New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is 'close to zero'

A new peer-reviewed paper published in Energy & Environment finds there is no agreement between observations and climate model predictions during the last two decades of the 20th century. According to the author, "This finding is shown to put constraints on surface [temperature] trend and Climate Sensitivity, limiting them to values close to zero." The paper adds to several other peer-reviewed publications finding the IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity to CO2 are greatly exaggerated. 

The full paper is paywalled, but a 2011 paper by the same author [S. Fred Singer] is available here and comes to similar conclusions.

Inconsistency of Modeled and Observed Tropical Temperature Trends

S. Fred Singer

¹Science & Environmental Policy Project, University of Virginia, Arlington, VA 22202

Abstract: Consistency or lack thereof between observed temperature trends and those predicted by Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are a contentious though important issue. The lack of consistency between observed and modeled temperature trends has frequently been used to argue against a significant human contribution to global warming - and vice versa. We present here additional and independent evidence that there is no agreement between observed and modeled warming trends in the tropical troposphere during the last two decades of the 20th century. This finding is shown to put constraints on surface trend and Climate Sensitivity, limiting them to values close to zero.

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New paper finds more evidence the Medieval Warming Period was global

A new paper published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology reconstructs climate in Kenya, Africa over the past 1700 years and finds evidence of a Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age, adding to the papers of over 1,200 scientists who have proven these climate phenomena were global, not local as claimed by Michael Mann. The authors also find that "the Little Age Ice was the wettest and most humid period of the entire record," contrary to the claims of climate alarmists that warmer climates cause increased flooding. The authors also find, "From the late-18th to early-19th century and again in the 1870’s, the region experienced two episodes of drought more severe than any recorded in historical time," once again demonstrating that man-made CO2 is not the control knob of climate.

Late-Holocene and recent hydroclimatic variability in the central Kenya Rift Valley: The sediment record of hypersaline lakes Bogoria, Nakuru and Elementeita

• Gijs De Cort^a, , , 


• Ilse Bessems^a, 


• Edward Keppens^b, 


• Florias Mees^c, 


• Brian Cumming^d, 


• Dirk Verschuren^a

• ^a Limnology Unit, Department of Biology, Ghent University, Ledeganckstraat 35, B-9000, Gent, Belgium


• ^b Isotope Geology and Evolution of the Paleoenvironments Research Unit, Department of Geology, Free University of Brussels (VUB), Pleinlaan 2, B-1050, Brussel, Belgium


• ^c Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Leuvensesteensweg 13, B-3080 Tervuren, Belgium


• ^d Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Laboratory, Department of Biology, Queen’s University, 116 Barrie Street, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada

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Highlights

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We document the sediment record of three lakes in the Kenya Rift Valley.

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Salt mineralogy and sedimentology provide indications for climate change.

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During the first millennium AD up to the 12th century AD, the area was mostly dry.

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The Little Ice Age equivalent was the wettest period of the entire record.

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Lakes Nakuru and Elementeita were desiccated during the late-19th century drought.

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Abstract

The sedimentology, salt mineralogy and stable oxygen- and carbon-isotope signatures of a mid-lake sediment sequence from hypersaline Lake Bogoria in Kenya reveals marked climate-driven changes in water-column mixing regime and salinity over the past 1700 years. Combined with sedimentological data on short sediment sequences from nearby lakes Nakuru and Elementeita, this results in a preliminary reconstruction of hydroclimatic variability in the central Kenya Rift Valley since ca. 300 AD. Stratigraphic analyses of bulk sediment composition, texture and magnetic susceptibility of all three cores; and smear slide, XRD and stable-isotope analyses on carbonate minerals in the Bogoria sequence allowed to define a succession of sedimentary units, corresponding to distinct phases in lake history. In the lowermost unit, four characteristic trona layers (Na₃(HCO₃)(CO₃).2H₂O) are attributed to predominantly dry conditions during the second half of the first millennium AD and the period equivalent to the Medieval Climate Anomaly [Medieval Warming Period], until the first half of the 12th century AD. Lake Bogoria was probably polymictic at that time, its surface level standing significantly lower than today. The second unit displays uniform deposition of nahcolite (NaHCO₃), indicative of a strongly stratified lake where a layer of less saline surface water (near-)permanently covers a hypersaline water mass with high pCO₂. We propose that this depositional phase reflects the rising lake level related to the transition from dry to more humid climate conditions at the onset of the Little Ice Age, as previously documented for other parts of equatorial East Africa. The third, uppermost Bogoria unit contains only sporadic depositions of magadiite (Na₂Si₁₄O₂₉(OH)₃.11H₂O) and various sodium carbonate minerals. This, together with low magnetic susceptibility, is interpreted to indicate humid Little Ice Age conditions, with highest lake level and reduced salinity around the late-15th to early-16th century AD. From the late-18th to early-19th century and again in the 1870’s, the region experienced two episodes of drought more severe than any recorded in historical time. Tentative evidence for these events in the Bogoria record is not well constrained in time, but dated desiccation surfaces in the Nakuru and Elementeita records confirm their widespread nature across eastern equatorial Africa.

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Brain-eating parasites thriving in Joe Romm's brain

Joe Romm's latest global warming scare story today is entitled, "Brain-Eating Parasites Thrive As Global Warming Heats Up Lakes." Romm offers no evidence that the 0°C global warming over the past couple decades will increase the exceedingly rare incidence of amoebic encephalitis [a total of 32 cases from 2002 to 2011], a parasite that preferentially thrives in water temperatures above 100°F [38°C]. 

Brain-Eating Parasites Thrive As Global Warming Heats Up Lakes

Posted August 2, 2013 by Joe Romm

...Another apparent winner [allegedly from global warming] is Naegleria fowleri aka N. fowleri . The bad news:

It’s a fatal infection without an effective treatment, and one that strikes in a decidedly gruesome manner: An amoebic organism lurking in water is inadvertently inhaled during a swim on a hot summer’s day. From there, it travels through the nasal passage and into the brain, where it multiplies, devours one’s cerebral fluid and gray matter, and almost invariably causes death.

The good news is that it is, or has been, an exceedingly rare disease — “between 2002 and 2011, there were only 32 infections in the US.” But as far back as 2007, Michael Beach, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expert in recreational waterborne illnesses, warned:

“This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we’d expect to see more cases.”

The CDC notes that this (thermophilic) amoeba is “able to grow and survive at higher temperatures, such as those found in hot springs [greater than 100 F] and in the human body, even under fever temperatures. able to grow and survive at higher temperatures, such as those found in hot springs and in the human body, even under fever temperatures.”

And indeed, as The Verge reported in June:

In recent years, N. fowleri has popped up in unexpected locations, which some experts suggest is a sign that warmer waters — caused by brutal summer heat waves and rising temperatures across the country — are catalyzing their spread.

“The climate is changing, and let me tell you, so is this,” says Travis Heggie, an associate professor at Bowling Green State University who’s tracked the amoebas for several years. “If warm weather keeps up, I think we’ll see N. fowleri popping up farther and farther north.”

...So the next time someone says that there will be winners and losers from global warming, remember that many of those winners will help make Homo sapiens one of the biggest losers.

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New paper finds lunar-tidal cycles explain much of the 20th century global temperature change

A new peer-reviewed paper published in Energy & Environment finds long-term lunar tide cycles "lead to conditions that preferentially favor the onset of La Niña/El Niño events that last for approximately 30 years" and significantly affect global temperatures. The author concludes, "the IPCC needs to take into consideration the possibility that long term Lunar atmospheric tides could be acting as a trigger to favor either El Niño or La Niña conditions and that these changes in the relative frequency of these two type of events could be responsible for much of the observed changes in the world mean temperature during the 20th century."

Are Global Mean Temperatures Significantly Affected by Long-Term Lunar Atmospheric Tides?

Ian R. G. Wilson

Liverpool Plains Daytime Astronomy Centre, Curlewis, NSW, Australia

Abstract: Wilson and Sidorenkov find that there are four extended pressure features in the summer (DJF) mean sea-level pressure (MSLP) anomaly maps that are centred between 30 and 50° S and separated from each other by approximately 90° in longitude. In addition, they show that, over the period from 1947 to 1994, these patterns drift westward in longitude at rates that produce circumnavigation times that match the 18.6 year lunar Draconic cycle. These type of pressure anomaly pattern naturally produce large extended regions of abnormal atmospheric pressure that pass over the semi-permanent South Pacific sub-tropical high roughly once every ~ 4.5 years. These moving regions of higher/lower than normal atmospheric pressure increase/decrease the MSLP of the semi-permanent high pressure system, temporarily increasing/reducing the strength of the East-Pacific trade winds. This leads to conditions that preferentially favor the onset of La Niña/El Niño events that last for approximately 30 years. Wilson and Sidorenkov find that the pressure of the moving anomaly pattern changes in such a way as to favor La Niña over El Niño events between 1947 and 1970 and favor El Niño over La Niña events between 1971 and 1994. This is in agreement with the observed evolution of the El Niño/ La Niña events during the latter part of the 20th century. They speculate that the transition of the pattern from a positive to a negative pressure anomaly follows a 31/62/93/186 year lunar tidal cycle that results from the long-term interaction between the Perigee-Syzygy and Draconic lunar tidal cycles. Hence, the IPCC needs to take into consideration the possibility that long term Lunar atmospheric tides could be acting as a trigger to favor either El Niño or La Niña conditions and that these changes in the relative frequency of these two type of events could be responsible for much of the observed changes in the world mean temperature during the 20th century.

Prior posts on lunar-tide cycles and climate

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Delingpole: Something is rotten in the state of climate science

Silencing climate change dissenters

Two Australian universities have ostracised eminent scientists for straying from the ‘consensus’

3 August 2013 by James Delingpole The Spectator


Something is rotten in the state of climate science. The atmosphere is so poisonous it’s like a throwback to the days when the Nazis tried to discredit the ‘Jewish physics’ of Albert Einstein by commissioning a book called ‘100 Authors Against Einstein’. Einstein was unimpressed by this appeal to authority: ‘If I were wrong, then one would be enough.’

But see — already I am in breach of Godwin’s Law, the nebulous code so tirelessly invoked by those on the green-tinged liberal-left whenever their dodgy antics are compared to those of the Nazi Germany regime. Apparently, the moment you mention Hitler you’ve lost the argument.

So maybe they’d feel more comfortable if I invoked Stalin, for that comparison works just as well. I’m thinking in particular of Trofim Lysenko, the morally and intellectually corrupt junk scientist who flourished in the Soviet Union by telling the regime exactly what it wanted to hear, even as his more honest colleagues were carted off to the Gulag.

The point I am making is this: suppressing open scientific inquiry in order to promulgate a heavily politicised ‘official’ version of the truth is the behaviour of totalitarian dictatorships, not Western liberal democracies like Australia. Or so you might have imagined if you weren’t familiar with the recent treatment by two Australian universities — Macquarie and James Cook — of two eminent scientists working in the field of ‘climate change’. Both have been ostracised by their institutions for reaching conclusions unsatisfactory to the controlling regime.

Murry Salby, an American astrophysicist was appointed professor by Macquarie in 2008 but fell out of favour when his research into greenhouse gases contradicted the so-called ‘consensus’. Salby’s discovery that — contra the Alarmists — there is nothing unprecedented about modern changes in atmospheric CO2 went down like a lead balloon with his politically correct colleagues. First, Macquarie made its displeasure known by giving him increasingly menial tasks unbecoming to his professorial status; then, when that didn’t do the trick, it accused him of misconduct and terminated his contract.

Bob Carter, the other recent Green purge victim, will be familiar to many readers as one of Australia’s most articulate, brave and outspoken resident climate sceptics. A marine geologist, Carter was for many years professor and head of James Cook University’s School of Earth Sciences. On his retirement, he kept his adjunct professor status which, though unpaid, enabled him to supervise the occasional graduate student while continuing to have a university email account and access to the library. Last month, however, these privileges were withdrawn. Staff at the School of Earth and Environmental Studies had decided that Carter’s ‘views on climate change did not fit well within the School’s own teaching and research activities’.

Still, at least in one respect, the timing of this humiliation — and the resulting media furore — could not have been better for Carter. It coincides with the publication of his latest book Taxing Air: Facts And Fallacies About Climate Change (Kelpie) which he has written with cartoonist (and fellow sceptic) John Spooner from (of all places) the Age. There are many excellent works I could recommend on climate change written from a sceptical perspective — by Ian Plimer, by Christopher Booker, by that skinny, swivel-eyed pom with the funny glasses whatever his name is — but this is the most useful of the bunch because it keeps things so very simple.

Each chapter comprises a series of commonly asked questions — to each of which it gives two answers: a pithy one in italics, then a longer, more detailed one. Its short answer to ‘Is today’s temperature unusually warm?’ is ‘No — and no ifs and no buts.’ Then it goes on to note all those periods — from the Pliocene to the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods — when temperatures were higher than they are now, despite the fact that not a single person back then was driving around in 4x4s or flying in CO2-belching airliners.

This, you could argue, represents the biggest flaw in the Warmist argument. If the planet’s temperatures have fluctuated so dramatically before without man’s intervention, how can we be so sure that late 20th century warming wasn’t largely natural too? The answer, as this book makes painstakingly and unarguably clear, is that we can’t. Eyewateringly vast sums of taxpayer’s money are being squandered, rent-seeking corporatists are being grotesquely enriched, corrupt science is being promoted, energy bills are being inflated, jobs are being killed, and the economy is being spavined with unnecessary carbon taxes — all to deal with a ‘problem’ which remains, at best, unproven. And at worst, the biggest and most expensive scientific fraud in history. Anyone reading Taxing Air with an open mind will inescapably be drawn to the latter conclusion. Its argument doesn’t rest on emotion, after all, but on basic and verifiable facts.

Is the science really settled? No. Scientific knowledge is always a moving feast.

But don’t 97 per cent of all scientists say that dangerous warming is occurring? No. A majority of scientists have expressed public scepticism about dangerous warming.

But isn’t there supposed to be a consensus about global warming? ‘If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.’ [It says, quoting the late Michael Crichton.]

Has Australia recently had more droughts than usual? No.

Has Australia recently had more ‘flooding rains’ than usual? No.

Is climate change destroying the Great Barrier Reef? No.

What was Climategate and why was it important? Scientists behaving badly.

Not all scientists, of course. Just those scientists who for whatever reason — ‘noble cause corruption’; ideology; self-preservation; pure, naked greed — have a vested interest in propping up the man-made climate change ‘consensus.’ Scientists, perhaps, like the ones who treated Professor Salby and Professor Carter so badly for the crime of ‘incorrect’ thinking. At the risk of breaching Godwin’s Law twice in one article, both Hitler and Stalin would have been proud of them.

James Delingpole is the author of Watermelons, which is published in Australia as Killing The Earth To Save It: How Environmentalists Are Ruining The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Jobs (Connor Court).   H/T Junk Science

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New paper finds the 'fingerprint of man-made global warming' doesn't exist

A new peer-reviewed paper published in Energy & Environment confirms from the latest satellite data that the tropospheric "hot spot" or so-called "fingerprint of man-made global warming" predicted by climate models does not exist. The authors find surface warming exceeds tropospheric warming, the opposite of model predictions, suggesting there are fundamental flaws in the physical assumptions of the models.

Full paper available here



Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change: 2013

David H. Douglass 1, John R. Christy 2

1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA
2 Department of Atmospheric Science and Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA


Abstract: In 2000 a panel of the U.S. National Research Council in a report with the same title suggested, among other things, that a "substantial disparity remains" between the observed warming rates of the surface and troposphere. Also, in 2000, the climate models showed more warming of the tropical atmosphere than was observed. Many papers have been written since then. We discuss the most recent papers on this subject and using the latest data show that the differences remain unresolved.



Prior posts on the "hot spot"

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New satellite dataset finds global temperatures decreased from 1982-2006

A new peer-reviewed paper published in Energy & Environment analyzes 24 years of data from the European Meteosat weather satellite and finds global temperatures decreased over the period 1982-2006. According to the authors, 

"Our observations point to a decrease in planetary temperature over almost the entire hemisphere, most likely due to an increase of cloudiness." 

"The cloud filtered temperature change patterns, in figure 2c, indicate that the largest decrease occurs in the more cloudy regions of the hemisphere: the tropics and the temperate zones, while in the desert belt the temperature decrease is much smaller. This suggests that cloudiness changes could be the mechanism behind the observed global cooling since 1982: an increase in cloudiness would decrease global radiation and increase rainfall and evapotranspiration. Both effects tend to decrease the surface temperature."

Full paper available here



Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend 1982-2006 

Andries Rosema¹, Steven Foppes¹, Joost van der Woerd¹

¹EARS Earth Environment Monitoring Ltd., Delft, the Netherlands Kanaalweg 1, 2628 EB Delft, the Netherlands

Abstract

24 year of Meteosat hourly thermal infrared data have been used to study planetary surface temperature change. Thermal infrared radiation in the 10.5-12.5mm spectral window is not affected by CO2 and only slightly by atmospheric water vapor. Satellite thermal infrared data have been converted to brightness temperatures as prescribed by Eumetsat. Hourly brightness temperature images were then composed to corresponding noon and midnight temperature data fields. The resulting data fields were cloud filtered using 10, 20 and 30 day maximum temperature substitution. Filtered data were subsequently averaged for two 10 yearly periods: 1986-1995 and 1996-2005. Finally the change in brightness temperature was determined by subtraction. In addition nine locations were selected and data series were extracted and studied for the period 1982-2006. Our observations point to a decrease in planetary temperature over almost the entire hemisphere, most likely due to an increase of cloudiness. Two small areas are found where a considerable temperature increase has occurred. They are explained in terms of major human interventions in the hydrological balance at the earth surface.

Related posts on clouds

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