Record cold from global warming causing 'polar vortex' debunked

The global warming apologists are struggling to explain the record cold on global warming due to an alleged slowdown in the jet stream keeping a 'polar vortex' alive. However, a recent paper finds no evidence of any unusual or unprecedented changes in the latitude or speed of the North Atlantic jet stream over the past 142 years since 1871. Another paper confirms there is no evidence that climate change has slowed the jet stream or increased frequency of jet stream blocking.

Once again, the global warming apologists are caught out again in the face of real-world data. Dr. Roy Spencer sums it up in a post today:

Does Global Warming Theory Predict Record Cold?
January 6th, 2014 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. 

NO.

Related:

New paper debunks claims that 'Arctic amplification' causes extreme weather

A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters debunks claims that "Arctic amplification" is causing an increase of extreme weather in North America or the North Atlantic, finding such claims are "an artifact of the methodology" and not real. The paper finds no evidence of an increased frequency of jet stream blocking or a decrease of jet stream speed, a result corroborated by a recent paper finding no significant changes of the jet stream over the past 140 years. The paper debunks claims by climate alarmists such as Heidi Cullen [and Jennifer Francis] that "Arctic amplification" is causing a "constipated jet stream" leading to increased extreme weather in North America.

Other related links via Climate Depot:

Scientists reject claims of record cold being caused by ‘global warming’ – Time Mag. blamed ‘polar vortex’ on ‘global cooling’ in 1974 – Special Report

Time Magazine Goes Both Ways On The Polar Vortex: ‘In 1974, Time Mag blamed the cold polar vortex on global cooling’ — In 2014: ‘Time Magazine blames the cold polar vortex on global warming’ (Via Real Science)

U.S. News: ‘Is Climate Change Causing the ‘Polar Vortex’? Article rebuts: Claim ‘appears unsupported by the observations’

Wash Post Throws Cold Water on Idea that Global Warming Is Causing Record Cold: ‘It’s still heavily debated…Elizabeth Barnes of Colorado State disputed the link’

Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue rejects claim that global warming is causing record cold: ‘This polar vortex episode is the global warming media’s most recent ‘Snapchat’ message: after a few seconds, explanation just dissolves’

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer refutes claims that global warming is causing record cold: ‘Polar vortices have been around forever. They have almost nothing to do with more CO2 in the atmosphere’

Is Climate Change Causing the 'Polar Vortex'?
A blast of severe cold is sweeping across the country

By TERESA WELSH January 6, 2014 US News & World Report

A blast of severe cold is sweeping across the country.

Large portions of the United States are currently experiencing the effects of a "polar vortex," an area of low pressure bringing dangerously cold air over the country. Temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast are below zero in many areas, with wind chills as low as -50 degrees.

Temperatures in many cities are expected to hit record lows, 30 to 50 degrees below typical averages. Thousands of flights have been cancelled, and schools across the country have been closed.

Jennifer Francis, a research professor with Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, said that such extreme weather events can be caused by global warming. Despite the fact that the extreme weather is bitter cold in this case, warming of the arctic can have such an effect because it changes the flow of the jet stream. Sea ice melts, leaving more water surface area exposed to absorb sunlight, leading to further warming. [Dr. Judith Curry on Jennifer Francis' credibility and Dr. Elizabeth Barnes' rebuttal of Francis' claims]

"Extra heat entering the vast expanses of open water that were once covered in ice is released back to the atmosphere in the fall," Francis said. "All that extra heat being deposited into the atmosphere cannot help but affect the weather, both locally and on a large scale."

The arctic is warming about twice as quickly as the rest of Earth, according to Francis, and this shrinking temperature difference slows down the jet stream. It then gets stuck, leaving weather patterns lingering longer than usual.

Yet a study by Colorado State Professor Elizabeth A. Barnes suggests that this explanation oversimplifies the impacts of Arctic warming, as well as the subsequent impacts on severe weather:

We conclude that the mechanism put forth by previous studies … that amplified polar warming has led to the increased occurrence of slow-moving weather patterns and blocking episodes, appears unsupported by the observations.

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New paper finds glaciers have been melting naturally at the same rate since 1850, no acceleration predicted

A paper published today in The Cryosphere finds global glaciers melted at the same rate in the first half of the 20th century as in the second half. This implies no man-made influence on glacier melt, since the melting began naturally at the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 with "safe" CO2 levels, and continued at the same rate throughout the 20th century with no acceleration. The authors predict glacier mass loss will continue at the same rate in the 21st century and have "relatively weak dependence" on future greenhouse gas emissions. 



Since glacier mass loss is the largest single cause of sea level rise, this explains why there has been no acceleration of sea level rise over the past 100-200 years and why sea level rise is also unlikely to accelerate in the 21st century. 



The lack of any acceleration in glacier mass loss and sea level rise in the 20th century despite an exponential rise in greenhouse gases proves that both of these processes are primarily natural and unrelated to CO2. During prior interglacials, most glaciers disappeared, as well as the entire ice sheet of Greenland and West Antarctica, all entirely natural and with "safe" levels of CO2. There is no evidence the current interglacial is any different. 



Excerpts:



Glaciers have lost a substantial fraction of their mass during

the past century (Cogley, 2009; Marzeion et al., 2012), with

the globally averaged mass balance turning negative probably

around 1850 (Leclercq et al., 2011).Within the 20th century,

mass loss of glaciers was likely the largest single cause

of sea level rise, followed by thermal expansion of the ocean,

mass loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and

changes in terrestrial water storage (Gregory et al., 2013).

Even though the rise of global mean air temperature accelerated

in the 20th century, the mass loss rate of glaciers during

the second half of the 20th century was not higher than

during the first half of the century (Leclercq et al., 2011;

Marzeion et al., 2012).



Observed sea level rise during the 20th century can only be

explained if the glaciers’ contribution did not develop in parallel

to global mean temperature, but was high already in the

first half of the 20th century (Gregory et al., 2013). Our result

that changes in glacier hypsometry play a significant role in

shaping the glaciers’ response to climate change, in particular

that loss of low-lying surface area (i.e., terminus retreat to

higher elevations) decreases the sensitivity is critical for explaining

the strong glacier-mass losses during the first half of

the 20th century.



Conclusions



We have used a model of glacier response to climate change

to quantify the equilibrium sensitivity of glaciers, and to distinguish

the respective contributions of temperature and precipitation

anomalies. Because of the geographic distribution

of glaciers, the temperature and precipitation change experienced

by glaciers is far greater than the global mean. Precipitation

anomalies projected for the future dampen the mass

loss of glaciers, but their effect is strongly limited by the increasing

temperatures, which increases the liquid fraction of

precipitation on the glaciers.



We find that glacier-mass loss during the 21st century is

to a significant degree a response to 20th century climate

change. This partly explains the relatively weak dependence

of 21st century mass loss on future greenhouse gas emissions.

A second reason is that the complete loss of individual

glaciers imposes a strong restriction to the rates of mass loss

in a warming climate. Results from methods not accounting

for finiteness of ice mass available for melting, for example,

by extrapolating current rates of mass loss, or even increases

of rates of mass loss (Meier et al., 2007), will therefore yield

substantial overestimates.



Thirdly, changes of glacier hypsometry reduce the response

of glaciers to warming, and need to be considered

in explaining the observed rates of mass loss during the 20th

century and the projected rates for the 21st century. Figure 9

summarizes our quantification of this effect. We find that the

retreat of glacier termini to higher altitudes is a strong negative

feedback, which is becoming weaker as more glaciers

disappear completely.

The Cryosphere, 8, 59-71, 2014 www.the-cryosphere.net/8/59/2014/ doi:10.5194/tc-8-59-2014

Feedbacks and mechanisms affecting the global sensitivity of glaciers to climate change
B. Marzeion¹, A. H. Jarosch², and J. M. Gregory^3
1Center of Climate and Cryopshere, Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Innsbruck, Austria
²Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
³NCAS-Climate, University of Reading, Reading, and Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK
Abstract. Mass loss by glaciers has been an important contributor to sea level rise in the past, and is projected to contribute a substantial fraction of total sea level rise during the 21st century. Here, we use a model of the world's glaciers to quantify equilibrium sensitivities of global glacier mass to climate change, and to investigate the role of changes in glacier hypsometry for long-term mass changes. We find that 21st century glacier-mass loss is largely governed by the glacier's response to 20th century climate change. This limits the influence of 21st century climate change on glacier-mass loss, and explains why there are relatively small differences in glacier-mass loss under greatly different scenarios of climate change. The projected future changes in both temperature and precipitation experienced by glaciers are amplified relative to the global average. The projected increase in precipitation partly compensates for the mass loss caused by warming, but this compensation is negligible at higher temperature anomalies since an increasing fraction of precipitation at the glacier sites is liquid. Loss of low-lying glacier area, and more importantly, eventual complete disappearance of glaciers, strongly limit the projected sea level contribution from glaciers in coming centuries. The adjustment of glacier hypsometry to changes in the forcing strongly reduces the rates of global glacier-mass loss caused by changes in global mean temperature compared to rates of mass loss when hypsometric changes are neglected. This result is a second reason for the relatively weak dependence of glacier-mass loss on future climate scenario, and helps explain why glacier-mass loss in the first half of the 20th century was of the same order of magnitude as in the second half of the 20th century, even though the rate of warming was considerably smaller.

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Paper finds solar amplification mechanism via clouds at the South Pole, amplifies surface solar irradiance up to 24 times

A paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics finds evidence of a solar amplification mechanism via cloud cover at the South Pole. According to the authors, at solar cycle minimums, cloud cover increases which further decreases solar radiation reaching the surface of the South Pole by 1.8% - 2.4%, depending on the wavelength, and vice-versa for solar cycle maximums. This begs the question: Could the current record high Antarctic sea ice extent be related to the current weakest solar cycle in 100 years rather than AGW? ;)



The paper adds to many other peer-reviewed papers describing solar amplification mechanisms by which tiny 0.1% changes of total solar irradiance can be amplified to produce large effects on climate. According to this paper, 0.1% changes in solar irradiation over solar cycles are amplified by a factor of 18 to 24 times at the surface of the South Pole, dependent upon wavelength. As noted by Dr. Roy Spencer, a mere 1-2% change in global cloud cover [such as the 1.8% - 2.4% found by this paper] can alone account for global warming - or global cooling.

The current solar cycle is the weakest in 100-200 years.

Atmos. Chem. Phys., 11, 1177-1189, 2011 www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/1177/2011/ doi:10.5194/acp-11-1177-2011 Full paper available here: Solar irradiance at the earth's surface: long-term behavior observed at the South Pole

J. E. Frederick and A. L. Hodge

Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Abstract. This research examines a 17-year database of UV-A (320–400 nm) and visible (400–600 nm) solar irradiance obtained by a scanning spectroradiometer located at the South Pole. The goal is to define the variability in solar irradiance reaching the polar surface, with emphasis on the influence of cloudiness and on identifying systematic trends and possible links to the solar cycle. To eliminate changes associated with the varying solar elevation, the analysis focuses on data averaged over 30–35 day periods centered on each year's austral summer solstice. The long-term average effect of South Polar clouds is a small attenuation, with the mean measured irradiances being about 5–6% less than the clear-sky values, although at any specific time clouds may reduce or enhance the signal that reaches the sensor. The instantaneous fractional attenuation or enhancement is wavelength dependent, where the percent deviation from the clear-sky irradiance at 400–600 nm is typically 2.5 times that at 320–340 nm. When averaged over the period near each year's summer solstice, significant correlations appear between [ground level] irradiances at all wavelengths and the solar cycle as measured by the 10.7 cm solar radio flux. An approximate 1.8 ± 1.0% decrease in ground-level irradiance occurs from solar maximum to solar minimum for the wavelength band 320–400 nm. The corresponding decrease for 400–600 nm is 2.4 ± 1.9%. The best-estimate declines appear too large to originate in the sun. If the correlations have a geophysical origin, they suggest a small variation in atmospheric attenuation [clouds] with the solar cycle over the period of observation, with the greatest attenuation [more clouds] occurring at solar minimum.

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Game Over! IPCC Quietly Concedes Defeat

A new paper from SPPI and Christopher Monckton shows how the IPCC has quietly conceded defeat, that it's models projecting catastrophic doom from anthropogenic global warming have been falsified in the face of real-world observations. 

"the IPCC has quietly, furtively, but very definitely capitulated in the face of the real-world evidence that the models have failed." 

"The IPCC’s explicit reliance on its own “expert assessment” rather than upon the models’ projections is a significant climb-down."

For the Full Report in PDF Form, please click here.

[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Excerpts:

You couldn’t make it up. A Russian “Antarctic research vessel” carrying not diligent scientific researchers but 74 taxpayer-funded climate extremists on a junket to help them make up headlines about sea ice melting because of “global warming” finds itself stuck in – er – sea ice. And sea ice in high summer at that. The extremists, as so often happens, had believed their own propaganda. They had believed Al Gore. They had believed, poor saps, that Antarctica was warming and melting. It isn’t.

Aside from the Antarctic Peninsula (just 2% of the continent), which has an anomalous climate, Antarctica has been cooling since satellite records began, and sea-ice extent there has been growing.

The IPCC has quietly, furtively, but very definitely capitulated in the face of the real-world evidence – first revealed here at SPPI – that the models have failed. 

The IPCC’s explicit reliance on its own “expert assessment” rather than upon the models’ projections is a significant climb-down.

Despite record increases in CO2 concentration, there has been no global warming for almost 13 years, or, by satellite measurements, for more than 17 years, and no warming distinguishable from the combined measurement, overage, and bias uncertainties for 18 years.

Multiple lines of evidence now confirm that the models and consequently the IPCC have overestimated global warming. yet neither that misconceived organization nor any of its host of unthinking devotees has displayed any remorse. 

 

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Gavin's worry about the state of understanding of climate science comes true

From a comment at WUWT:

DB says:

December 28, 2013 at 5:34 pm

Jimbo wrote:

“Wasn’t Gavin for a specified period of no global surface warming after which he would reconsider CAGW? I can’t find it but I vaguely recall it was a question in one of Real Climate’s comments sections.”

Ah, Gavin’s goalposts. Gavin Schmidt of NASA has a website called RealClimate. Back in 2007 there was a post on signs of climate change.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/

In the discussion thread Daniel Klein asks at #57:

“OK, simply to clarify what I’ve heard from you:

(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding

(2) In general, any year’s global temperature that is “on trend” should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds “weather noise”)

(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings

I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?”

[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, I'd need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality - right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so that's the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. - gavin]

__________________________________________

In fact, 1998 has not been exceeded by any of the five global temperature indices as of the end of 2013, so Gavin, it's now finally time for you to worry about the state of climate science rather than CAGW.

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Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson: Global warming is the most notorious dogma of modern science

THE SCIENTIST AS REBEL: A TRIBUTE TO FREEMAN DYSON ON HIS 90TH BIRTHDAY

• Date: 04/01/14




• The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Freeman Dyson recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Born in England on 15 December 1923, Freeman Dyson graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a BA in mathematics. In 1947, he moved to the USA where he went to work at Cornell University and, later, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Dyson is a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, we republish an CCNet-interview he gave Benny Peiser in March 2007.

Freeman Dyson

...

Benny Peiser: In a Winter Commencement Address at the University of Michigan two years ago you called yourself a heretic on global warming, the most notorious dogma of modern science. You have described global warming anxiety as grossly exaggerated and have openly voiced your doubts about the reliability of climate models. These models, you argue, “do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.” There seems to be an almost complete endorsement of the world’s scientific organisations and elites of these models together with claims that they reliably epitomize reality and can consistently predict future climate change. How do you feel belonging to a tiny minority of scientists who dare to voice their doubts openly?

Freeman Dyson: I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable. They are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behavior in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

remainder of interview

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UK Climate Commission submission: IPCC AR5 Report 'definitely weakens the case for action' on climate

A submission to the UK Energy and Climate Change Committee inquiry into the IPCC AR5 Report points out how the IPCC has deliberately obscured recent evidence that the climate is significantly less sensitive to CO2 than previously claimed, and how the IPCC models significantly exaggerate warming from CO2. 

He concludes that the IPCC AR5 physical science basis "definitely weakens the case for action, although IPCC nowhere admits this. There is now good observational evidence for a substantially lower climate sensitivity. This means considerably less warming is to be expected in the future. Meanwhile it has become clear that extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts) have not become worse. This means that in the coming decades any climate money is best spent on adaptation, i.e. helping those regions vulnerable to extreme weather events to be better prepared for the next event that sooner or later will take place."

Reposted from Marcel Crok, with emphasis added:

Submission to AR5 inquiry

DOOR MARCEL CROK OP 13 DECEMBER 2013%

The UK Energy and Climate Change Committee invited anyone with interest in the AR5 report to submit answers on a long list of questions. The deadline has now passed and several people have already made their contribution public (Richard Tol, Paul Matthews, Mike Haseler). As sooner or later all the submissions will be public anyway I have decided to do the same. My submission follows below and can also be downloaded as a pdf here.

Energy and Climate Change Committee inquiry into AR5Written submission by Marcel Crok

Credentials and statement of interests

I am a Dutch freelance science writer based in Amsterdam. Since 2005 I specialised in the global warming debate. In 2005 as an editor of the Dutch monthly popular science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek (recently this has become the Dutch edition of New Scientist) I published a long and critical article about the infamous hockey stick graph featuring the criticism of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. Many of the issues described in that article came back in the Climategate emails.
I published a critical book in 2010 that focused on the third and fourth assessment reports of the IPCC (TAR and AR4). The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment then gave me funding to critically review AR5 as an expert reviewer.
Since Climategate I am in favour of a more constructive interaction between climate scientists with opposing views. Late 2012 the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment funded an international discussion platform, ClimateDialogue.org, that organises constructive dialogues between climate scientists with opposing views. This has been set up by the leading Dutch climate related institutes KNMI and PBL and myself. [1] We cover controversial topics and invite scientists with a range of views.
In 2013 I was co-author of my first peer reviewed paper (describing a European temperature shift in 1988).

How robust are the conclusions in the AR5 Physical Science Basis report?To answer this question is beyond the scope of this inquiry I would say. However your own introduction provides a good start to deal with it. You wrote: “The report concluded that, ‘it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.’ But it reduced the lower bound for likely climate sensitivity and for the first time did not publish a best estimate of it because of lack of agreement.”
It’s good that you picked up this apparent paradox. AR5 itself focused on the 95% certainty that humans are the cause of most (>50%) of the warming since 1950. Most media outlets brought this as the major news of AR5 writing things like ‘how much more certainty do you want (before you act)?’.
However this interpretation of the 95% claim is misleading. In a sense the 95% claim of AR5 (itself a result of expert judgment and not some sort of mathematical calculation) is a no-brainer.
To understand this we focus on this other important parameter, climate sensitivity (the rise in global temperature after a doubling of the CO2 concentration). Recently several papers have been published estimating climate sensitivity from observational data since 1850. These studies assume that almost all of the warming since 1850 is due to greenhouse gases. These papers then come up with best estimates for climate sensitivity in the range of 1.5 to 2.0°C, considerably lower than the best estimate of 3.0°C that IPCC has presented in all their assessment reports so far.
So claiming that at least 50% of the warming since 1950 is due to humans is meaningless. The much more important question is whether the contribution of greenhouse gases to warming is big or small. AR5 has all the ingredients to conclude that the contribution is much smaller than we have thought for the last three decades. But by not giving a best estimate for climate sensitivity it failed to communicate this important message. So IPCC failed to give policy makers its most important conclusion. And IPCC only dealt with this important decision in a footnote in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).
The 95% claim also tells you nothing about the seriousness of the climate issue. The 95% can be completely in accordance with there being no climate problem at all. IPCC failed to explain this clearly and journalists didn’t pick it up.
To conclude: the 95% claim of AR5 has been misinterpreted by most people, including policy makers and the media as the final proof that we have a huge anthropogenic climate problem. The claim itself proves no such thing and is in fact pretty meaningless.
Although it seems contradictory, there is in itself no conflict between the increasing certainty (the 95% attribution claim) and not giving a best estimate for climate sensitivity (less certainty). The 95% claim is just very conservative and tells you little about the seriousness of the climate issue.

Have the IPCC adequately addresses criticisms of previous reports?There is some encouraging progress in this area. For example in AR4 IPCC claimed greenhouse gases already influenced hurricanes. This was based on a very biased selection of the literature. Both in the 2011 IPCC SREX report and in AR5 IPCC does a much better job, admitting there is no link (yet) between all kinds of extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts) and the increase in greenhouse gas concentration. [2]However there are other topics where IPCC seems to be completely unwilling to address criticisms. A notorious example is the case of long term persistence (LTP). Most people will agree that the weather of this hour is related to that of the next. Well the same can be said about climate. If this year we’re in an ice age, logically next year we are still in an ice age. This is called persistence. LTP becomes relevant when you want to claim that the recent rise in global temperature of 0.8°C is statistically significant. This is important for what IPCC calls ‘detection’. You first have to detect a ‘significant’ increase in the global temperature, before you can ‘attribute’ it to any cause.
To do this calculation you have to assume what kind of statistical model best fits your data. IPCC and the whole climate field for some reason has adopted the view that one can describe climate time series with a so-called AR1 model. This model assumes that this years’ climate will influence that of next year but not the year after. This AR1 model is also called short term persistence. There are many papers criticising this approach however both in AR4 and now again in AR5 IPCC failed to address this issue in a satisfactory way.

In my review of AR5 I wrote:
“It is commendable that the authors mention Cohn and Lins, 2005 [3]. Unfortunately this is the only place in the entire report where this important paper is mentioned. In their conclusions Cohn and Lins write: “[With respect to] temperature data, there is overwhelming evidence that the planet has warmed during the past century. But could this warming be due to natural dynamics? Given what we know about the complexity, long-term persistence and non-linearity of the climate system, it seems the answer might be yes…natural climatic excursions may be much larger than we imagine.” AR4 did not do a good job dealing with this topic, as is explained in McKitricks submission to the IAC: http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/iac.ross_mckitrick.pdf (page 7-9) He mentions an [Climategate] email of [David] Parker to [Phil] Jones, who were responsible for the AR4 treatment of the Cohn and Lins paper. Parker wrote: “Maybe the biggest problem is Ross McKitrick and David Stephenson’s remarks on trends; we used only an AR-1 and they may be correct in advocating a more complex model. Our software for restricted maximum likelihood does not cope with ARMA(1,1) and may have to get John Kennedy to investigate new software using the cited references. This may be a big job but could be done after the LA3 meeting if we agree there what to do. Alternatively – as we have considered already – we could consider not citing linear trends, just overall changes of level from the smooth curves. This would save some space.” In the end Parker and Jones did cite linear trends in chapter 3 claiming the warming was highly significant. In the second draft of AR4 IPCC wrote: “Determining the statistical significance of a trend line in geophysical data is difficult, and many oversimplified techniques will tend to overstate the significance. Zheng and Basher (1999), Cohn and Lins (2005) and others have used time series methods to show that failure to properly treat the pervasive forms of long-term persistence and autocorrelation in trend residuals can make erroneous detection of trends a typical outcome in climatic data analysis.” This was a fair comment about Cohn and Lins. However after the second draft this text was removed and in appendix 3.a a much more disputatious text was introduced: “Nevertheless, the results depend on the statistical model used, and more complex models are not as transparent and often lack physical realism. Indeed, long-term persistence models (Cohn and Lins, 2005) have not been shown to provide a better fit to the data than simpler models.” This was a completely ad hoc remark without any reference to the literature. A fair treatment of this topic in AR5 is much needed. I think this discussion should be dealt with in both Ch 2 and 10.”

Ross McKitrick also raised the issue of LTP again in his AR5 review comments. Did AR5 address this issue? No. Doug Keenan, a British mathematician who has shown interest in this topic, explained in detail that AR5 didn’t give LTP a fair treatment. [4]Keenan’s research has recently led to many parliamentary questions by Lord Donoughue. [5]So several people raised this important issue both during the AR4 and AR5 review process. Privately Parker and Jones admitted the comments of McKitrick were valid. However in the end IPCC more or less ignored the issue both in AR4 and AR5. It hasn’t even started to take the topic serious.
In May of this year we organised a Climate Dialogue about LTP inviting Armin Bunde, Demetris Koutsoyiannis and Rasmus Benestad as participants. [6] Bunde and Koutsoyiannis have both published many papers about LTP and both are convinced that when you use an AR1 model the statistical significance of the 0.8°C is seriously overestimated. But this is what IPCC still does.

How much scope is there to question of the report’s conclusions?Not enough. In general critics of the IPCC view (sceptics if you like) are not invited to participate in the writing process, as coordinating lead authors, lead authors or even contributing authors. So they can only contribute as expert reviewers. In practice an expert reviewer has very little influence. Just look again at the example of LTP given above. Several reviewers both during the AR4 and AR5 review process mentioned this important issue. In the end though it was ignored. The same can be said about Nic Lewis’ important review comment to present two ranges for climate sensitivity, one based on climate models and one based on observations.

Can any of the areas of the science now be considered settled as a result of AR5’s publication, if so which?Unfortunately very few things are settled in the global warming debate. There is only one solid fact: the greenhouse gas concentrations are rising and humans are causing this increase. A second fact is that the climate is warmer than a century ago. How much warmer exactly is still a matter of debate. And how much of the warming is attributable to humans is also far from settled.

Does the AR5 address the reliability of climate models?Several chapters deal with the reliability of climate models and one chapter (9) in specific terms. Climate models play a huge role in the report. All the future projections of climate in 2100 are based on these models. The reliability of the models is therefore crucial. Unfortunately, the implicit conclusion in AR5 that climate models are, overall, sufficiently reliable for projecting global warming is not supported by the evidence.
It has become increasingly clear that models don’t fit the observations very well, even when you look at the global average temperature. Stephen McIntyre showed in a blog post [7] that models on average show 50% more warming during the last 35 years than the real climate:

Modelled versus observed decadal global surface temperature trend 1979–2013

Temperature trends in °C/decade. Virtually all model climates warmed much faster than the real climate over the last 35 years. Source: http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/24/two-minutes-to-midnight/. Models with multiple runs have separate boxplots; models with single runs are grouped together in the boxplot marked ‘singleton’. The orange boxplot at the right combines all model runs together. The red dotted line shows the actual increase in global surface temperature over the same period per the HadCRUT4 observational dataset.

Instead of showing this insightful graph IPCC presented this (Figure 1 from Box 9.2):

Frequency distribution of trends in global mean surface temperature from 114 CMIP5 model runs

Model runs are grey bars for the periods (a) 1998–2012, (b) 1984–1998, (c)1951–2012. The comparison is with the uncertainty range for the observed trend per the HadCRUT4 dataset (red, hatched) over the same periods. From IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Box 9.2, Figure 1.

In this figure the IPCC attempts to show that the recent hiatus is more to do with choosing the hot El Niño year 1998 as a starting point. Panel (a) shows that CMIP5 models overestimate the HadCrut4 global temperature trend since 1998. However in panel (b) one can see that models tend to underestimate the observations in the period 1984–1998. So the message is: if you look at short periods of 15 years the models are sometimes too hot and sometimes too cold. Panel (c) then suggests models are performing well on a longer timescale, in this case 60 years. That is not surprising, since models are likely to have been tuned so that they provide a reasonable match to the global surface temperature rise over the historical simulation period, most of which occurred after 1950. The discrepancy between models and observations over the last 35 years is conveniently not shown. This period is long enough to be relevant for climate.

Another important discrepancy between models and observations is laid down by Nic Lewis in another Climate Audit blog post. [8] Here Lewis shows that the so-called Transient Climate Response (TCR), a more policy relevant parameter for climate sensitivity, in the models is considerably higher than the TCR that is based on the best observational evidence:

Transient climate response distribution for CMIP5 models in AR5 Table 9.5The bar heights show how many models in Table 9.5 exhibit each level of TCR

Again, AR5 does not show a similar graph but gives this statement (Box 12.2):

“the ranges of TCR estimated from the observed warming and from AOGCMs agree well, increasing our confidence in the assessment of uncertainties in projections over the 21st century.”

How can this be right, when the average model TCR is 40% higher than an observationally-based best estimate of 1.3°C, and almost half the models have TCRs 50% or more above that? The IPCC obscured this large discrepancy between ‘models’ and ‘observations’ by not showing a graph like this and by a misleading statement in the full report.
So models overestimate the warming of the real climate in the last 35 years by 50%. And the same models have ECS and TCR values that are considerably higher than estimates based on observations indicate. Both these important observations were not made explicitly by the IPCC in AR5.

Has AR5 sufficiently explained the reasons behind the widely reported hiatus in the global surface temperature record?Stephen McIntyre showed in detail [9] that the IPCC didn’t take the hiatus serious enough until too late in the AR5 process. In the first draft they ignored the issue. In the SOD they dealt reasonably well with the hiatus, showing that models don’t simulate it. In the final draft AR5 then came up with a new graph that obscured the mismatch between models and observations. This graph almost certainly contains an error. [10] Note that this final graph was never presented to the expert reviewers. Is IPCC going to acknowledge this error and fix it?

Do the AR5 Physical Science Basis report’s conclusions strengthen or weaken the economic case for action to prevent dangerous climate change?It definitely weakens the case for action, although IPCC nowhere admits this. There is now good observational evidence for a substantially lower climate sensitivity. This means considerably less warming is to be expected in the future. Meanwhile it has become clear that extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts) have not become worse. This means that in the coming decades any climate money is best spent on adaptation, i.e. helping those regions vulnerable to extreme weather events to be better prepared for the next event that sooner or later will take place.
The case for mitigation is less urgent and this means that as a society we could first focus on new technologies that make decarbonisation possible with lower costs than the now available options like wind, solar, biomass etc.

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[1] http://www.pbl.nl/en/news/newsitems/2012/pbl-knmi-and-crok-launch-climate-discussion-platform-climatedialogueorg

[2] http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.nl/2013/10/coverage-of-extreme-events-in-ipcc-ar5.html

[3] Cohn T.A., Lins H.F. (2005), “Nature’s style: naturally trendy”, Geophysical Research Letters, 32, L23402; doi:10.1029/2005GL024476

[4] http://www.informath.org/AR5stat.pdf

[5] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhansrd/text/131203w0001.htm#13120366000164

[6] http://www.climatedialogue.org/long-term-persistence-and-trend-significance/

[7] http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/24/two-minutes-to-midnight/

[8] http://climateaudit.org/2013/12/09/does-the-observational-evidence-in-ar5-support-itsthe-cmip5-models-tcr-ranges/

[9] http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/24/two-minutes-to-midnight/ and

http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/30/ipcc-disappears-the-discrepancy/

[10] http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/30/ipcc-disappears-the-discrepancy/

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Paper: Scientists on ice are media's nightmare

EDITORIAL: Scientists on ice are media's nightmare

The Gazette editorial • Updated: January 4, 2014 at 8:28 am • Published: January 4, 2014 | 12:00 am 

 

Global warming scientists went looking for disappearing ice. They found quite the contrary, getting so badly stuck two icebreakers couldn't get to them. Media portrayed it as a pleasure cruise, ignoring the obvious global warming irony. (AP Photo/Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Chris Turney)

As a bunch of global warming scientists were stuck in ice through the holidays, we barely heard a peep about global warming and climate change. The ice, after all, is supposed to be melting and scarce because of SUVs, "Big Oil" and indulgent American lifestyles.

The mainstream national media so love the human-caused global warming hypothesis that Americans seldom get straight reports of weather events without reporters grabbing "global warming" connections from thin air. We are assured each catastrophic tornado, hurricane—even each blizzard—results from humans burning fossil fuels.

Radical environmentalists even tried to blame global warming for the devastating 2011 tsunami—a tragedy caused by a 9.0 offshore earthquake. To suggest that auto emissions cause tectonic plates to shift sounds like quite a stretch, but global warming zeal apparently has no limits.

"Past research suggests there may indeed be a link between climate change and earthquakes in some parts of the world," stated the environmental blog Mongabay.com, as the tsunami's body count rose.

The environmental website "grist.org" responded to the earthquake-caused tsunami with the headline: "Today's Tsunami: this is what climate change looks like."

The headline was later retracted.

Staffan Nilsson, president of the European Economic and Social Committee, tied the earthquake-tsunami to global warming like this:

"Some islands affected by climate change have been hit. Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity—not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming?"

Though nearly anything passes as rationale for "global warming" alerts, these leaps in logic don't go both ways. When a news event provides non-scientific, anecdotal evidence to the contrary—when details seem to counter a melting-earth philosophy—we hear nothing of global warming and climate change.

Scientists stranded on the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy were on a mission that issued the following statment: "Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change."

Yet, they ran into so much ice—on their mission to examine disappearing ice—that two ice giant breakers could not reach them. They were stranded for 10 days before a successful helicopter rescue concluded Thursday.

The mission's leader, Chris Turney, is a professor of climate change at the University of South Wales. His personal website explained the purpose of the trip was to "discover and communicate the environmental changes taking place in the south."

Yet, typical reports created visions of another vacation cruise gone bad. Stranded scientists were widely described by media as "tourists" and "passengers." Mainstream media mostly ignored the most interesting element of the story: an ice-melt excursion was trapped in ice. It's an irony worth noting, even if it says nothing scientific about global warming.

"Nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all," reports NewsBuster.org, a service of Brent Bozell's Media Research Center. "Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition."

That's because the story doesn't fit the global warming narrative. Scientists aren't supposed to get mired in sea ice on a mission to prove the poles are melting and facing a dearth of ice. The true dilemma did not bolster the cause, so the media looked away.

Read more at http://gazette.com/editorial-scientists-on-ice-are-medias-nightmare/article/1512010#T75CvTS5dwg5eZDO.99

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Bravo! Global carbon markets' value dropped 38% in 2013

Global carbon markets' value dropped 38% in 2013

Low carbon targets set by governments blamed by analysts for falling carbon price in EU and UN schemes

Reuters theguardian.com, Friday 3 January 2014 07.36 EST

The value of global carbon markets dropped 38% to 38.4 billion euros ($52.9 billion) in 2013, as prices slid in the main EU and UN schemes and trade limited in new programmes, analysts at Thomson Reuters Point Carbon said this week.

The value of carbon permits and credits traded was down from 62 billion euros in 2012 and 96 billion euros in 2011, a two-year period in which benchmark EU carbon permit prices fell to 5 euros per tonne from 18 euros, the analysts said in a a report.

Last year also saw a decrease in volume, with 9.2 billion emission units changing hands compared to 10.7 billion in 2012, the first drop in turnover since 2010.

"The main explanation for the falling prices in carbon markets around the world is the very modest emission reduction targets adopted for the period up to 2020," Point Carbon's Anders Nordeng said.

"Without ambitious climate targets there is no need for deep emission reductions and carbon prices will remain at low levels."

In an effort to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming, many governments have set up markets that cap emissions and allow emitting companies to trade excess permits.

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has operated since 2005 and represented 94% of the value and 88% of the traded volume of global carbon markets in 2013, the analysts said.

Prices in the EU scheme have fallen as rigid supply rules flooded the market with permits as demand ebbed amid the bloc's economic downturn.

Last month, EU lawmakers agreed to cut supply temporarily in an attempt to push prices back towards levels that stimulate companies to invest in carbon-cutting technology. The move followed more than a year of wrangling amid concerns that higher prices could hamper the bloc's economic recovery.

The so-called backloading proposal, which delays the sale of permits from scheduled auctions, is not expected to take effect until March at the earliest. Analysts say that without further reform, it will not push prices much higher than 5 euros.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI), the carbon offset schemes created under the United Nations, suffered an even greater decline in 2013.

Trade in UN credits dropped 96% in value and 75% in volume to 299 million euros and 742 million units respectively, the analysts said.

The CDM and JI allow developers of carbon-cutting projects to earn credits that can sold to governments or companies seeking to meet emission targets, with some 2.2 billion units generated since their inception in 2005.

But fresh investment has dried up as credit prices have crashed 98% in five years to less than 50 cents, lower than the cost of developing the projects.

Additional demand for the UN credits has failed to emerge via fresh government targets and the EU this year banned credits from new schemes from all but the world's poorest nations in an effort to get emerging nations such as China, Brazil and Russia to pay for more of their own emission reductions.

North American carbon markets were the only ones to have grown in volume and value over 2013.

The fledging market spanning California and Quebec now has the highest permit prices in the world, at $10.71 per tonne, said Point Carbon's Olga Chistyakova.

The analysts added that the launch of five of seven planned carbon markets in China in the second half of 2013 had great potential to reverse the overall decline in global carbon markets due to the sheer size of the schemes, which are in Guangdong, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin.

Nordeng said talks on a global deal to tackle climate change due to be struck in late 2015 would be a key test on whether big-emitting countries would set or deepen emission reduction targets to tackle climate change effectively.

"If the goal to limit global warming to 2C shall be met, more dramatic cuts are needed over the next decades," said Nordeng, referring to a 2010 agreement by almost 200 nations under the UN to limit the rise in global temperature.

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Global warming believers are today's climate deniers

ICE AND COLD: GLOBAL WARMING BELIEVERS ARE TODAY'S CLIMATE DENIERS

by JOHN NOLTE 4 Jan 2014 Breitbart.com

Just this week we had dozens of Global Warming-believing scientists, who specialize in researching ice melt in Antarctica, run into a helluva lot more Antarctic ice than their research told them would be there. So much more ice that their ship and three ice-breaking rescue vessels were stuck in ten feet of it for days (two of the vessels are still stuck). As I write this, the big news of the weekend is a cold snap across much of the country with temperatures reaching 20 and 30-year lows. And yet, despite all of what should be good news, the Global Cooling Global Warming Climate Change community is not celebrating.

Not only are Climate Change Truthers not celebrating, they are hysterical with worry that unexpected Antarctic ice discoveries and American winters returning to the normalcy those of us of a certain age remember, might hurt their religion crusade. The media is so worried they have coordinated a cover-up of the news from Antarctica and those of us pointing to what one might call the "science" of colder temperatures and increased Arctic ice are being mocked for doing so.

Granted, more ice in one area of a vast South Pole is not empirical proof that all is well in the Antarctic, but it is a great way to call attention to the fact that according to NASA, "In late September 2013, the ice surrounding Antarctica reached its annual winter maximum and set a new record."

Who is anti-science now?

The chief of today's Climate Deniers is President Obama, whose second term will end up being "all about Climate Change." Despite all this good climate news, Obama still intends to circumvent Congress and use the Tyranny of the Bureaucracy to strangle the kind of industries that create solid middle class jobs. But don't worry, while Obama is killing good-paying energy jobs he will be rescuing us from income inequality that good paying energy jobs would help to solve.

There are all kinds of reasons not to believe in Global Warming -- the cover-ups, the media bias, the outright lies; the science just being plain old wrong; the absurdity of using a hundred-or-so years of data on a planet billions of years old; the oh-so bizarre coincidence that the only solution to the "crisis" is to check off every item on the Marxist wish-list; the fact that Global Warming Believers live their lives like the rest of us instead of preparing for imminent catastrophe…

And let's not forget the oily shift in branding from Global Cooling to Global Warming to Climate Change…

Well, now we can add to this list the fact that the very good news of unexpected Antarctic ice, and a return to the kind of winter weather we experienced before this Climate Change hysteria began, hasn't so much as made a single Truther pause for just a moment to wonder aloud if this might be good news.

Instead, they are ignoring the science to double down on their denial and partisan bitterness.

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