JANUARY, 2018, CLIMATE NEWSLETTER
"2017 ended up being the 3rd warmest year in the satellite record for the globally-averaged lower troposphere, at +0.38 deg. C above the 1981-2010 average, behind 1st place 2016 with +0.51 deg. C, and 2nd place 1998 at +0.48 deg. C. The linear temperature trend of the global average lower tropospheric temperature anomalies from January 1979 through December 2017 remains at +0.13 C/decade." Eyeball the 39 year record above. What do you see? Warming for sure, yes? Do you see an acceleration in warming?
It's almost impossible to know trends over short time periods, and the start date greatly influences the trend. The UAH satellites were launched in 1978 and began observational data January, 1979, which happened to be during a colder year and decade than most of the the 1950's and 1960's. An earlier launch and starting date might have produced a greater or lessor warming trend. We'll look at trends in a future newsletter.
The land based, instrument global temperature records, (all pretty much based on the same data) show 2017 as the second warmest year following 2016's strong El Nino-fueled warmest year on record. I don't think we can infer anything about 2018 from the recent very cold North American and British Isles weather. Australia, the north polar region, and other areas have been much warmer than average. So stay tuned!
GOOD NEWS AND PERSPECTIVE-
Last Saturday, Nicholas Kristof wrote a NYT op ed column titled-
Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History
An excerpt- A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell..." I like his perspective. Let me add this good news. Global warming is occurring at about half the rate the IPCC has predicted (first Assessment in 1990 and continuing) and about 1/3 the rate that noted alarmist scientist, Dr. James Hanson, first predicted in the 1980s. Why do Al Gore and the media not report this good news?
The above predictions (and the ones of scientists like Richard Lindzen of MIT who predicts very modest warming) are all based on models which attempt to "map" all the complex "forcings" (causes) and feed backs that determine climate. Models are hypotheses, not accurate maps of reality, but a few scientists and most journalists treat models and their predictions as "the science."
In real science, hypotheses must make testable predictions, and are tested by whether those testable predictions are confirmed. When hypotheses' predictions are not confirmed, the hypothesis is falsified and some better hypothesis must be found and tested. In climate science, the predictions are for decades or more ahead, so testing takes a long time! So far, about 30 years, the Hanson and IPCC predictions get the sign right- warming- but are way off on the amount.
GOOD NEWS IS BAD NEWS? Four years ago I posted a two sentence comment to the Global warming listserv of my Unitarian Universalist church to counter the very alarmist, frightened, and pessimistic posts there. The UU church promotes itself as a rational, diverse, and inclusive with "Justice, equity and compassion in human relations." The church and its members try very hard to live up to its mission in most areas and is pretty successful.
However, based on one of the UU's other seven principles- "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning," the UU is a fundamentalist church, no different from other fundamentalist churches, when one of its "truths" is criticized. My first (and last) post to the UU Globalwarming listserv was two lines long (from memory) "Good news. There has been a pause in global warming so far this century" with a link to the following NOAA 2013 graph-
The listeserv moderator immediately posted "we have a denier in our midst." I have been unable to post there these past four+ years! Ironically, the IPCC published its 5th Assessment a few months after I was called a denier and it documented the pause, calling it "a hiatus" reporting- In summary, the observed recent warming hiatus, defined as the reduction in GMST trend during 1998–2012 as compared to the trend during 1951–2012, is attributable in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution from internal variability and a reduced trend in external forcing (expert judgment, medium confidence).
Fundamentalists suppress and censor information that threatens their "truths." Do you belong to any institutions, religious and otherwise, that might be called fundamentalist?
Fast forward 4 years. In 2016 the pause ended, and we have had significant global warming again, but far less warming than what most climate scientists (there are many exceptions like controversial Richard Lindzen) have predicted.
Given what we know, how do we respond to global warming?
Is this reduced warming likely to continue?
Is the reduced warming less of a threat?
What are realistic remediation/adaptation strategies given the reduced warming?
Is remediation and/or adaptation required immediately?
You are invited to answer any of the above and, if you like, share your answers with others in next month's climate newsletter. We'll be addressing those questions in future newsletters.
These are all very difficult questions. We need informed, open-minded consideration of the many alternatives. Fundamentalists like my UU church which teaches our children the fundamentalist CAGW (catastrophic global warming) meme are outside the loop and play only a spoiler role in the national and international conversation we need. How sad! It's a group whose good intentions and concern is genuine, but whose fundamentalism delays, interferes with, and prevents informed conversation and crafting of responsible policy!
CLIMATE SCIENCE IS FASCINATING, AND SIMPLE IN THEORY
CLIMATE SCIENCE ISN'T ROCKET SCIENCE- IT'S FAR MORE COMPLEX
I frequently use those two phrases together! Both of the above are true!
Let's look at the Earth's energy budget, the sum of incoming short wavelength, solar radiation and outgoing, reflected solar plus longer infrared radiation. It's a simple concept. Understanding its constituent parts is difficult. Accurate measurements are difficult or impossible. If satellites could measure the incoming and outgoing radiation exactly, we would know whether the globe is getting warmer or cooler and by how much. Because those measurements are not perfectly accurate, we look at the surface and lower troposphere temperatures to determine fluctuations in Earth's global temperature. That data is also not perfectly accurate, so we have much less than the perfect knowledge we would prefer. Also, climate science requires specialized expertise- atmospheric physics, meteorology, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanology, paleoclimatology, and many others. A specialist who examines climate is a little like one of those elephant examiners above!
Earth receives on average about 340 watts per square meter in annual solar (short wavelength) radiation and radiates to space about the same amount (both solar and longer infrared wavelength). Click the NASA link above or this Wiki link for more information.
In the lower left of the image above, you see reflections from the earth's surface. Man has changed the earth's surface, its albedo, in many ways. Albedo is the fraction of solar energy (shortwave radiation) reflected from the Earth back into space. Snow and ice are good reflectors. They absorb very little energy. For instance, fresh snow reflects up to 95% of the incoming radiation. Therefore, fresh snow has a high albedo of .95. By contrast, water reflects about 10% of the incoming radiation, resulting in a low albedo of .10. The soil, vegetation, and disturbed areas such as human construction have varying amounts of reflection and absorption. You can understand how difficult it is to model albedo, and why models are hypotheses and not maps of reality.
Next look at the greenhouse gasses on the right side of the above image. We know the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and it is increasing due to our emissions. We do not know the effect of the greenhouse gasses (beyond that they cause some warming) because we don't understand the feed backs. The most important feed back we don't understand is the H2O forcing. Water vapor is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, methane, and ozone are trace gases that account for about a tenth of one percent (mostly CO2) of the atmosphere. CO2 is about 400 parts per million (ppm) of the atmosphere and was about 280 ppm 150 years ago. There is much more H2O water vapor in the atmosphere than CO2, from about 2 times as much in the driest desert to 6000 times as much in the humid tropics. H2O water vapor averages about 25,000 ppm. Water vapor is the principal greenhouse gas.
FEED BACKS
We know that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, but there are two crucial feed backs that we don't know. Will the warming atmosphere caused by increased CO2 actually contain more H2O, as most of the models predict? The empirical evidence from satellites and weather balloons is mixed. Even more important, if and when there is more water vapor in the warmer atmosphere- which of the following is the more important feed back? Look at the image above as you consider-
1) The extra amount of greenhouse gas H2O water vapor absorbs and re-radiates increasing amounts of infrared radiation from earth, thus amplifying the greenhouse effect of CO2- a positive feed back causing extra warming. Note- a doubling of CO2 on its own causes about 1.1 degrees C warming.
2) The extra amount of water vapor H2O condenses to create more cloud cover than would otherwise occur, and therefore more incoming solar radiation is reflected from the clouds and less reaches the earth which lowers surface temperatures- a negative feed back which causes cooling.
Both, no doubt, occur, but there is no way to determine the combined effect of H2O and cloud feed backs. The IPCC has stated, clouds exert two competing effects on the Earth’s radiation budget, and in every IPCC Assessment has stated that the relative positive and negative feed backs from H2O and clouds can not be determined. Most of the climate models assume stronger positive feed backs, and this is probably one reason they have over-predicted warming.
Disentangling these and many other positive and negative feed backs has been a century old quest in climate science. One of the best reads in climate science is the attempt to discover the forcings and feed backs that cause glacial and inter-glacial periods. Here is a technical climate site that details that exciting story- Science of Doom. Don't let the website name scare you. It's ironic. It's one of the very few climate websites that actually enables and promotes understanding above propaganda. Almost all the many dozens of other climate websites, even the best ones, are activist sites, part of the climate wars.
Climate scientists themselves are doing pretty good job in the midst of the climate wars. Sure, some of their research is shaped by government or fossil fuel funding or by ambition. Paying the mortgage, or for your child's education is a great motivator! The climate websites, like the political web sites you may read (and most climate websites are political), demonstrate how civility has suffered from our polarized political culture. I cringe when I read the snark, demonization, and nasty comments by both liberals and conservatives following almost any political or climate post.
CHERRY PICKING. I don't think any of us can avoid it. It's part of confirmation bias and part of how we try to make sense of our own mental world. We can, however, be aware of it, and allow for it in ourselves and others as human flaws we all want to transcend, as best we can. Civility is prerequisite to helping each other transcend our flaws. You can easily see from the earth's heat budget and discussion above, how easy it is for all of us, including climate scientists, to cherry pick when the data is uncertain or ambiguous.
The image of the earth's heat budget shows you how something so simple is so complex. Even if we had much better measurements and understanding, there is another part to the puzzle- context. How does the present warming and global temperature compare to the past. We have few temperature records that go back more than 200 years. We have anecdotal records of growing seasons and crops that grew well in different areas. That helps us understand recent past climates. We also have a few ancient writers who wrote about climate and weather events. It's all helpful, but insufficient and inexact.
Paleoclimate is the climate of some former period of geologic time. We have ice bore data and also "proxies" (tree rings, clam shell rings, many others) for learning about earlier climates. Again, there are vast unknowns and many disputed claims. We will look at the paleoclimate record next month. Reading about past climates, ice ages and inter-glacial periods from the Science of Doom link or some other source will help in understanding some of next month's content. In March, we'll have an environmental Earth Day issue. I was involved in the first Earth day, April 22, 1970, as a promoter and participant, and will be again this year.
Your comments, questions, and criticism is welcome. Please be as specific as possible by quoting exactly what you question or want to comment on.
Research the charities that reflect your goals at Charity Navigator. So many are hurting. Almost all of us are so very fortunate.
With best wishes for the new year.
Doug Allen