent claims by climate change alarmists have raised the possibility that terrestrial ecosystems and particularly the oceans have started loosing part of their ability to absorb a large proportion of man-made CO2 emissions. This is an important claim, because currently only about 40% of anthropogenic emissions stay in the atmosphere, the rest is sequestered by a number of processes on land and sea. The warning that the oceans have reached their fill and their capacity to remove atmospheric CO2 is accompanied by the prediction that this will cause greenhouse warming to accelerate in the future. A new study re-examines the available atmospheric CO2 and emissions data and concludes that the portion of CO2 absorbed by the oceans has remained constant since 1850.

Wolfgang Knorr from the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, has published a study in Geophysical Research Letters entitled “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?” Knorr combines data from ice cores, direct atmospheric measurements, and emission inventories to show that the fraction of human emitted CO2 that remains in the atmosphere has stayed constant over the past 160 years, at least within the limits of measurement uncertainty. Here is the paper's abstract:

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