The Skeptics Case

His "subsequent reality" doesn't seem to be very real at all. This is what NASA says:

This week, scientists at NASA released their global climate analysis for 2012 which revealed that Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The past year was the ninth warmest year on record since 1880, continuing what appears to be a long-term global trend of rising temperatures. The ten warmest years in the 132-year record have all occurred since 1998, and the last year that was cooler than average was 1976. The hottest years on record were 2010 and 2005.
The analysis was done by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, comparing temperatures around the globe to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century.

In 2012, the average temperature was about 14.6 degrees Celsius (58.3 degrees Fahrenheit). This is .55 degrees C (1.0 degree F) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline, with the global average temperature having risen about 0.8 degrees C (1.4 degrees F) since 1880. The majority of that change has occurred in the past forty years.
Additionally, last week the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) released their latest climate report from 2012 and found that it was the warmest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. The average temperature for the contiguous United States for 2012 was 13 degrees C (55.3 degrees F) which was 3.2°F above the 20th century average.

The map depicts temperature anomalies, or changes, by region in 2012; while the line plot above shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2011 as recorded by NASA GISS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The data was gathered by NASA GISS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. All four institutions tally temperature data from stations around the world and make independent judgments about whether the year was warm or cool compared to other years. Though there are minor variations from year to year, all four records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the last decade as the warmest.
Scientists emphasize that weather patterns cause fluctuations in average temperatures from year to year, but the continued increase in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere assures that there will be a long-term rise in global temperatures. Each individual year will not necessarily be warmer than the previous year, but scientists expect each decade to be warmer than the previous decade.
“One more year of numbers isn’t in itself significant,” GISS climatologist Gavin Schmidt said. “What matters is this decade is warmer than the last decade, and that decade was warmer than the decade before. The planet is warming. The reason it’s warming is because we are pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
See an interactive global temperature map from New Scientist.
Carbon dioxide traps heat and largely controls Earth’s climate. It occurs naturally but is also released by the burning of fossil fuels for energy. The level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has been rising consistently for decades, largely driven by increasing man-made emissions. The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, the first year of the GISS temperature record. By 1960, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, was about 315 parts per million. Today, that measurement exceeds 390 parts per million.
The continental U.S. endured its warmest year on record by far, according to NOAA, the official keeper of U.S. weather records. NOAA also announced that global temperatures were 10th warmest on record by their analysis methods.
“The U.S. temperatures in the summer of 2012 are an example of a new trend of outlying seasonal extremes that are warmer than the hottest seasonal temperatures of the mid-20th century,” NASA GISS director James E. Hansen said. “The climate dice are now loaded. Some seasons still will be cooler than the long-term average, but the perceptive person should notice that the frequency of unusually warm extremes is increasing. It is the extremes that have the most impact on people and other life on the planet.”
For more explanation of how the analysis works, read World of Change: Global Temperatures (pdf).
Sources: NASA, NASA’s Earth Observatory

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For those not put off by the objection Mojo raised earlier against skeptical science (website), you will find each of these matters to have been discussed there, usually with literature references.

If you can't stomach SkS, then we'd probably have to examine the figures presented, one by one.

I think the focus on feedbacks is very appropriate, though not as rare as Evans states. W/o feedbacks it would be hard to explain the air-T time series of BEST. W/o feedbacks it would be hard to explain the earth's glacial/interglacial cycle! So yes, a lot depends on quantifying feedbacks.

Can that be done exclusively with the microwave sounder satellites since 1990? After having discarded the instrumental surface-T record and all paleo-proxies? This is Evan's approach, and not one that I find powerful.

The task, as redefined by Evans, becomes quantifying feedbacks with that 22-year record. Even though we know there are decadal and longer cycles affecting climate. Instead, I'd open that door back up, and use the longer records, while recognizing their limitations.

Four published papers are cited, and that's good because 4>0. But if somebody wanted to put narrow limits on feedbacks, a more comprehensive effort might be fruitful.

 

I link another Evans document

http://pensee-unique.eu/d-evans2007.pdf

specifically because of the bet described on page 11. It commands respect when people put up their own money in defense of their ideas! As I read it, $2000 is on the line in 2019. The 10-year T anomaly (2010-2019 inclusive) will be compared to the previous decade (2000-2009 inclusive). It is not disclosed which T metric will be used but I have HADCRUT4 handy. The previous decade anomaly was 0.452. The first 3 years of the new decade average 0.46.

We cannot so accurately predict the future, but I am glad (so far ) not to be on his side of the bet. While we cannot predict the future, an El Nino is quite probable prior to 2019, and you know what those do to air T. The sun has failed to receive Penn and Livingston's memo, so little help may come from that quarter. CO2 will probably be about 415 ppm by then, but Evans confidently dismisses that thing. I'd say our Evans needs an Atlantic Mulitidecadal Oscillation down-cycle, even though in his 'shortist' view of the world (since 1990) they don't exist. What a pickle.

I presume he has email, so he might be contacted by other people willing to take his money, come 2019*.
*Note, I am not calling on PCers to troll a fellah, just because of his belief system. nothing could be further from the truth.

None of this answers the mole-whacking called for up top, but perhaps somebody else has the patience required for that.

 

Evan's ideas (er, facts) have been discussed widely, and it would be great if someone else here could take the time to address them. Search the web with

David Evans Australia climate

and if that don't do, add

debunk

Please limit your responses to published papers, and please avoid discussing whether he is a rocket scientist (as he claims to be).

This will suffice until mojo finds another, at which time y'all will have to do it again. I am trying to get out of the loop. At best, I will link to PC a few latest published papers that point us towards truth. I cannot imagine a better goal.

 

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First allow me to explain those ... posts above. I was on a poor internet cnx and had the definite impression that the single post was going in only once. I apologize if this interfered with our discussion.

Evans follows many in this area referring to a 800-year lag in CO2 compared to isotopic proxy T in ice cores. It is absent from the top url, but present in his earlier work.

If you missed my post about this last year (2012 April 5 in "bad week for believers") you would perhaps not know about Shakun et al on the topic.

Yesterday in Science, there was another showing no evidence for lag:

Science 339, 1060 (2013);
F. Parrenin et al.
Temperature During the Last Deglacial Warming Synchronous Change of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic
DOI: 10.1126/science.1226368

This is perhaps even more helpful because they found a bubble-migration mechanism for the apparent lag. As we hope science to work, look more closely and get closer to the truth.

All this leaves any moles unwhacked that may relate to a last-few-decades-only effort to quantify climate feedback. So I declare it 'be kind to moles day', and leave them to their own activities.

But if you are unaware of Shakun and Parrenin, you are not equipping yourself well for discussions and CO2/T lag. Please see to that

 

Think of it like arguing the Pope's case vs. Galileo's.

 

"Prove CO2 levels precede temp..." I wonder if this might be a red herring.It rather sounds like a situation where CO2 increases (from whatever cause) and does not immediately change the energy balance of the atmosphere. If I am reading it correctly, it seems to request proof that CO2 does not immediately absorb IR. If so, I can't imagine how to begin.

The dynamics (per Parrenin) seem to include the air bubbles finally finding home in a layer of ice other than the year they were trapped. This is why I linked the paper, it seems to be the first exposition of mechanism. BTW those who benefitted from Shakun and Parrenin should probably also look at:

Tightened constraints on the time-lag between Antarctic temperature and CO2 during the last deglaciation
J. B. Pedro, S. O. Rasmussen, and T. D. van Ommen
Clim. Past, 8, 1213–1221, 2012
http://www.clim-past.net/8/1213/2012/
doi:10.5194/cp-8-1213-2012

There are dynamics outside the ice as well, and at centuries time scale the most important may be ocean circulation. So, if you start with a small thermal increase in the atmosphere (from CO2 or Milankovich-insolation-variability), it warms the surface ocean and it degasses Co2. Thence, positive feedback, following some dynamics.

Not sure if any of that helps, but I completely agree with Mojo that a worthwhile climate model on the 10,000 to 100,000 year time scale would give us glacial cycles with (modest) Milankovich forcing. AFAICT, the current bunch can't do that. The situation gets more complicated if you open the window to 5 or 6 million years. For the first half of that, there weren't glacial cycles. Then, about 2 million years of 41ky glacial cycles. Finally, a million years of 100 kyr glacial cycles of larger amplitude. It would take a really impressive climate model to reproduce all that! Something I'd vote "Nobel" for (like I get to vote )

But the more proximate use, need, and value of climate models is to get 100 years right. Maybe a few hundred years. For that the feedbacks (which is where we started) must be very well sorted. Obviously, opinions vary on whether we have that yet, and I come surprisingly close to Mojo's position that we haven't. A climate model that does ENSO, AMO, and PDO would be a wonderful thing.

So, we need to bear down. It would be darned useful to know with confidence what climate we'd get in 2100 with 500 ppm CO2, or 900 (my idea of the relevant range). Then, we could talk seriously about a burn path. We'd still have to hope that high-latitude methane does not rise up and bite us you know where.

The to-do list seems pretty clear to me at least. Make a century-scale model that "does" oceans. Monitor that methane on large spatial scales, and perform manipulative experiments there on small scales that can give insight on mechanisms of instability. Meanwhile, don't be too quick to defund all the carbon chasers at lower latitudes (like me ) because it is in such places where the annual nearly balanced cycle photosynthesis and decomposition is 10 times larger than the annual fossil-C burn. We need the currently healthy net C sink on land to stay that way!

Sounds doable to me, but perhaps I am too optimistic. It surely requires excellent understanding of the feedbacks, which again is near where we began here. If you limit your attention to 2 or 3 decades (like the latest Evans), or stretch it way out to 40,000+ years (like the latest Mojo), then an excellent understanding may get a lot less doable. But let's not lose sight of the important century-scale thing.

 

If we look at average temperature over 20 years, most of the ocean oscillations and solar cycles are averaged out. Climate is after all defined as over a 30 year period, so looking at single years will large natural variability doesn't make much sense. If we do that we can look at the sensitivity range of 2-4.5 degrees C per doubling, and come up with 0.7 degrees C for 500 ppm and sensitivity of 2 as a lower bound, and 5.3 degrees C for 900 ppm for a sensitivity of 4.5. This is quite a range of uncertainty. Until sensitivity is nailed down, there is a strong possibility of major climate change.

At a minimum we will see rising sea levels and the need to shift crops to varieties that do better with the current climate and the growing world populations. That is even at 500 ppm and a sensitivity of 2, spending more money to reduce the impacts of climate change - mitigation, and moneys for reduction - research into ccs, legislation to close down old coal plants, raising the oil tax to reduce transportation oil use.

At the far end of the scale, 5.8 degrees C, we may be majorly screwed. Airable land may greatly decrease, large drops in species diversity. The rain forests may all get cut down to grow food, and starvation will cause a reduction of the human population unless chinese style 1 child per couple or similar harsh restrictions are put in place.

Many of the skeptics support a sensitivity of 2. If Hansen and the politically activist gang of alarmists really want legislation in the US, they may be better off toning down the rhetoric. Its less exciting, but if you say sea level is going to rise 2 feet instead of 20, more people will believe you Similarly if Watt's, and the no warming bloggers keep trying to obfuscate the temperature rise with claims of bad thermometers and satellites new data will keep proving them wrong. What is the point in claiming that its not getting hotter, when we have great temperature records for at least the last 60 years in most of the places with urban heat islands. Many will understand if another hurricane like sandy happens with higher sea levels, NYC other areas may be much better served with a sea wall for protection instead of the blocking of a pipeline. 350 ppm may have sounded like a good idea in the past, but at 395 ppm today, we aren't dialing it back without a massive war with china, and I don't know how we pay for it if china doesn't loan us the money.

 

AustinG and I disagree about many aspects of over-the-top claims by the (paragraph 1) gang. Not that they are over, but concerning the motivations behind. But that is probably not so important.

I also would ask for toning down rhetoric, but I wonder: Suppose someone (Lonnie Thompson perhaps) were to say "I used to talk about 20 feet sea level rise, but now I say 2 or 3 feet and this time I really mean it". Now, given that there do exist deniers, how would they respond to such toning down? And what would be the net overall effect on the body politic?

Another way to describe it is that both extremes may have painted themselves into different conceptual corners. If either walks in the wet paint, they face trouble.

 

I'm not sure what the Paragraph 1 gang is, so I'm not sure if I disagree with you or am playing the devil's advocate.

On sea level and huricanes, all the scientists and politicians need to do is read the current peer reviewed literature , and move their opinions and public speech closer to the science instead of raw speculation pretending to be a theory, but not supported by any data. Do they believe it instead of the data because of watching an inconvenient movie? I don't know the motivation, but not modifying your theory when new data shows it is wrong is pretty poor science. The same is true of watts and his biased thermometers that may actually be biased the other way according to B.E.S.T. temperature reconstruction. The theory is right, badly sighted thermometers might cause systemic error, but the direction may be wrong and the magnitude is likely small.

Now how would the politicians in the US react? It likely would be better. Now I can see some of these supposed scientist blogger politicians are acting exactly like congress, and perhaps they feel they need to continue to lie to get support from their base or to get dollars from their big contributors. I don't think the science community would be well served by having the credibility of congress.

I don't think the republicans did themselves any favors in the fiscal cliff negotiations by declaring that letting a temporary tax decrease expire for the richest 2% of Americans was a big tax increase that would kill the economy. They looked silly in the fight, and even worse after losing it. That doesn't mean that the sequester 2.2% decrease of the budget expansion, means that taxes need to be raised again or the cuts will be armegeddon. The bad cuts are by design, many in the stupidest places to cause the most pain for the American people, simply because congress and the president seem to hate us and don't want to do their jobs. We could easily cut 5% of the budget and not cause as much pain, but politicians think the American people can't handle the truth. Do we really need more tanks? The military says no but congress thinks its a jobs program. Do we need 10 carrier groups instead of 7? Can we just make Dennis rodman ambassador to north korea, and bring the troops home from south korea? Do we need to keep medicare away from means testing even though $2 comes out for every $1 coming in if accounted for correctly, and numbers will get worse in the future?

I don't think either side is doing the American people any favors by holding to its political base, and that includes people like watts and trenbleth. Maybe if we raised an oil tax instead of blocked the keystone pipeline, or tightened power plant pollution standards instead of shoveling money to big utilities ghg would get reduced without as much of a political fight.

 

If I was unclear, I meant "Hansen and the politically activist gang of alarmists..." in AustinG's #15 here. It was not in his paragraph 1, which must have caused confusion.

I reckon that both Mojo and I are disappointed that none of y'all have taken the trouble to discuss Evan's linked first. What a lazy group we have here! So I have to do it all myself.

Read this (it's open access):
Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011
Stefan Rahmstorf, Grant Foster and Anny Cazenave
Environmental Research Letters 7 (2012) 044035
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044035

Not every graph of Evans is, um, redrawn, but it's a start.

 

Tisdale and I completely agree that global circulation models don't spontaneously develop ENSO or the other known ocean oscillations. I repeat this often at PC. From that, it is quite a leap that ENSO-driven air T variations cannot be be removed from the record. He takes that leap, and I (and AustinGreen above) would not.

Comparing model output to recent records should be quite a simple thing. Rahmstorf et al. did so, and showed how they did it. Evans was a bit more vague about how his straight lines came about. Anyway, my interest here is for other readers to see it all, and reach their own conclusions.